Tag Archives: Leadership

What we do; What we think

Being a newly appointed principal has provided me with a short window of time during which I am doing a sort of “ethnography” of the school and culture. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my goals these first few weeks has been to try to gather an understanding of what staff is most proud of and what they’d like to see abandoned or, at least, reconsidered.

Like some other schools with diverse student populations, our students need a variety of supports – both academic and personal – to achieve “proficiency” on state tests. While I’m not a fan of this kind of assessment of our kids or our schools, as a new principal I believe that arguing about the merits of said tests is best left to the policy wonks. It’s the hand we’re dealt for now, and as a new principal I’m focusing first on those things within my control.

So my main objective in the near-term is to support my teachers in wrapping their heads around the idea that student success as measured on our state standardized tests and student success as measured by their ability to communicate, collaborate, and produce content in an interconnected, global community are not mutually exclusive.

When I first landed in the Big Chair, I ramped up my scouring of the blogs of other school leaders. What I found was an abundance of ideas, lists of tools and apps, advice on being a good Tweeter, and the like. I’m certainly guilty of posts like this…

What I’ve become increasingly focused on is moving from ideas and feel-good blog posts to action. One of my goals is to renew my use of this space and to spend time writing and reflecting about my actions in this first year as principal. I want to look at things that I actually do as a new principal that might improve systems, culture, and learning in my school with the goal of cultivating an environment that empowers students to learn and develop their identities as global citizens and world-class learners.

I’ll probably fall on my face. I might do that more than once. But at least I’ll try to maintain a good record of my thoughts and actions and how they play out in this organization. Maybe they’ll even help someone else who is entrusted with the exciting but very real responsibility of being a principal.

Some topics I will be addressing in upcoming posts:

  • Re-imagining a culture of meetings
  • Developing a manageable system of academic interventions that address students’ individual needs
  • Moving a 40-year-old school into the 21st century
  • Paring back “initiative bloat”
  • Doing my best not to reinforce the status quo
  • Quite frankly, anything else that comes to mind…

So stick around. This could get interesting.

Trying on the Big Chair

As I mentioned last week, career paths can take unexpected and unusual turns, usually when you least expect it.

I am happy to be blogging today and sharing the news that I have been appointed as the interim principal at Conrad Ball Middle School here in the Thompson School District. The current principal has been asked to serve as the interim Director of Secondary Education and I have been asked to assume her role for the 2010-2011 school year.

Of course, there are no guarantees beyond next year, but as a trusted mentor told me last week as I was weighing this decision, sometimes you have to just jump off the cliff without looking down and without checking your parachute. I’m extremely excited to get to know the faculty and staff at CBMS as well as to roll up my sleeves and get to work implementing some of the new and innovative initiatives that they have worked hard to bring to fruition this coming year.

I know I’ll be blogging more about my experience moving into this role, but I wanted to share this news with my virtual colleagues as soon as it was official!

My Latest Project

This two-days-in-a-row posting pattern is not indicative, by the way, of any nascent desire to participate in Melinda’s latest Twitter challenge. It is, however, an indication of how excited I am to have been asked to facilitate an extension of today’s Tech Bootcamp for leaders.

Inspired by the work of Bud and Michelle in the district to my south, I will be facilitating what amounts to a year-long, embedded PD experience for leaders who are motivated to stop simply talking about making change and actually start doing it.

I have to confess, the iLead name is not original. But I like it. (Or, iLike it…) It’s catchy. And “I lead” really speaks to what I hope participants will get out of this. We will work to build leadership capacity around robust, 21st century learning by supporting the cohort members as they build their own professional and personal learning networks. Reflection and data collection will be key components of this project, and with a little luck we’ll have this year’s cohort mentoring next year’s participants.

I hope to get a lot of interest from district leaders who want to play in our sandbox.

Spreading the Word

I am both excited and nervous about tomorrow.

Over a year ago, I pitched an idea to one of our district-level tech folks to do a hands-on, immersive day (or series of days) where school and district leaders could just… play. We spend a lot of time debating the theory of this or the data supporting that, but too many leaders lack the fundamental knowledge and skills to move forward with using technology to facilitate communication and collaboration in their schools and departments. And unfortunately a few are afraid of looking “dumb” and therefore not comfortable in their ability to support their staff in jumping into this stuff.

They really want to know. They’re hungry to know. But some just don’t know where to start.

It’s taken me a while to bring this to reality (huge thanks to our Director of C&I for actually thinking I was onto something with this idea…), but tomorrow I will be hosting our district’s first ever Leadership Technology Bootcamp. The format for the day was inspired by the bootcamps that Scott McLeod and his posse at CASTLE present to leaders in Iowa. The agenda is very aggressive for the time we’ll have (I doubt we’ll get past podcasting), but I’d rather keep it that way and leave folks wanting more.

My biggest concern going in is the diversity of proficiency in the group. I plan to do a little show & tell, followed by some hands-on time. I’ve also dragged a couple of my fellow TSD Twitterati along to help facilitate small groups.

My greatest hope for the day is that my colleagues see a lot of different tools and, through some experimentation, find one or two that they can see themselves using in the 2010-2011 school year. I also hope that by exposure to some of these tools, they will be in a position to better support their teachers — not necessarily because they know everything about Google Reader or WordPress or Etherpad, but because they know enough to steer a teacher in the right direction when they think something might be a good fit.

And it would also be nice for all of us to continue working together to improve our skills. A true community of practice. A Twitter colleague said it better than I ever could.

As it stands, I have close to 50 school and district leaders signed up to spend the day learning and collaborating. Quite a nice start, I think.

Wish me luck!

What you need to know when you’re done with teacher school

Actually, this should be called, “What you need to know before your first day as a teacher” since the original title, while pithy in its similarity to the title of a recent post, assumes (a) that every teacher went to teacher school (I didn’t!), and (b) that something you learned there may have some relevance to your actual job. Your mileage may vary with (b).

  • Be interested. No, that’s not a typo. I don’t want you to worry too much about being interesting because that’ll take care of itself. And, let’s be honest, you just can’t force that. So start out your first year in the classroom by being interested — really interested. And please, for the students’ sake, show them that you’re interested in more than just your content area. You’ve got a passion (presumably) so don’t be afraid to let it come out in who you are in the classroom. In one of my all-time favorite blog posts ever, Russell Davies says, “The way to be interesting is to be interested.” Sound advice. See also.
  • Be a learner. Unless your content area is “literature of Ancient Greece,” things in your area are probably changing with the times. When I took Earth Science, for example, Pluto was still a planet. More than that, the ways that we interact with our students are changing. And the ways that students interact with the world are changing. You’ll likely never catch up to where your students are in terms of comfort with technology, but the best teachers are the ones who are the Lead Learners in the classroom. They take what kids know and think they know about technology tools and help them use it as an effective tool to do more than update their Facebook status with what they had for lunch that day. Note: The best way for teachers to learn is not necessarily through one-size-fits-all professional development sessions. Read a lot. Create an account on Google Reader or Netvibes and subscribe not only to education blogs, but blogs about what you’re passionate about (remember the first tip I gave you?). And also, keep it in balance and subscribe to blogs that you don’t necessarily agree with. Preaching to choir is always fun, but it can be a dangerous habit. Network with colleagues who have been doing it longer and who are doing it differently. Find an administrator you trust and see how he or she is willing to help support your professional growth.
  • Avoid like the plague negative people and their efforts to recruit you. Misery loves company. This is true at all levels. You’ll find negative teachers in the lounge and negative administrators in the front office. You’ll know the ones as they’re fairly easy to spot. Their attitude is generally that students are a nuisance to be dealt with and they view their job as laying out a buffet of knowledge from which students can choose whether or not to partake. Their syllabi usually read like the state penal code. You’ll see a lot of “Do nots” and “No exceptions” in their classroom expectations. In fact, you probably won’t see a section called “Expectations” so look for the section called “Rules and Consequences.” The administrators may have cute, witty things in their offices like an urn on their bookshelf that oh-so-humorously reads, “Ashes of Problem Students,” or an old-fashioned paddle engraved with the words, “The Enforcer.” Forget any discourse about the messages these “jokes” send to students, parents, or community members who may have occasion to see them and who may not share their owner’s sense of gallows humor… Negative people want nothing more than to perpetuate their negative energy. Seek out teachers and administrators who enjoy working with kids and have a positive world view. They’re out there, and more common than you think, but they’re usually doing something good for kids instead of complaining about how no one else is.
  • Have fun. Don’t confuse this with “be funny” because they’re not the same thing. And by “fun,” I don’t mean pizza party or Friday Free Day. You’ve chosen a very serious job with a serious responsibility. You’ve accepted the challenge of teaching the next generation. They will have to go out there after you’re finished with them and make the world a better place. So take the job seriously, but not yourself. Show a funny YouTube video, sponsor the sophomore class, smile, and love your job.
  • Just because you can do something with technology doesn’t mean you should do it with technology. Do you need a wiki intervention? You know who you are.

It’s not an exhaustive list, but that should get you started. You’ll notice I didn’t include anything about where to find discipline referrals or how to access the copier. You’ll get all that stuff from your new boss on your first day of orientation. I also didn’t share my philosophy on discipline and how you work with kids, but that’s been done before by me and others. This is some of the other stuff that’s been on my mind for a while. And spending time with new and preservice teachers, I’m sure there will be more that follows.

Coming soon: What you need to know before your first day as an administrator…

Making things happen

[This post also appears on LeaderTalk.]

A month or so ago, Twitter colleague Dave Meister (@phsprincipal) sent out a tweet wondering if any of the educational leaders on Twitter would want to attempt a “virtual” meet-up sometime this summer. Being a generally social person who enjoys exchanging good ideas with smart people, I thought this would be great. Dave threw together a quick interest survey on GDocs and over 40 school and district-level leaders expressed interest in the event.

Being fresh off the modest success of the Learning 2.0 event at my school, I volunteered to help out. We’d gotten pretty adventurous with the online portion of Learning 2.0 so I wanted to see how much farther we could push the virtual conference paradigm. Being that all of our districts are cutting back on PD money and that we all have other things we like to do in the summer, we thought that a virtual, half-day event would be ideal.

Dave and I spent a lot of time DM-ing and emailing and collaborating to determine an appropriate format for the event. We wanted a format that would provide a loose structure, but not too much structure, and that would allow participants to network, share what they’re passionate about, and form learning groups organically.

After a couple weeks of planning, I am proud to invite your participation in LeaderCamp 2010 on Thursday, June 24, 2010. Naturally, you can follow the event updates on Twitter.

The theme for the day, “Making Things It Happen,” was inspired by this Tweet from Dave. We talk about change a great deal. For this event, though, we hope to focus on action; on leaders who are – well – making things happen in their school or their district. Big successes or tiny victories, we want to learn from them.

We’ve attempted to structure the event in the spirit of a Barcamp or Unconference. We are exploring WebEx Event Center as a possible vehicle for collaboration, and will probably open up the agenda-creation phase the Monday before the event. We will not be calling for proposal submissions or anything so fancy or sophisticated as we really want this to be as open as possible. We wanted to create a space and time where everyone is welcome and anyone can claim a session and share a good idea, a powerful tool, or a success story.

We’ve created longer session slots for big ideas, as well as a pair of 10-minute “micro-sessions” that would be perfect for showing off a tool that you use in your practice. We’re also building in some “networking” time as well and working on an opportunity for participants to submit a 2-minute video on a topic of their choosing which we’ll string together to create a session in the style of “TED” or “Ignite.”

I hope that if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll at least mark your calendar and plan to spend some time with us this June. It’ll be a first of its kind event and I am very much looking forward to connecting with colleagues I’ve never met and sharing more than the confines of Twitter allow.

What you need to know when you’re done with high school

I had a great experience working with a group of teachers and leaders in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a couple weeks ago. While I like to kid about them being a “tough crowd,” the truth is that they were an open-minded group who asked great questions.

One of the participants (I can’t recall her name – sorry!) challenged me during my session to identify the Top Ten Things Every Graduating High School Student Know or Understand. Since I enjoy a challenge, I told her I’d work on it and post a response here. I’m not sure it’s what she had in mind, but it’s the best I can think of.

  • Know what is valuable. The value of factual information is either at or quickly approaching zero. What you need are skills. Skills that will allow you to learn and re-learn will be more important than factual knowledge. Now, don’t read this to say that factual knowledge is never valuable or that it shouldn’t be taught — all things in moderation will create balance — but if all you take away from science class is that you memorized the Periodic Table, then we may have a disconnect between what we do in school and what you’ll do when you’re done in school.
  • Learn how to learn. In our information-rich, always-on, instant-access world, the winner isn’t the one who knows the most, rather it’s the one who can do the most. So how do you learn? Do you read a book or watch a video? Do you find a mentor or expert tutor? Do you throw your search at Google and click “I’m Feeling Lucky”?
  • Tackle interesting problems, and be OK with messy solutions. Find an interesting problem and solve it in a unique way. But know that the answer will rarely be found in the form of a 5-paragraph essay or a nice, round integer.
  • Be a connoisseur of information. Anyone with a computer or cellphone can do a Google search. But you need the information literacy to make sense of the results. The trade-off of having all this information a click away is that you’ll need to be able to read and assess it for possible reliability and validity issues.
  • Be conscious of your digital footprint. It’s never too early to start being aware of your online presence. You will be Google-able and you will be Googled. I suggest that you be certain that you’re in control of what people find when they Google you.
  • Give back. Share. Contribute. Help out. It doesn’t have to be monetary.
  • People are more important than technology. Technology is awesome because it gives us the ability to break down barriers. We can share and collaborate in ways that, even as recently as 5 years ago, seemed like the exclusive domain of the crew of the Enterprise. So use the technology to build and strengthen connections, but always remember that technology is only one tool in relationship-building.
  • Find something you’re passionate about. Life is really going to stink if you can’t find something you love to do.
  • Be nice. One effect of all this technology is that everyone who’s anyone has a blog or a Twitter account or a Facebook account. That’s swell. But what I don’t particularly care for are those who use these platforms as a soapbox to pop off about anything and everything simply because now they can. And because there are no short-term consequences, people uncork with things they’d never say in front of actual people for fear of getting punched.
  • Play. It’s not just for kids anymore. Play is an important part of learning. It helps us think.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m not sure if it’s what she expected, but that’s that I think our kids need to know when they leave high school. I sure hope you weren’t expecting me to say they needed to understand the electoral college or how to change the amplitude of a sine wave. They can look that stuff up when they need it.

The Larger, Smaller Conversation

[I posted this on LeaderTalk earlier today.]

I had a whole post ready for my “official” LeaderTalk day last Friday but in the end I just couldn’t bring myself to click “Publish.” I was a little frustrated when I wrote it and I think it needs to simmer for a bit before it’s ready for prime time.

Fast-forward to this morning and a great keynote from Karl Fisch about literacy in the 21st century. Karl said a lot of great things and challenged the thinking of a lot of people in the room. This led to some great conversations throughout the morning and throughout the day.

But Karl’s talk got me thinking about my “unpublished” post. I’ve been spinning a lot of half-formed thoughts around in my head all morning and this is my attempt at putting them together in some quasi-cohesive form.

Most of us reading LeaderTalk and publishing our blogs are basically in agreement that school, in its current iteration, leaves something to be desired in terms of its ability to meet the individual needs of students in a way that doesn’t look like an assembly line. Though the methods proposed to address this deficiency vary from blog to blog and person to person, there isn’t a lot of disagreement that something needs to change.

The question I’m left with, then, is that with all of this ideology around how things should look, and all these great conversations “out there,” how do we carry these conversations back to our schools? If we (the schools) are supposed to “be the change [we] want to see in the world,” then how do we start talking about this change at the micro level in one school?

More pointedly, how do we have a real discussion about these real ideas that doesn’t somehow degenerate into (a) “If the school/district would buy me a projector/computer/document camera, then I could do this stuff,” or (b) “Let’s talk about tardy policies and consequences for cell phone use…”?

Is this the majority of teachers? Probably not. Are these equipment and policy issues important? Sure. Are they the most important? Not to me.

Nonetheless, I would love to get beyond them in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m minimizing the concerns of the teachers for whom these are the Big Issues Of The School.

My struggle right now is trying to frame these big ideas in a simple, straightforward way that is accessible to everyone and doesn’t alienate any particular group of teachers. On the other hand, part of me feels like waiting around for buy-in from everyone means we’re wasting a lot of time when we could be moving ahead.

I guess don’t have a lot of answers, but I sure have a lot of questions.

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!).