Mi–Life

After finishing my Education Specialist Degree last spring, I needed a challenge. I couldn't decide if I wanted to pursue another educational degree, perhaps a Doctorate, right away or not. I was in the process of determining what would be next when a great opportunity arose. Heck, I first heard about the Mi–Life program last March at the Michigan Association of State and Federal Program Manager's Winter Institute in Lansing, Michigan.

MI-LIFE is stimulating, inspiring and challenging and will cause school leaders to confront and question their current assumptions about leading, teaching and learning.

Based on the Michigan School Improvement Framework and aligned with the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) Balanced Leadership™ work of Robert Marzano, Tim Waters, and Brian McNulty, and the Microsoft Education Competencies, the MI-LIFE curriculum will provide technology-rich courses that, when successfully completed, will earn school leaders a Michigan Leadership Improvement Framework Endorsement and 18 State Board Continuing Education Units (SB-CEUs.)


Instructor and Harbor Beach Superintendent Ron Kraft called Heller, Jackson, and Ziecina "The Three Amigos."

Today, a cool group project involved creating a leadership project. With my partners, Melissa Heller, Tammy Jackson, and Jessica Ziecina, we created a "best of" album for the material in Marzano's book, School Leadership That Matters. This project took about an hour our of the day.


A great piece of research.

The class began at 8:30 a.m. and ended a little bit after 4 p.m. The time flies. We cover a great amount of material in the class, mostly about leadership. Our instructors are current or former school administrators. Our cohort is the Traverse City one, but there are several others throughout the state — totaling 250 or so participants.

To sum it up, it's good stuff.


Marzano.