This issue of The Launching Pad is dedicated to the art of focus. For those of us who are amateur photographers (and I use the term loosely – just look at the pictures of my daughter doing gymnastics I’ve taken for verification), we know the importance of focus. Most digital cameras these days come with an auto-focus setting, to which we defer with the grand assumption that the camera knows exactly how the picture we’re taking should appear. More often than not, that works for us. Generally, we put the subject of the photo in the middle of the viewfinder. Not much guesswork there. Life, however, does not come with an auto-focus setting. And educational leadership certainly lacks that simplicity. Absent such a default setting, we’re left with one option: focus ourselves.

I have had the wonderful experience of reviewing hundreds of schools’ School Improvement Plans over the past few years. Most of these schools were facing the dire consequences of NCLB as schools In Need of Improvement, and many had identified plenty of factors contributing to their lack of success and growth. What they really lacked, however, was a focus for turning themselves around. A wise man once told me, “When you find yourself underwater, swim up.” It seems so simple, yet the message escapes us repeatedly.

Schools will try just about anything to buoy their chances of making AYP. Leadership teams, school boards, principals, superintendents, teachers, and parents grasp at anything within their reach to stem the tide of failure. More often than not, that approach does not yield the results they are looking for.

Which brings us to focus. As school leaders, what are we really focusing on? Are we putting our energy in the right arena? Are we allocating our personnel in the subjects and areas that require our attention? Are we supporting these ventures with adequate appropriations of our budgets? Are we doing the right work, right now? These are the questions we all face as school leaders, and these are some of the questions that we take a stab at in The Launching Pad.

Alisa Simeral, one of the brightest instructional coaches you’ll ever meet, kicks us off with Coaching Along the Continuum. In the article, she presents a framework for instructional coaching – that job we keep hearing about, hiring for, and celebrating on our websites, but that rarely comes with a clear, distinct job description. Alisa provides a brilliant description of the stages we guide teachers through as they practice the art of self-reflection (which we discussed a bit in the last Launching Pad). Finally, instructional coaches can have a model to offer them the focus they so desperately need.

Next, Derek Cordell (yes, the Derek Cordell) provides us with an avenue for confronting school-wide discipline and student management challenges in his article, The Lightning Club. In it, he offers us a method to the madness: a way to focus our work on building and strengthening individual relationships with students that will, in turn, help them to engage in positive, productive behaviors. It's a proactive model to school-wide discipline that can have some remarkable effects...if we focus our work.

If you can stand to wait for Mr. Cordell’s next installment of his column On Common Sense, have a gander at our book review. This time we tackle Marcus Buckingham’s The One Thing You Need to Know. From the title, you can deduct that Mr. Buckingham provides us with a recipe for focusing our management and leadership attention. Then, of course, Derek’s contribution will leave you laughing and realizing that we do, indeed, have a grand resource that we probably don’t tap into as much as we should.

Focus. Intentionality. Precision. Take aim. Read on.

Commence liftoff.