Connected Principals

You have to have strength in order to be an effective leader. The question here is not as much about being strong as it is about how you exert that strength. We can either exert our strength through strength or we can do it through being soft.

The people in your life want that same validation. In fact, every single person you will ever meet shares this common desire. They want to know they matter.

On the Connected Principals blog, 24 administrators from around the world share best practices in education. They come from the U.S., Canada, England and China; they come from private, public and independent schools; and they come from different perspectives and experience levels.

"Lead, follow, or get out of the way." ~ Thomas Paine It's simple. It's wrong.

But I think we will find that at the end of that battle, we won't really feel too much better, we might have said some things that we might not be able to take back, and we will be in a position where a solution may be even more distant than when we began the fight.

Great post... worth reading more than once. "...I believe the classroom should be a place that is sometimes in the world and sometimes removed from it."

A year ago, I wasn't on Twitter. Now my PLN is invaluable. If every other form of PD was taken away from me, I would continue to grow and learn because of the people and resources at my finger tips on Twitter. A year ago, I didn't really blog. Now it's part of who I am. It's how I actively try to make sense of the world. And it has connected me to people who challenge my thinking and help me to be a better teacher.

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." Henry Ford

The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology.

I agree with Dave's observation. We have four elementary buildings in our district, each with a different principal and each with a distinctive leadership strength. It's just like when I was teaching, I tended to teach to my strengths and had to remind myself to be well-rounded, but my classrooms definitely had a technology slant to them. Now as a building principal, my staff professional development is also slanted to the technology side. That part comes easier to me. I just have to work harder at curriculum and instruction pieces when I "marry" them all together.

How important is it to step beyond boundaries to test ideas and to test yourself? Beyond the boundary lies the potential for disruption, for innovation, for a different way.  Between the two, is the edge, the tension and dynamic between what has always been and what could be. ...stepping beyond the comfort of the status quo is how you become great.  It's how you become a true leader.  It's what true leaders do, and do without regret or pause. Because it's really the only way.

The behaviours individually are not rocket science - they can be found in good classrooms everywhere - but it is the combination of all of them together which produces the chemistry to transform good to excellent practise and therefore children's academic and social/behavioural outcome

I think we've all got to stop cranking out blog posts and Tweets that tout new tools and the "10 Best Ways…" and instead begin to make the case in our blogs and in person that technology or not, this is about what is best for our kids. That in this moment, 20th Century rules will not work for 21st Century schools.

Based on my recent project with my students, I ask participants to take a recent concept or skill they are learning and to examine various facets of the experience. I'll offer them these questions as prompts:

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror, but we're actually more like diamonds," Poole told the audience. "Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different… Facebook is consolidating identity by making us more simple than we truly are."

One forum that enables educators [including students, parents, community] to engage in meaningful and relevant professional development is the Edcamp model. What is Edcamp? Edcamp is organic, democratic, participant driven professional development for educators. There are no keynote presentations, there is no formal pre-set agenda, and participants set the course of the day. My thoughts on Edcamp:

To build upon this, we are about to embark on a "Learning Leader Project" which focuses on networking and connecting educators so that they are able to shape their own learning based on personal interests.

That's because all the major search engines have revised their formulas to include social media data-such as how frequently we've visited a particular website before, or how many of our online friends and acquaintances have endorsed it-as key indicators of a website's importance.

I tried playing Angry Birds the other day on my iPhone and found tons of teachable points of view on leadership issues.Here are twelve of the hidden nuggets I found:

When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

"Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea." In other words, our aversion to uncertainty means we find it difficult to even recognize a creative idea when we see it, focused as we are on removing the risky, uncomfortable strain on the status quo.