Monthly Archives: February 2009

A Different Kind of Gap

I had an amazing weekend. We had no school on Friday (payback for two grueling nights of parent-teacher conferences on Wednesday and Thursday), but I opened my email that morning to learn that I was selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator. For those who know me, that’s a little bit like the mother ship calling me home.

I’ll be in Florida in July for a week of hands-on learning with the good people at Apple. To say that I can’t wait would be an understatement.

On Saturday I gave a talk on “Leadership 2.0” which I really enjoyed. It was my first time speaking at this kind of event and I think I did OK. I know I could have done better, but I got a lot out of my session — probably more than some of the attendees! — including a great experience that I will be able to take with me as I continue to learn and share.

A Missing Link

Where are all the school administrators? I mean, I know we’re out there. We blog, we tweet, but beyond that it feels like we are underrepresented. I might be missing something, but follow me on this…

Of the 52 ADEs that were selected this year, there are teachers, school technology coordinators, college professors, and district-level tech folks. But as far as I can tell, I’m the only school administrator. What’s up with that?

We’ve got amazing teachers doing great things in the classroom and we’ve got district people with good intentions. But if there is no one in the middle, who’s going to be the liaison between these groups?

A big part of my job is clearing away the big boulders from my teachers’ paths so that they can worry about the little pebbles. If the web filter is blocking a legit site that was working yesterday, I can make the call to IT. If you want to make something happen but need more time or resources, I’m there to help you pull it together.

Building administrators are the vital link in this chain. How can we get more of them thinking about change? How can we expect our teachers to think ahead if so few administrators do?

Update on Learning 2.0

Here are the links I know you’ve been dying to have for this Saturday’s Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.

I look forward to seeing you there (in-person or virtually!).

Subtle Differences

I had the good fortune of listening to one of my favorite educators talk to a group of pre-service teachers about discipline and classroom management. I asked her to give this talk because she deals with some of our most challenging students, yet has very few attendance problems and almost never has a discipline issue.

I don’t even think she realized the power of what she said this morning because she kind of glossed right over it, but she told the soon-to-be teachers that as soon she sees a possible attendance issue emerging with a student, she will pull him or her aside and say (in her best tough-love delivery):

You know if you get to six absences, you and I are going to have a talk.

Consider just for a minute the difference between a statement like that and:

You know if you get to six absences, I’m going to send you to your administrator.

The difference is subtle, but it’s there. If you’re a student, one of those says, “We are going to work this out,” and the other one says, “I’m going to make you someone else’s problem.”

Guess how many of her kids get to six absences.

Now That’s Leverage

Michael Wesch blogged recently about “How to get students to read 94 articles before the next class.”

Essentially, each student in his class had to find, read, and summarize five articles before the next class. The summaries were consolidated using Zoho Creator, and, well, according to Wesch:

By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles.  This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation.

I hear the term “leverage” used quite a bit – mostly as a fancy (read: incorrect) synonym for the word “use” (E.g. “Students leveraged their cell phones to call GCast…” or “The principal leveraged technology to show a PowerPoint presentation…”). As a former physics teacher, the word “leverage” has a specific meaning in my mind. It implies compounding resources to gain some mathematical or mechanical advantage.

Leverage is like mechanical gestalt. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You know – like having 15 students collectively read 94 articles before the next class.

Such a simple idea with so much potential for use in the classroom and in professional development.

(Don’t even get me started on the use of the word “potential.”)

Raising the Bar on Professional Development

[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I blogged earlier this week about the potential for collaborative technologies to have a significant impact on the way we deliver professional development in our schools. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we are right on the precipice of some really powerful transformations in the ways that schools have traditionally handled staff development.

The PD Spiral

Think about professional development and you’ll often think of what I’ve heard described as “drive by staff development.” We’ve all been there. We talk about something (or we bring in a highly-paid consultant to talk about something), we spend a day or two on it, and then it’s forgotten; vaporized into the ether like the opaque projector and the mimeograph. No one knows how it will be implemented or even whether it will be implemented. There was little or no discussion on how it will look in practice. It’s just gone.

Worse, we meet after the students have gone home for the day. Everyone is exhausted and time is limited. But before the actual PD can begin, we have 87 announcements and a mess of administrivia to get through. That leaves roughly 11 minutes for the planned inservice session, by which time everyone is transfixed by the clock on the wall and ready to go home.

The Perfect Storm

I can’t help but think that everything is coming together. Online tools available for free or cheap are sufficient in features and quality to deliver a powerful learning experience for teachers and administrators. Further, in our current economy, it’s safe to say that districts will be scaling back on bringing in high-paid consultants to “teach us” something. Finally, the trend toward building-level instructional coaches means there are dedicated teacher leaders on campus who can support classroom teachers in implementing new teaching strategies.

Vox Populi

At my school we’re not just talking the talk. When our new administrative team came to the building last year we heard the complaints loud and clear. Rather than talk about making PD meaningful, we put together a simple, online survey that took teachers less than 5 minutes to complete. We asked them rate themselves on a 1-5 scale of proficiency in several different areas that were part of the district’s initiatives. We also asked them to give the top three PD topics they’d like to see as well as the one (or two) that they hoped they’d never see again.

While it now sounds forehead-smackingly obvious, how often have we as administrators taken the time to ask the teachers what they wanted? OK, maybe we’ve asked, but have we listened? Have we delivered? Or did we ask because that’s what some seminar on shared decision-making told us we should do and then just do whatever we thought was best anyway?

No More Secrets

Using the data we gathered from our faculty, at our next pre-determined PD time, we didn’t jump right in. As the resident presentation guru (gratuitous link), I prepared for the faculty a brief but comprehensive overview of the survey results so that everyone was on the same page. This way, when we announced that we would be doing a session on a particular topic, it was obvious that it wasn’t just The Suits pushing their agenda, it was what people wanted.

For example, if 85% of our staff felt comfortable with accessing our district’s data warehouse, we knew we didn’t need to spend 4 hours on it. We offered an optional session for our new teachers or for those who wanted to refresh their memories about the site.

Bringing it Together

So now we have the data on what people want and it’s pretty clear that one-size-fits-all is not going to work all the time. Sure, sometimes there are initiatives and mandates and new software that make an all-staff meeting necessary, but more often teachers’ and administrators’ staff development needs are pretty individual.

This is where virtual PD fits perfectly. If four people have a desire to learn best practices for digital storytelling and ten are jonesing for more info about Lexiles, you can meet those needs without subjecting every single staff member to some one-size-fits-all inservice activity that may not even make sense to them.

If we put the pieces together, it’s simple. We need to honor what our teachers already know and find out what they want to learn. Collecting data, aggregating the results, sharing the results with the faculty, and using them to build a comprehensive PD plan can not only change the culture of the school, but it can raise the level of quality and engagement in your school’s professional development.

On-Demand Personal (and Professional?) Development

As a PhD student I spend too much of my time pondering what topic I’ll eventually tackle for The Dissertation. Naturally, I’m interested in leadership and leadership development, but I’m also interested in learning. Specifically, the way we learn when we leverage the power of collaborative technologies that, right now, we’re barely even scratching the surface of. How do these technologies empower educators to educate and, maybe more importantly, to be educated.

Most of the learning that I see happening online occurs in what have come to collectively be called “Personal Learning Networks.”

Coffee Talk

I’ve wrestled quite a bit lately with this idea of a Personal Learning Network (or “PLN”). While creating a PLN is all the rage, discounting their significance could be grounds for excommunication (twexcommunication?). Initially, I wondered how this had any sound, educational value as it seemed to me akin to meeting some friends at the local coffee joint, talking a little about work and a little about the Broncos and calling it professional development.

But then it struck me exactly how many times I’ve done exactly that. And how many times I’ve said or heard someone else say something to the effect that, “Hey – all professional development should be like this!”

Consensus, Conshmensus

As with many things “21st century,” the notion of a PLN is vague at best. What are they? Do we start our own? Join one? How? What’s the protocol? To get some idea of how difficult it really is to pin this concept down, think of the last time you tried to explain to someone that you learned about something from someone on Twitter.

“Yeah – I heard about it from this guy I know. Well, not ‘know, know.’ I know him from Twitter. It’s this website where you can tell everyone what you’re doing. Well, I guess they care since they’re following me, but anyway – he had this great idea…”

If all of this is a little too abstract for you, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has assembled some resources for people interested in finding out what the heck a PLN is and why they should care. My interest is really in watching these things develop. In the two years I’ve been blogging and Twittering, I’ve already seen conversations around social networking in general grow from the fringe, early-adopters (“Hey, this is cool!”) to becoming more mainstream, at least among forward-thinking educators (“I learned about this resource from someone on Twitter.”).

A New Era of Online PD?

Even though there is little specific agreement on exactly what a PLN is, I think that even the doubters may have to grudgingly accept the value of these tools when it comes to connecting with others to share resources and ideas. Has the time come when using Facebook and Twitter for a few hours can be counted as “professional development time?” Probably not. But as the significance of creating virtual learning communities gains acceptance by those higher up the chain, I think we will see more and more structured, high-quality learning opportunities become available to those willing and ready to embrace them.

Money, Mouth. Mouth, Money.

I’m excited to announce (for those who didn’t hear it on the last episode of Practical Principals) that I’ve been accepted to lead a conversation at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation in a few weeks. While I’m really excited about it, I’m also a little nervous.

I think I’m going to be in the “Leadership and Infrastructure” track and I plan to focus my conversation on the challenges inherent in leading a school in the 21st century. Basically, I want to look at what school-based leaders need to know and be able to do given the rapidly changing landscape in which we work.

When I did my masters a while back, the theme that was woven through all my coursework was, “We are not managers, we are instructional leaders…” I don’t think I’d argue that administrators need to be great teachers and that they need to be able to recognize, inspire, and support great teaching among their faculties, but what else? Surely it goes deeper than that.

From my proposal for this conversation:

Schools face the daunting task of balancing the requirements of AYP and NCLB with the demands of business and academic leaders who are looking for graduates proficient in what are being called “21st century skills.” In light of this shift, the role of the school leader must evolve to cope with the challenge of addressing these seemingly contradictory expectations that are being placed on our school systems by external sources.

Jon Becker got the ball rolling in Philadelphia last month with his conversation at EduCon 2.1. I’d like to continue to advance the discourse that started in that session. To that end, I’ll pose the question here and use the responses to help me pull together something cohesive.

How are the challenges facing school leaders today different than what we faced 5, 10, or 20 years ago? What are the core competencies for school leaders in the 21st century

I look forward to reading your comments here or via a trackback from your own blog. If you’re in or around Colorado on February 21, 2009, I’d love to see you at CO Learning, if not I’ll post a link to my conversation information and live streaming details here as soon as I have them.