Appearances
Below is a list of locations and recordings where you can hear me talking more about education, technology, and professional development. And usually some ridiculousness or another.
Teach Better Talk Podcast – You’re Doing Enough
In 2020, the Teach Better Talk Podcast invited me on to talk about failure, finding the good in emergency remote learning, and why teachers are doing enough, even when it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.
UnScriptED
For a time, I did a live streaming show to write code and interact with guests and the chat. It was pandemic, we all did weird things. But, this was actually a lot of fun!
OnEducation Podcast
The OnEducation Podcast was a big deal for a while there. In 2022, I was invited to be a guest on their show, and later joined the show as a host. Mike and Glenn are amazing guys, and was happy to get to be featured on their show.
Hot SaucED
One of the most ridiculous questions I’ve ever gotten came from Derek Rhodenizer when he asked “Do you want to eat spoonfuls of hot sauce and talk about education?” Obviously, I had to say yes, and so did Shane Laurence and Carol Salva. It is one of most insane, but still informative, videos I have ever been a part of.
The Dr. Will Show – That Podcast Life
Dr. Will Deyamport is one of the most entertaining education podcasters around. The man just genuinely owns and embraces his true self on air, so when he asked me to be on his show, I said absolutely! Dr. Will and I talk about podcasting, what it means to me, why I do it, and what I’ve learned from the process.
Building Morale as an Instructional Coach – MADPD
As part of an online Professional Development conference, I presented on building staff morale. I talk about specific actions that can be taken to boost teachers and make them feel supported.
The Big Q in Edu – ISTE 2018
My IGNITE presentation on The Big Q in Edu – What is the biggest problem in education today?
Personal Playlist Podcast – It Gets Real
Noa Daniel’s show The Personal Playlist Podcast is aptly named. Noa asks me to pick three songs that makeup my personal playlist; one that has nostalgic value, one that represents you, and one that pumps you up. Truly, this 36 minutes of conversation is the most real and personal thing I have ever put on the internet, and I love it.
The APlusEdTech Podcast – Student Tech Support
After being on my show, Ashley McBride asked me to be on her podcast to discuss my Student Tech Support classes. It was a fun conversation and it gives a good insight into how to start such a program at your school.
Time to Teach – Creating a Positive Classroom Environment
Tami Jimenez asked me to be on her podcast after she heard me in an episode of my show say that I never write referrals. As an elementary teacher, she was interested in how I manage a classroom at the secondary level without reaching for outside help. In it, I explain how I run a room based on mutual respect, and that I hate moving the locus of control outside my room. It is a practical conversation with simple, actionable ideas.
Three Biggest Data Mistakes School Leaders Make
As school leaders, we know that data drives decision-making. From tracking student progress to identifying intervention needs, our spreadsheets hold the key to unlocking student success. But too often, we find ourselves stuck in inefficient workflows, spending more time organizing, manipulating, and simplifying data than actually using it to make impactful decisions.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked in various school leadership positions, in schools with as many as 4000 students (in just 9th through 12th grade). And, because public school budgets are what they are, our student information systems (SIS) are also out-dated, poorly designed, or heavily restricted to not be able to do what should be easy for an SIS to do. As a result, I have seen school leaders of all types make repeated mistakes that cost hours and hours of work, simply because they don’t know better.
My response to this problem was to combine my years of experience in computers and programming before I went into education, with my understanding of the needs of a school leader, to create systems that save me hundreds of hours of work, and lead people to ask me “how do you do that?”
Here are three repeated mistakes I see school leaders make that can be easily fixed.
Mistake #1: Generating Data for a Singular Purpose
Many school leaders create spreadsheets for one-time use—a tracking sheet for the most recent test data, a behavior log for one specific program, a check on the number of absences or tardies for the last few weeks. Then, a few weeks, a quarter, or a month passes, and they do it all over again with the new report data.
Instead of thinking of your spreadsheets as temporary solutions, start building systems that adapt and grow with your school’s needs. A well-designed Google Sheet should:
- Import the raw report data from the source
- Update dynamically without requiring manual input
- Be structured in a way that hides the “work” of the sheet, and simply shows users the results
The Fix
Desig your spreadsheets with the future in mind.
One tab on the sheet should be unmodified, raw export from the source data. On a separate sheet, use INDIRECT, FILTER, or QUERY formulas to reorganize the raw data on a new tab in the needed structure to run calculations on. Once the Calcs tab is built, add a Data Display tab that outputs the organized results in tables or actionable student lists. The end user only interacts with the data display, and when you update the raw report, the data display dynamically updates.
Mistake #2: Wasting Time on Repetitive Tasks
Those that aren’t familiar with the intermediate and advanced formulas in Sheets and Excel will use tools like filters, sorting, deleting rows, and copying data from one sheet to paste into another. This all has to be redone every time that you get new data.
For example, you run a report on student absences. You then filter to show only those with more than 3 absences in the last two weeks, copy that list of students and send it to your attendance dean. Sure, that might take you 10 minutes. But next week, you do it again, and then the next week, etc. etc. A 10 minute process once a week is 6 hours of work a school year. That is the power of dynamic Sheets.
The Fix
Use built-in Google Sheets features to automate these tasks.
- FILTER() functions to dynamically show only relevant data
- QUERY() functions to pull exactly what you need without manual work
- ARRAYFORMULA() to analyze data when the size of the dataset can change
Mistake #3: Thinking One Formula at a Time
Even school leaders that have an intermediate understanding of Google Sheets formulas like those mentioned above, often forget that formulas can be nested into each other. The power of formulas basically exponentially grow when you nest formulas within formulas.
For example, let’s say you have a report that lists class rosters for every student in your school, and each scheduled class is a new row. If you try to use a VLOOKUP() formula, you will only return the first result. If you try to use a FILTER() formula, it will return multiple results per student, which will cause an error depending on where you try to output it, since it can’t overwrite other data.
Instead, consider using a FILTER() inside your VLOOKUP() as the range to search through. VLOOK for the student ID in a Filtered range that only includes math teachers, for example.
- FILTER(), QUERY(), and SORT() can all be used inside a VLOOKUP() to control responses.
- VLOOKUP(), IF(), COUNTIF() and many more can be used inside an ARRAYFORMULA() to apply across entire columns regardless of data size.
- FIND() and LEN() formulas inside of LEFT() or RIGHT() formulas to manipulate and remove excess data from cells.
Make Your Data Work for You
If any of these mistakes sound familiar, don’t worry—you’re not alone! The good news is that fixing these habits will save you hours every week and make your spreadsheets work for you instead of against you.
That’s why I created the Google Sheets for School Leaders Course—an online training that walks school leaders through Google Sheets formulas, tips, and tricks to help them simplify and organize their data management strategies so that they can spend more time on the “decision making” part of data-based decision making.
- Learn how to structure your data for efficiency
- Discover shortcuts and automation tricks that save time
- Build a system, not just a spreadsheet
Get instant, free, access to the Level 100 course at BradShreffler.com/100!
Don’t let data management slow you down—checkout the Google Sheets for School Leaders Course now to start making all your data dynamic so you never have to do the same thing twice with your spreadsheets.
Podcast Archive
All episodes of The Planning Period Podcast are still available to listen to. Listen to me interview some of the biggest and most interesting people in education and ask them my three questions.
My Mental Health Journey
To hear a recording of me reading this post, checkout the podcast episode.
Today, I want to tell you a story.
Spoiler Alert: I have anxiety and depression.
I haven’t said that in public before. In fact, I’ve only said that to about five people in my life at all. I didn’t know I had anxiety and depression before six months ago. In fact, before six months ago, I didn’t even understand anxiety at all, couldn’t wrap my head around what it was and how people didn’t just push through and keep going.
This started to come to light for me with the start of the Covid Pandemic. I am extremely extroverted, a true extroverted extrovert, who could be around crowds of people, groups of friends, co-workers, students, whoever 100% of my waking time and be energized and excited. So, getting locked in my house with the same two people for multiple months, was not an ideal scenario for me (even though those two people were my wife and son, who I love more than anything).
At the onset, the solution was easy. I am a Instructional Technology Coach, and overnight the entire education industry needed tech coaches desperately. Between Facebook Groups of teachers, Twitter questions, and emails from my own school’s staff, I stayed busy. And I don’t mean typical teacher busy where we always work extra hours doing grading and such, I mean work from 7 am to 7 pm with maybe a 20 minute lunch break, and then continue to answer emails/messages while I sit on the couch half watching TV or playing games with my family.
At first, it was exhilarating. I was needed. I was helping. I was building my reputation. This last reason was especially nice, since at the same time, I was in my last term of my master’s program for my degree in Educational Leadership, and I knew I would be throwing my name into the hat for Assistant Principal jobs in the fall. Things were exhausting, but it was a good exhausting, and it kept my mind off the isolation.
Slowly though, I started to feel…off. I could come up to my office/podcast studio and be totally fine, get on Zoom calls and be myself, do interviews for the show and be personable and engaged. But once I left this office, I felt disconnected, like my self wasn’t engaging quite right with my family. I chalked it up to being exhausted and focused on work given the increased responsibility, and pushed through.
By May, it was starting to get bad. I specifically remember my birthday, May 1st, and a few of my friends put together a surprise Zoom game day. I played along, but the whole time I kept thinking, “I just want this to end so I can go back to watching TV and not talking.” That is about as far from a me statement as I can imagine. At that point, I started to realize something was really wrong with me.
I started to talk to a couple of close friends and my wife about what I was feeling. It wasn’t easy, and the conversations didn’t always go well. It took a lot for me personally to admit out loud the problem was there, even when I had already accepted internally something was wrong. “It’s just the pandemic. Everyone is struggling. You can get through this. It’s not a big deal. You’re just tired. Don’t be so weak. Suck it up.”
Even then, it struck me as funny how much of a hypocrite I was. I advocate on my show constantly for trying to overcome the stigmas that have traditionally been placed on mental health. I talk about teacher self-care, the importance of finding someone to talk to, how we, both as the field of education and the country, needs to take this stuff more seriously for teachers and students. And yet, faced with my own mental health, I followed none of my own advice for two months.
Saying “two months” probably isn’t true. Looking back on my life, this wasn’t the first time I had felt this way, and it also didn’t start when the pandemic hit. Those are convenient false internal narratives that allowed me to ignore the problems for longer, but they aren’t true.
I finally reached out to get professional help in the middle of May, and with one telehealth appointment, the doctor said confidently that I had moderate to high anxiety and depression. By the time I had the appointment, I was already 99% sure I had depression, but something about that “moderate to high” hit me. This wasn’t just a down moment I was going to get over. This wasn’t just being tired, being overworked, or any of the excuses I had. This was more than that.
I was prescribed antidepressants and suggested to see a therapist as well. Despite the fact that I had avoided this for my entire life, the diagnosis felt good. It was an admission of something I had denied for a very long time. Because, once I got the diagnosis, and I considered how I felt, the symptoms that made up anxiety and depression for me, I realized I had been this way before, had dealt with this before. At many times throughout my childhood during custody battles between my parents, moving to new areas, particularly stressful school experience, and in my adulthood in college, during my first marriage, and for sure throughout the divorce process.
It became clear to me the signs, and looking back, the waves, ups and downs, flowing through the timeline of my life. The rise and fall was gradual through the years, but it is definitely there. Despite the fact that I choose to believe I’m highly reflective and hyper-aware of myself, I just didn’t want to see it.
I am not a fan of medication. I just really don’t like needing to take a pill every day. And, honestly, when asked, I can’t say for sure the medication I am taking is working. I definitely feel different, but I don’t know if that is because of the medication or the other changes I’ve made. Or, if the medication pushed me to make those changes.
Within a week of starting the medication, I was out on a bike ride listening to Mandy Froehlich on another podcast and, as she usually does, she was talking about teacher mental health. It hit me differently this time, for obvious reasons. And, when she mentioned meditation with the Calm app, I stopped my bike at the little dock I happened to be riding past, downloaded the app, and did my first meditation. Meditation (and most of the time the bike ride) are now part of my daily practice.
A week or two later, I found another hobby: woodworking and carpentry. Honestly, not really sure where this came from, but it has become a huge part of my life. In fact, I include it in this piece of writing mainly because I just enjoy talking about it. I spent pretty much every day this summer building planter boxes, headboards, garage shelves, workbenches, and other furniture. Even started selling some, mostly to pay for all the new tools I kept buying.
So, why do I tell you all of this? First, because I think it’s important to admit this. If I can’t admit that I am dealing with this, I have no right to tell people that we need to overcome the negative stigma of mental health issues. I will not be a hypocrite any more.
Second, and more importantly, I know I’m not the only person that feels the way I do. Not just the anxiety and depression, but the excuses too. It is far too easy, and far too common, to avoid seeking professional help. It is far too easy to say “this is just me” or “I will be fine.” And sure, most times you will eventually be fine. And maybe you don’t need medication, just someone to talk to, or a new routine. But even when you think something is normal, explaining it to a professional might bring new things to light.
So please, if you are feeling off, aren’t feeling yourself, or are feeling down, or worn down, consider seeking help. Most school districts include employee assistance programs that will make your first 6 or so appointments free. And, now that most are still telehealth, you don’t even have to go anywhere to talk to someone. Maybe they say you’re just fine, maybe they suggest you try something new, or maybe they help you work through things you didn’t event realize you had weighing down on you. What I know, is it doesn’t hurt to talk.
I don’t like asking for help. I don’t like taking medication. But, I like the me that has come out the other side of this thing.