Task Jar: Major PowerPoint Revision

During the Covid-19 pandemic and its corresponding shut-down, I had created a sizable task list that was converted into slips that were randomly drawn each day in order to entice me to make steady progress on the always-present to-do list. One of those items, from May 2020, called for me to overhaul a particular powerpoint module that I long ago developed when training administrators in ways to approach coaching and feedback to support their teachers.

Guilford County Schools Mission Possible Retreat
Asheville, NC • 2014

As noted in the blog post cataloguing a mix of project updates in May 2020, that specific task slip was too challenging to complete because I wasn’t in the right headspace needed to create a mindful and coherent revision. As I dug into it almost five years ago (!), I realized it also had implications for the powerpoint module that preceded it, focused on Instructional Design and Planning.

I did labor to sort out and better organize the two presentations, in my typical pattern puzzle approach spread out on the kitchen table so that I could see and shift and manipulate and fill gaps. But I only got so far before having to put it aside.

As 2025 got underway, there was a helpful convergence of events to at last bring me into that frame of mind for this presentational renovation. Over the past year, I’ve been working up a set of ideas that I’d begun to float (and submit for scrutiny) to some trusted colleagues; I’ve been engaged in some intense work with administrators facing tremendous pressure to up their students’ performance; and I was called upon in an elementary school in DC to create a small seminar conversation that would bridge the needs of a wide variety of teachers. All that occurred close to the same time I was finishing my last session with an outgoing cohort of aspiring administrators and immediately beginning my first day of work with the incoming cohort, through High Point University’s Leadership Academy. Initiate Frame of Mind!

With a couple of quiet evenings plus some open time on a weekend in between, and perhaps working later into the night than is my custom, I finally got it done. My conscience is eased even if it was an item checked off nearly five years after my clever task jar slip idea was first drawn.