The Tempered Radical

New Slide: Note to Principals

As I was poking through the Connected Principals hashtag (#cpchat) in Twitter last week, I came across a great message on school leadership posted by Chris Wejr (@mrwejr), who is an elementary school principal in British Columbia.

I turned it into a slide.  Here it is:

 

Download Slide_NotetoPrincipals

(Image Credit:  Icon by Kevin N. Murphy, licensed CC Attribution)

 

Chris's message is great, isn't it?  If principals have an honest desire to be the instructional leaders of their schools, they've got to spend as much time in classrooms, hallways and on playgrounds as possible. 

So the logical question is have we done enough to create the kinds of conditions to allow principals to spend more time leading and less time managing?  Do principal professional development programs put an emphasis on leadership instead of management? 

Or are principals so burdened by the tasks of management that leadership is impossible?

How do effective principals pull off this juggling act?

New Slide: Oprahganda and Education Nation

In honor of the Education Nation circus that's about to begin today---which I wrote about pretty passionately yesterday---I whipped up a little slide that I thought was appropriate. 

Here it is:

(Image Credit:  Oprah Winfrey by Cliff 1066, Licensed CC Attribution)

Download Slide_Oprahganda

Many thanks to Anthony Cody---the mind behind Living in Dialogue---whose post titled OprahPaganda sparked my slide.  Anthony's a pretty brilliant political thinker and edublogger whose writing about the Education Nation controversy should be required reading for anyone still working in schools. 

Education Nation, Oprah and ‘The Bigger Picture’

Cranky Blogger Warning:  Like Chris Lehmann, the last few weeks of teacher and school bashing by the likes of NBC, Bill Gates and Oprah have left me exhausted and angry.  That means the emotion in this post is stronger than usual. 

Who knows if I’ll feel the same way two weeks from now, but I sure feel better today.

 

Memo

To:  NBC, Education Nation, Oprah, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and Bill Gates

From: A classroom teacher.

CC: Anyone who will listen—which is likely to be a short list.

Date: September 25, 2010

RE: Your Stranglehold on American Education

______________________________________________

The defining moment in my 17-year teaching career—a moment I’ve never chosen to write about because it was so hurtful—took place in the conference room of an ineffective principal who had decided to reprimand me. 

While there were lots of tense moments between us, the tipping point came when she’d hired extra gym teachers to get the numbers in our PE classes down to a more manageable size.  The result:  I was trying to teach 36-38 kids—dozens with special education needs—in my language arts classes. 

I pushed back.  She got pissed.  I was written up. 

In the course of our meeting, I asked for the logic behind placing 38 kids in my language arts classroom when there were only 18-20 in most of our gym classes.  Her response:

“Bill, you’re just a teacher.  You don’t see the bigger picture.  If you need more desks, let me know.”

I vowed, then and there, to NEVER let her accusation that I couldn’t possibly understand the ‘bigger picture’ because I’m ‘just a classroom teacher’—an accusation that you seem to share, considering your very public choices to leave teachers out of the important conversations you’ve started on education—to be true. 

I promised myself that I’d study damn near everything there was to know about education beyond the classroom.

And I have. 

Read This: Brown's Take on Waiting for Superman

"Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, holds up my school, SEED, as an exemplar of opportunity and success for educating at-risk youth, but really only portrays it through the admissions process. Teachers and classrooms aren’t spotlighted.

SEED, a tuition-free college-prep, five-day-a-week boarding school, located in Southeast D.C., is an outstanding example of what charter schools are meant for; it’s an innovative alternative to a traditional public school and a place for responsibly experimenting with new models of wrap-around services. It currently serves around 325 students in Washington, D.C. and there’s a new SEED School in Baltimore that is several years away from growing to its full scale.

 

I love my job teaching English at SEED, and I receive the space and support to excel at it.  So what makes it work? Many of the most important parts are replicable en masse in the public system."

via teacherleaders.typepad.com

Dan Brown---a brilliant young teacher who is also a colleague of mine in the Teacher Leaders Network---happens to work at one of the charter schools spotlighted and celebrated as an alternative to the abyss in the new edu-bashing film, Waiting for Superman.

In this post, Dan points out several practical changes that public schools---which serve the VAST majority of American students---can make today to improve teaching and learning.

What I like about Dan's bit is that he clearly demonstrates that the conditions that make him so successful at his current school aren't afforded to teachers working in comparable public schools.

That's such an important message for policymakers to hear. We're so willing to celebrate charter schools but we're unable---or unwilling---to ensure that public school teachers have the same kinds of working conditions and opportunities.

How does THAT make sense?

Tips for Growing Your Blog’s Audience: Consistency

This is the last post of a three-part series (see here and here) that I’ve written based on the ideas of Amber Mac that details the key behaviors necessary for building your education blog’s audience.  Hope you dig it:

Perhaps the greatest challenge for edubloggers hoping to grow an audience is the reality that growing an audience requires consistent posting and participation. Writing every now and then is just not good enough in a world where instantaneous communication is the new normal.

Once you decide to participate in social media spaces, your audiences are going to expect you to be consistently present. Failing to share on a regular basis—or to respond when readers reach out to you—is a recipe for a small audience and a short career as an edublogger!

While there are no hard-and-fast rules for the number of posts that are required in order to satisfy readers, most successful bloggers—regardless of field—are creating new entries 2-3 times per week.

Paying Students for Better Grades?

So an interesting email landed in my inbox today. 

In it, the author---who I think is a part of a team marketing the new movie based on the popular book Freakonomics---pointed me to this YouTube excerpt from the film, which spotlights a study designed to discover whether paying students cold hard cash has a positive impact on their academic performance:

Crazy, isn't it?  Made me feel kind of dirty, actually.  To see schools appealing to such extrinsic and materialistic awards to motivate kids just doesn't feel right. 

But if it works, can we really knock it?  If improved academic performance is what we care about and cash is an incentive that changes behaviors, wouldn't we be stupid not to consider it?

All I know is that I'm going to download the video in iTunes right now.  I kind of want to know what the outcomes of the study were! 

Google's Wonder Wheel ISN'T Gone!

I got a panicked email from a teacher friend last Thursday.  It read:

"Bill...you've got to help me.  I'm using your book and wanted to show my students how to target their research projects using Google's Wonder Wheel.  Then, I come in this morning and the Wonder Wheel is gone. 

Now what am I supposed to do?"

My first reaction was to groan simply because disappearing tools is one of my greatest fears as the author of a book on technology.  In fact, if you ask the Solution Tree folks, they'll tell you they had to twist my arm to get me to write a book on technology because I was afraid to be the author of an outdated title.

That's also why the majority of my book is focused on skills----problem solving, communication, collaboration, information management----instead of tools. Skills rarely change.  Tools are constantly changing.

My second reaction was, "Why in the world would Google get rid of such a great tool for researching?"

The answer---which I learned only after poking around for about 45 minutes---is that they haven't.  Instead, the Wonder Wheel---which automatically breaks broad concepts down into related subtopics---has simply ended up hidden because of a new service that Google rolled out called Google Instant.

Google Instant displays search results automatically while you're typing---and I'm not sure why, but Google's Wonder Wheel doesn't appear in the search sidebar when Google Instant is activated. 

If you want to see the Wonder Wheel, you've got to turn Google Instant off by clicking the small "Instant is On" link next to the search box on any search results page.  After making that change, you'll be able to search "the old fashioned way" and to find the Wonder Wheel in the sidebar of the search results page again. 

I know it's a bit of a pain---I'm still trying to figure out why Google would want to hide one of it's most valuable tools---but at least the Wonder Wheel isn't gone forever!  That would be a real disaster.

If you're a teacher who hasn't played with the Wonder Wheel yet, you're missing out!  Check out this lesson---which I included in Teaching the iGeneration---to learn more about how it can be a great tool for helping students to focus their research projects.

Tips for Growing Your Blog’s Audience: Bravery

This is the second part in a 3 part series designed to introduce education bloggers to the tips and tricks of building an audience. 

Each part in the series is drawn from the ABCs of social media spaces laid out by Amber Mac in her fantastic book Power Friending.  You can find part one in this series here.

 

Another challenge for anyone interested in being heard in today’s new media landscape is that our audiences are literally swimming in digital noise. The number of messages—delivered via snail mail, email, websites, television stations, radio stations, text messages, instant messages—consumed by any one individual during the course of a given day is simply staggering.

That means being heard requires bloggers to be inventive about the content of—and the craft behind—the messages that we’re creating.

What do Teacher Leaders Need from Administrators?

This entry is cross-posted at Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irrelevant as a part of a week-long guest blogger project answering the question, "What do Teachers Need from Administrators?"

As a founding member of the Teacher Leaders Network and a guy who is passionate about trying to stay in the classroom for my entire career, I’ll never forget the first time that I paged through IEL’s seminal report, Redefining the Teacher as Leader. 

Strange, huh?  People remember lots of “first times”—riding a bike, kissing a girl, driving a car, landing a job, getting a paycheck—but remembering your first time with a policy document churned out by an edu-think-tank?

Not so much. 

Maybe that’s why I feel like such an odd duck—a label that my TLN colleagues and I wear with pride. 

Download Slide_OddDucks

Admittedly, there’s not a lot of teachers whose skirts get blown up by policy documents. 

But there are TONS of teachers who care deeply about serving as leaders in their schools and communities, creating what the IEL team writing Redefining the Teacher as Leader almost a decade ago described as:

“A potentially splendid resource for leadership and reform that is now being squandered: the experience, ideas, and capacity to lead of the nation’s schoolteachers” (p. 2).

And there are TONS of edu-experts that argue about the importance of teacher leadership all the time.  Need a sampling?  Take these two quotes for a ride:

• "A crying need exists for excellent, practicing teachers to advance---to lead---by taking a more formal and explicit role in the supervision and improvement of instruction."  Mike Schmoker

• "The leadership shortage may be dire, but the leadership development potential is great, if only schools and systems will tap into the potential of teacher leadership.  Even though 50,000 leaders will retire in the first few years that this book is in print, hundreds of thousands of teachers will be at the peak of their professional experience."  Douglas Reeves

Sadly, I’m here to tell you that the vast majority of our schools are still squandering the experience, ideas and capacity of our nation’s schoolteachers. 

In fact, little has changed in most buildings—despite the never-ending rhetoric that surrounds conversations about teacher leadership.  Most of us teacher leader types are still stuck in a hapless search for organizational juice. 

Need proof? 

Then consider that over half (53%) of the 140 teachers I recently surveyed are dissatisfied with the teacher leadership opportunities available to them and that just under half (49%) don’t believe that teacher leadership is valued in their schools.

Download Infographic_TeacherLeadership

Pretty discouraging, huh?  Teacher leadership has been an uber-buzzword for so long that you’d think we’d see more promising trends in these kinds of numbers. 

Now, knowing full well that us odd ducks can be a bit hard to understand, I had some of my buddies share their thoughts on the kinds of things that teacher leaders need from administrators. 

Here’s a sampling of what they wrote:

“I need a principal to do more public acknowledgement of the work and effort we've put in.”  David Cohen

“What I wish every administrator knew about teacher leaders is that whether they're born or made, genuine teacher leaders are outstanding teachers first and foremost.”  Gail Ritchie

“I would like to be utilized…I would hope that I could bring a vital perspective to problem solving in the school and be asked to be involved at that level.”  Heather Wolpert-Gawron

“I need to know that my principal  is a true member of our school.  I need to see his/her face in the hallway, at PLC meetings, and at sporting events.”  Sarah Henchey

“As a teacher leader, I need an adminstrator who trusts me to think independently, make on-the-spot educated decisions, and have the ability to problem solve educational issues.”  Cossondra George

“Teacher leaders need the freedom to try new things in their classrooms. We are intelligent leaders who are learning and may hear about things before you do!”  Becky Goerend

“Teachers need…a safe place to wonder in and personalize their learning. We do not make it easy for students to learn by making it difficult for teachers to learn.”  Nancy Stuewe

“Teacher Leaders need trust, freedom, and instructional leadership from our administrators.”  Paul Cancellieri

“Teacher leaders need an administrator who allows others to have input into how to (i) set the direction of the school, (ii) redesign the organization; and (iii) manage the instructional program.”  Tania Sterling

“I would say I need to be listened to, and to receive honest and helpful feedback on my ideas.”  Bill Ivey

Interesting stuff, huh?  Basically, what we’re saying is that teacher leaders need nothing more than the confidence and trust of their administrators.

And the even better news is that, in my survey of my teacher leader friends,  "informal words of thanks and praise from principals" rates as the most important reward necessary for encouraging teacher leadership----placing higher than release time from classroom responsibilities AND additional compensation. 

To put it simply, we're competent and qualified—we're reading as much as you are, we're studying our craft in deep and meaningful ways, we're studying organizational theory, we're perfecting our professional development skills---and putting our knowledge and skills to work ain’t going to cost you anything more than a willingness to let us lead!

That seems like a good deal to me.

(Can I get an Amen from the choir, please?)

Social Media in Education Resources Posted

I haven't got a ton of new content to share with you this morning because I spent the weekend grinding out content for a new book I'm writing on the role that social media tools can play in education. 

What I do have, however, are----I think---some pretty good handouts that you might find useful as you try to introduce people to the potential uses for social media tools in education.  Here they are:

Exploring School Based Social Media Efforts

While using social media services to reach out to school communities was still a relatively novel practice in the fall of 2010, several buildings had already worked to create a presence in popular forums like Twitter and Facebook.

One of the best ways to build confidence in your own social media communication plan is to explore their efforts. This handout can help you to track your reactions while exploring the social media efforts of three different schools and/or principals.

Top Ten Sources for Learning about Social Media

One of the first steps that principals interested in incorporating social media strategies into their communication and professional development plans can take is to read as much as they can about the role that new tools are playing in schools and businesses.

The readings and resources included in this handout are good starting points for initial studies about the changing nature of communication, professional development and learning in a world dominated by social media spaces.

Tracking Learning in Social Media Spaces

Some of the best professional development opportunities for educators take place as a result of interactions in social media spaces. These interactions, however, rarely count towards requirements for license renewal simply because they are not carefully documented.

Consider using this form over the course of the next year to record the impact that interactions in social media spaces are having on your own professional growth.

Exploring Common Patterns of Participation in Twitter

It can be inherently difficult to believe that meaningful professional development can actually occur in Twitter, a social media service that limits messages to 140 characters.

To build confidence in the value of joining the Twitterverse, consider monitoring the messages being posted by any educator using Twitter for a few weeks and then completing this handout.

Exploring Educational Conversations in Social Media Spaces

Successfully developing a 21^st Century PLN depends on choosing a social media space that aligns with your personal learning preferences, provides access to information that can improve your work, and connects you to colleagues that you can learn from.

Before committing to any social media space, consider checking out a few of the conversations occurring below and determining how likely they are to be a good fit for you.

There are a few other resources---which I've shared before---posted here on my Digitally Speaking Wiki.  Hope this stuff helps you somehow.