Stroll down the hallways of any educational institution today with the purpose of locating a blackboard, chalk, and erasers and you are likely to come away empty handed. Although not as commonplace as they once were due to the invention of the dry-erase and smart boards, chalkboards (once made of slate) have likely been a …
Author: Julie Powell, Ed.D.
Reset Button
“Is there anything more gratifying than a Reset Button? When your cell phone is acting finicky, you reset it and suddenly the world returns to normal, right? Turns out there are a bunch of household items that have one, and knowing a problem can be fixed by pushing a button — instead of shouting and …
Redefine Toughness
Using the legendary football coach Bear Bryant in the first chapter is a great method for capturing a sport-minded person’s attention to continue reading. After all, even the non-football fans living in the southern United States are familiar with Bryant’s accomplishments on the gridiron. Just look at how often any mention of football at a …
Spiritual Arteriogram
How’s your heart? Not a question you typically hear someone ask a healthy person. It’s an inquiry reserved for a patient on the mend, someone recovering from by-pass surgery, or perhaps an angioplasty. However, while reading Gods at War this week, Kyle Idleman was suggesting that perhaps I needed to consider the health of my …
Stick-to-itiveness
Post-it Notes…this is the answer I provide to students when a discussion arises over the question, “What do you wish you had invented?” Not only would I be financially secure, I would have been responsible for creating an item with perfect balance—enough stickiness to adhere where it’s needed, but not too much that it destroys …
Yearbook Lessons
In that photograph, the person is facing left, so please be sure to place that one on the right side of the page so your eye travels to the gutter. Perhaps only someone schooled in Yearbook Lessons can make sense of those guidelines, but personally, that particular tidbit has arisen too many times in my …
Eulogy Virtues
How do you want to be remembered? An awkward question to say the least, but one, I propose, if more people would ask it, might create a better world. Some people choose not to consider their own mortality, but we’ve all heard some variation of the saying, “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” We …
I Quit
Dear University President, I Quit…those words appear on a sheet of paper rolling upward from an old manual green typewriter on the front cover of a workbook created by Jeffrey L. Buller for ATLAS leadership training which addresses the Great Resignation that is currently being experienced in higher education. In the following pages, Buller shares …
The Great Resignation
“Please be patient with us. We are experiencing a worker shortage.” Unless you have been traveling to another planet or perhaps holed up in some remote section of the mountains, you have likely seen a sign with a similar message posted throughout your dining and retail experience. There are likely a multitude of circumstances that …
Quiet Quitting
The Great Resignation…I am uncertain who first mentioned this phrase to me, nor do I recall the context of the conversation; however, I do remember being encouraged to read about this phenomenon. And it doesn’t take much persuasion for the investigative side of me to start digging, in efforts to learn more about a topic …