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Principals must effectively and consistently model the use of the same technology tools they expect teachers to use in their classrooms with the students. Principals must be consistent in their decisions and expectations about integrating learning technology in the school. The principal's communication about the pace and process of integrating learning technology needs to be clear and reasonable. The principal must provide appropriate professional development time and resources to support effective classroom implementation of technology. The principal must support early adopters and risk takers. The principal must do whatever it takes to ensure that all staff has early access to the very same digital tools that students will be using in their classrooms. As the educational leader, the principal must make it clear to the technology leader that all decisions relating to learning technology will be made by the educational leaders with input from the technology leaders, not the other way around. The principal must set and support the expectation that student work will be done and stored using technology. Principals must ensure that families and the public are kept informed about the school's goals and progress relating to its use of technology as a learning resource. The principal must be an active and public champion for all students, staff members, and the school in moving the vision of fully integrating learning technology for the second decade of the 21st century.

It’s not just about the kids watching the same lecture the night before. For us, the big piece is having teachers use data to make instructional decisions about their students,

Students worked through those initial units quickly, but she could see when they hit their “pain points”—sometimes on material covered several grades earlier. The Los Altos Pilot Administrators, teachers, and students in Los Altos School District share their experiences with Khan Academy. Source: The Khan Academy Administrators Teachers Students “In order for me to get that kind of understanding of a student, I would have had to sit down one-on-one and work through problems and see a pattern, which I’m happy to do, but it takes a lot of time,” Ms. Caldwell said. “This confirmed my suspicions and allowed me to remediate much more quickly.”

“I was able to identify those learning gaps in real time, whether it was from 3rd or 4th or 5th grade, and I was able to remediate and saw those learning gaps begin to disappear

I'd be very concerned if we try to nationalize or standardize expectations of what counts as competency," she said. "The credit hour is a fundamental academic decision. Faculty should decide what's attached to coursework."

Many colleges embrace Advanced Placement examinations as universal markers of quality, she said. Lawyers and doctors also have rigorous qualifying exams that are essentially competency-based assessments.

This is not the right time to jump off the old credit-hour boat and assume that new competency-based assessments are primed and ready to sail," she said. "And we should definitely not kid ourselves that there are strong standardized tests already available that can do the job for us."

At the same time, we need to have the confidence to make decisions on the spot, even in the absence of compelling, complete data.  The qualities needed at the top—openness, authentic listening, adaptability—also indicate that leaders need to be comfortable with and able to embrace the “grayness” that comes from other people’s ideas or situations that arise.

Learning Agility is a reliable indicator of leadership potential because learning agile people “excel at absorbing information from their experience and then extrapolating from those to navigate unfamiliar situations.

In short, Learning Agility is the ability to learn, adapt, and apply ourselves in constantly morphing conditions.

Effective teaching is variable

They do not teach the same way and use the same instructional repertoire year after year

Effective teaching is contextual

Clearly define your vision

when it’s clear and concise, post it in the places where employees can see important stuff like this.

Give employees what they want and need.

The ability to work well with others - flexibility and interpersonal skills - seemed to be a bigger factor in teacher retention than where the teacher went to college. Other things like experience and instructional skills also were big factors.

Our research suggests that teacher workforce improvements can be derived from more careful hiring decisions,

such as whether a teacher would be good at teaching students to be good citizens, Goldhaber said.