Giving Compass' Take:

· An interview done by Chalkbeat reports on how Principal Karen McEwen uses her personal experiences to motivate her students, specifically the discipline issues she had as a student.

· Relating to troubled students can inspire them for their future, and it's worth examining when administrators apply a more personal touch to their work.

· Read more about Detroit principals working to better schools for students.

Karen McEwen, principal of Cooke STEM Academy, knows what it’s like to be a bad kid in school. She acknowledges she was one of them. McEwen wasn’t the type of student who skipped classes to hang in a friend’s basement or cause mayhem outside school. She did it right in the classroom while sitting at her desk.

“I would write a note, and we would pass it around the classroom. It would say, ‘When the hand on the clock hits 5, we will all stomp our feet,’” she recalled. Sometimes, she led other students to clap their hands or stand up simultaneously. Her ideas were endless, and she was a good at leading the other students to act out until she got caught as the main culprit.

Now that McEwen leads Cooke, a pre-K to 6th-grade school on Detroit’s west side, she said she draws on her past as a trouble-maker to relate to her students today.

Read the full article about this motivational principal by Kimberly Hayes Taylor at Chalkbeat.