Okay, I have to be honest, my degree is in business not education, and before Solution Tree I spent 14 years in higher education administration not K-12 public education.  So, some might say when I began to run Solution Tree I did not have a solid understanding of the K-12 market.  Some might be right. 

I quickly hired a consultant, drew from my non-profit background, went to a lot of conferences, read as many trade publications as I could fit in, but still felt woefully uninformed.

Oh how do I wish I knew ‘then’ what I know now.  And the ‘then’ is the newsletter Marshall Memo.

Okay this next part I copied from his website, but I know it all to be true. 

Note: I am not getting paid to share this information, and I have never met Kim Marshall. I did have to email him once to apologize after I promoted his newsletter to 2,000 people at one of our events and he was unexpectedly swamped with free issue requests.  Not nice.

      Kim Marshall

The Marshall Memo, published since 2004, is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents and others very well-informed on current research and best practices in  the field.  Kim Marshall, drawing on his experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, consultant, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”

To produce the Marshall memo, Kim subscribes to 64 carefully-chosen publications and looks through score of articles each week to select 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning.  He then writes a brief summary of each article, provides e-links to full articles when available, highlights a few striking quotes, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday (with the exception of a one-week break at Christmas and a two week mid-summer vacation).

Kim Marshall rocks, and the newsletter is well worth the price of subscription.  We can all learn a lot from the Memo on how to help educators…and that is why we do it.