I bake, so I sift. I live, so I sift. So, I borrow the saying, “sift happens.” And, to create better and more delicate bakery and to develop better and more impactful life decisions, the more one must sift. Bakers sift of necessity. For leaders, a decision that has not been sifted is an educated guess. I sift continuously and encourage every school leader to refine their sifting skills. If not, that other thing also happens.

http://www.craftsy.com/article/sift-happens

As a bread baker, I sift because flour and other dry goods settle, become compacted and clotted, and sometimes contain packaging debris I don’t want to taste in my end products. Sifting flour, for example, creates clarity. A sifted and weighed eight ounces equals a sifted and weighed eight ounces every time. I smile when asked to measure out a cup of “fill in the blank” and blindly add it to my bowl. A cup is not a cup and seldom is it exactly eight ounces regardless of how well you dip and use a straight edge to level at the rim. Sift to know what you have and when you know what you have, you can predict your results.

One also must sift continuously in the world of contemporary school leadership. Your weekly, even your daily, interactions present you with hundreds of bits of information, opportunities, dilemmas, and challenges. The topic does not matter, everything must be sifted. Every student problem, parent demand, professional development program, curricular program, learning assessment, and management decision contains ideas with and without merit. Unsifted decisions contain unspoken assumption, unseen costs, and unintended consequences. If you don’t sift well, how can you predict the effectiveness and the efficiency of your processes or the efficacy of your outcomes? So, how does one decide?

One sifts the school scene with the seine of their Big Picture or “this is the image of what total school success looks like.” The Big Picture is multi-dimensional, timeless and founded upon informed values and objectives. Achieving the Big Picture may not occur within a leader’s career, but the struggle to achieve the bigness and clarity of the picture is always conducted without favor or affection for any unsifted variables.

When baking, I have a clear picture of what will come out of the oven and how it will be presented for eating. Sifting the ingredients is my insurance that what I want is what I will get.

When leading a school, I have a clear picture of the ultimate educational outcomes that should be the result of our public school. Sifting the elements and workings of the many sub-organizations that constitute schooling – teaching, curricular and co-curricular programming, community support, child needs, and government mandates and finances – insures that each decision I make will continuously and consistently create the reality of a Big Picture quality education for all children.