A great deal of leadership is about ‘getting out of the road’ and ‘letting people get on with it’ – for me, that is one of the biggest differences between management and leadership. Management requires you to be intrinsically involved in the process; the smaller minutia of how ‘stuff’ happens. Leadership, conversely, is what is needed to make management possible; the strategic and forward thinking ‘stuff’ that allows the processes to happen. Clearly, organisations need a good dollop of both to operate effectively in the digital era, and the assembly of a team that encompasses both roles.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating that leadership is all about delegation by any stretch. Effective leaders need to be able to fill both roles. However this article provided some thinking stimulus as I reflect on my new formal leadership role as a Deputy Principal, rather than the specialist IT Department Head role that I have inhabited for the past four years.

Within this new role I am constantly seeking to not only ensure that I am staying out of my successor’s way and allowing him to redefine the role to suit himself, but also beginning to realise that I need to stay out of peoples way more globally to allow them to grow. It is quite easy to fall into the trap of working on the initiatives that are appealing to me and that I have the skillset to achieve quickly in achieving the outcome, rather than working with my team to ensure that others are learning as well as the outcome being achieved. This may mean that sometimes the project takes longer than I could do it myself, but it also means that it may also get done in a range of ways that I had not anticipated or thought of – that’s where the learning happens for both myself and others.

I have always prided myself on being the ‘go to guy’ who gets stuff done quickly and efficiently (for the most part), particularly where technology integration is the go – what I am starting to realise is that a key part of leadership (rather than just management) is the building of capacity in others to ensure that I am surrounded by ‘go to people’, rather than just getting the job done quickly myself in the way I think it should be done. This may seem inefficient in the short term as this capacity is built, but ultimately one person cannot do everything, and unless I have the team capacity around me to help, it’s doomed to medium/long term failure.

If we are to be serious about achieving ‘learning organisations’ rather than just working in schools that organise learning, we need to look at the way staff are developed. In order for staff to develop, they have to be given the opportunity to try and to fail, and then to try again and fail better – after all, is that not what we advocate for students in the classroom? Why are teachers any different? To do that, I need to learn to back away and to bite my tongue in letting others attempt things in their own way and style – even if it is in a field or area that I think I have all the answers.

One of my favourite podcasts is Chris Betcher’s ‘The Virtual Staffroom’, though the downside of living in a town that’s only 5km from side to side is that you don’t really have much of a commute to catch up on podcasts. I finally got a chance to listen to the first part of episode 38 – Student Voice – early in the year, and sketched out a blog based on my reactions to it. Unfortunately, much like the blog itself, my opportunity to finish the rest of the podcast never came. That is, until travelling home from Cunnamulla on Wednesday when conversations allowed me to plug both myself and @mrssamo into the episode in its entirety.

I’ve often reflected on my own classes, and their fear of publishing their thoughts on blogs. The conclusion that I’ve come to – and was clarified by Chris’ podcast – is that the publishing process (or lack thereof) is the hangup. This process has changed; the importance is now on proofreading and publishing thoughts quickly, rather than editing repeatedly and only publishing when the final product is perfect.

I’ve come to realise that we need to change the way that we look at blogging in classes; as highlighted in the podcast, we need to prioritise blogging in the classroom – explicitly teaching the digital literacies involved as you would any other genre. This gives the opportunity to explicitly teach collaboration, the art of commenting and the modern publishing process itself. The podcast gives some excellent ideas on ways to teach commenting – one of my favourites was the idea of ‘one star’ and ‘two star’ comments; one star comments being comments that don’t really add to the conversation (“Great idea!” “Thanks for that.” etc); two star comments being more in depth. By teaching the students how to recognise one star and two star comments, it is modelling what is needed for good comments and also teaching critical literacy skills.

The new publishing process is all about sharing imperfections, and recognising that knowledge is a moveable feast; an evolving discipline. By publishing first, and editing later, we are modelling this for our students and helping them to recognise that it’s ok to make mistakes – just so long as you learn from them and edit them later.

It was great to finally get to the end of the podcast – the discussions with @mrssamo were equally great, highlighting the way that we could use snippets of podcasts such as this as discussion starters with our collective staff. If you haven’t yet logged on to the Virtual Classroom, do yourself a favour this weekend and check it out! Now to find a way to catch up on the backlog that is still waiting for me…

Cross posted from my employer-provided blog; originally posted May 2011, under the same title.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2055/5756262381_1036ef8813.jpg -
Ripples, by whologwhy, licenced under Creative Commons

Leadership – it seems – is all about ripples; knowing when to cause them for effect and cognitive dissonance, and how to ride the waves that some ripples caused by others (and ourselves) sometimes become. In a culture of change, I have often reflected in my mind about the benefit of these ripples, for without ripples to challenge the way we’ve always done things, or to move us outside of our comfort zones, the ability to change becomes obscured. But the question for me is how to work within these ripples when they become waves?

Canadian educational change leader and author Michael Fullan is often quoted as saying that relationships are key:

Relationships. Leaders must be consummate relationship builders with diverse people and groups. The single factor common to every successful change initiative is that relationships improve. If relationships improve, things get better. If they remain the same or get worse, ground is lost. Effective leaders constantly foster purposeful interaction and problem solving. They are wary of easy consensus. Emotional intelligence is at the core of leaders who are continuously successful in a culture of change.
Sourced from http://www.michaelfullan.ca/resource_assets/ms_annotations/fullan1.htm

This is fantastic thinking, and definitely something to keep in mind when pushing that rock into the water. Another way of looking at the same concept was explained to me by a mentor and friend late last year when he spoke of ‘emotional capital’. This involved the need to ensure that you build sufficient emotional capital within relationships before needing to make a withdrawal of that capital as you introduced a change or initiative that may not be popular with everybody. Without the emotional capital in the bank first, there is a real possibility – almost certainty – that relationships can be damaged and, as Fullan says above, ‘ground is lost’.

But how do we deal with this when we are on the other side of the wave? When you are the one in control of the Emotional Capital Bank – the one pushing the rock – it is often easy to forsee and control the way that relationships may be tested and ensure that you have sufficient capital in place to offset your costs. This is not always the case, and sometimes relationships can suffer, but in the majority of instances you are able to work with and through people to ensure that the capital is in place through involving people in decisions and working for ownership, rather than buy in.

When you are the investor though, subject to the ripples caused by others, this is much harder to control.

Cognitive dissonance – that uncomfortable feeling when your thoughts/beliefs are challenged – is necessary for us to take an objective look at what we believe and the way we do things, in order for us to rationalise new information and incorporate new ways of thinking/doing/being. If ripples slowly wear away at us and cause this dissonance slowly, it is possible to create change without great withdrawals of emotional capital; assuming that people either don’t realise what is happening, or are willing to change.

What I am struggling to understand at the moment, is how do we deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by ripple s we know through experience or deep-rooted belief to be counter productive and superseded. When other leaders hold views that are very different to our own, we have the opportunity to learn from each other and to rationalise the two ways of approaching the world into a shared understanding of how the world works. When this rationalisation process is only one way though, the ripples can turn into dumpers. How we rebuild our thought processes and reinvest in the emotional capital after such emotional economic downturns would seem to be the key; an exercise in rebuilding consumer confidence.

So how do we go about this? Through rebranding? Through apologies to the press? That may be easier for corporate entities, however perhaps the metaphor is going too far. What would seem to be needed is for both parties to take stock and to recognise their part in the process, rather than blindly assuming that the cognitive dissonance process proved that the others views were invalid. This becomes difficult though, when communication channels become strained and it would seem one party is willing to do this, while the other does not appear so. While soever one of the two parties maintains the belief that they are trying to change their approach, while not being willing to listen or share with the other, the ripples will turn into tsunamis and tear the working relationship apart.

The leadership message in all of this would seem to be that effective leaders need to always be aware of not only their footprint on others, but also the footprint made by others; lest the footprint become a bootprint and the weather makes surfing the ripples unsafe.

Over the years, I have taken a fair bit of time to put together a range of tools that ultimately save me time. A classic example is the electronic markbook and roll setup that has grown from a simple Excel spreadsheet into an all-in-one solution that has ebbed and flowed over the years. Every time I’ve spent an hour or so working on a problem to turn a two minute job into a one minute job, I’ve endured withering criticism from friends and family alike – and I probably can’t argue too much…

However – at the end of the day – that one minute that I shaved off a task I undertook four times a day, saved me much more than the hour or so I took to design the fix in the first place. That’s where the real revelation is – playing with productivity can actually be productive!

I came home this afternoon aiming to get a lot of work done; instead, I came across ‘Remember the Milk’ in a post from Stepcase Lifehack. This cloud-based task management system looks to have the potential to solve a lot of problems for me. It will integrate and sync with Outlook, allow me access to my to-do list across devices, and ultimately help me to remember those jobs that I think of at midnight and try to scrawl on the back of my hand for action the next morning. While all of this sounds great, it took a little bit of research before I decided to give it a burl, and then a minimal amount of setting up. All in all, maybe 30 minutes out of my working time this afternoon.

While I was playing with productivity tools, I figured it was also a good time to play with a couple of other things I’ve been meaning to get to. So I decided to take the plunge with Buffer; a tool that allows me to schedule articles/links to be tweeted out at regular intervals, rather than me flooding the tweetstream when I get to checking out my Read-it-later backlog. That meant I then had to play with getting the system right – using Ifttt to automagically add my Read-it-later read items to the Buffer; adding a button to my iPad Safari to allow me to add links to the buffer that way too. Another hour or so ‘wasted’.

But is it really ‘wasted time’? Or is it an investment in the future? When I first became a Head of Department, the first question I asked anyone who had been in the position for a while was “how do you manage to get so much done?!”. Generally, people couldn’t answer me in a few words – I now understand that the reason they couldn’t answer me was because their secret had been honed through the half-hour here/half-hour there investments in getting their productivity workflow working well. I am incredibly lucky to be a young leader at a point in time where productivity management is being enhanced every day by technology – my challenge though, is to filter the seemingly endless sea of productivity tools for the ones that are truly worth the investment of time in order to gain in the long run.

I have to admit – even I find this blog title cryptic. That said though, the idea that underpins it would seem to provide an awesome way to encourage self-directed learning both within the classroom, and as part of a wider school change movement. We’ve all read the research from gurus such as Fullan, Robinson and Hattie that suggests people learn and perform better when they are able to work within their Element and exercise their passions. The concept of “FedEx Days” seems to capture this notion and allow people to release their creative juices from behind the dam walls that often contain them in traditional classrooms and schools.

I first learnt about FedEx Days from a Stepcase Lifehack article about Supercharging Team Productivity. In the article, it holds up Sydney IT company Atlassian’s concept of FedEx days – 24hrs each month for team members to work on any project they like, before pitching their project and being recognised for their creativity – as productivity best practice. Happening to have a great mate who works for Atlassian, I grilled him about the idea and we both came to the conclusion that the concept could easily be transferred to the classroom.

How amazing the potential for FedEx lessons could be? In my high school setting, we typically teach each of our five classes for three x 70 minute lessons each week. So imagine the potential outcomes that could arise from turning an English class loose for one of those lessons every few weeks to work on whatever English-related passion they held? A unit on Shakespeare could spark a FedEx lesson that yielded a Txt:Shakespeare dictionary, or spawned an examination of bear fight statistics from the Summer of 1583. A HPE anatomy unit could see an interpretive dance explaining the digestive system, or an examination of the way that music can stimulate certain areas of hair growth. The opportunities are endless! And yes; I know it sounds a lot like negotiated assessment – but is that such a bad thing? Same outcome, different name and slightly different approach that allows for both a more structured learning environment, and the opportunity to let your hair down and just explore your own learning passion!

So the FedEx lesson might go something like: brainstorming your project; creating/designing/’speccing’ it out (read: exploring the topic in an authentic way that is individually meaningful); pitching your project to the class; evaluating projects for innovation and learning through peer and individual reflection. How does that score, for those playing buzzword bingo? But seriously; how many of the things that we are striving to achieve in classrooms does that process tick off?

But wait! There’s more!

At a whole school level; imagine the power of allowing teachers to work on that unit plan idea they’ve been dreaming of but never had the opportunity to teach? Or even just allowing them to explore an area of another subject area that interests them, looking for opportunities to embed cross-curricular ideas? Again; the brainstorm/create/pitch/evaluate cycle could work wonders for sparking reflection and reigniting the passion for lifelong learning that resides somewhere (sometimes a little more hidden, or visible) within every teacher.

How could you FedEx your classroom? Your faculty? Your school? Your cluster!? The opportunities seem endless…

There has been a lot written about the whole Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) debate over recent months (or longer), and I have to admit that a lot of what has been written on both sides has been convincing in its own way. Interestingly, it was actually a comment on an article (read opinion blog) written by Lisa Nielsen – “7 Myths About BYOD Debunked” – that helped to solidify some thinking on my part.

While the article is largely personal opinion – as most blogs are – there is obviously a lot of thought and personal experience underpinning the opinion. For me, the biggest issues with BYOD are around the digital divide that may or may not be reinforced by relying on students to bring devices when they are often flat bringing a pencil. That said though, it is the students who often lack pencils that have devices in trumps; and it is these digital devices that live in the student’s pockets/hands/minds that they are clearly most comfortable with.

The comment that got me thinking was a fairly scathing attack on the article, highlighting that BYOD is clearly pie in the sky and fundamentally unworkable. Citing lines that could easily have come from an argument with teachers as to “why this new fangled data projector was a waste of space when I’ve got my good old chalk board”, the comment focused on the fear behind BYOD – a fear that I have to confess to harbouring at times when I think of the letting go of another layer of control in my classroom.

However, while this fear is understandable, as I have blogged before – it is more about the possibilities for students than the control for teachers. The flip side of the comment’s argument is that good pedagogical practice should be possible regardless of the device/system/program – if we are aiming for ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning, then using student devices (that they are comfortable with and use every day) means that we are able to engage more in the pedagogy and higher order thinking, than the ‘this is how you use THIS particular device/system/program’.

I’m sure that BYOD has a lot of cons, and a long way to go in debate yet – but right now, I am caught as to which side of the debate that I support, but can feel the tides of optimism dragging me away from the perceived safe harbour of school controlled devices; even in a student controlled classroom.

Over the course of this year, I’ve had the opportunity to help out at the local Primary school in an Acting Principal capacity for a few days here and there. I’ve always enjoyed my time down here – I’m currently on the second of a two day stint – and just love the atmosphere of the Primary classroom. To walk into any given room and have “Good Morn-ing Mis-ter Mc-Cor-mack” (or a variation on the pronunciation, depending on year level) belted out, and to sit in the back of the room and watch the active involvement of the kids in their own learning, their creativity and their quest for development; it leaves a smile on my face the whole time.

But then I go back to the High School (where I’m not so afraid that I’ll accidentally stand on a little person – don’t get me wrong; I love to visit the primaries, but I’m much happier back in the real world…) and just have to wonder; what happens to those kids at the end of year 7?

Yesterday, I sat in on a 6/7 class and spoke to some excited students about what next year holds for them at our place – the opportunities and the great things that are going to happen in classrooms. This discussion is not unlike discussions I’ve had with previous groups of year 7s during transition programs, and yet I find myself cynically thinking that the magical process that seemingly takes place every year, will happen again over this Christmas break. First day of year 8, those wonderful year 7s that I sat with yesterday will have turned into year 8s, and that passion and intrinsic quest for knowledge will be quashed in many of them; even before they sit in a year 8 classroom.

So how can I expect my teachers to fight a battle for the hearts and minds of year 8 students, if the battle is seemingly lost over the Christmas holidays? How can this switch be suddenly flicked; transforming the involved, creative and passionate young learners I have worked with in classrooms from Prep to Year 7, into year 8 students (and beyond) with (for the most part) little interest or passion in their own learning? The general attitude each year seems to be that the engaging learning opportunities teachers are enabling for them to be self-directed learners in charge of their own destiny, is “<<insert derogatory, generation specific word here>>”. This attitude surely can’t materialise overnight. Yet despite the mountainous effort my teachers put into their learning environments and curriculum endeavours, the attitude of many students persists.

I just wish I could capture the passion of the young people in Prep or grade 1, and administer regular doses of it back to them in the secondary school to help inspire that same quest for knowledge in grade 8 and beyond.

Just this morning, watching year 1/2 students striving to come up with words that started with the ‘sn’ sound – the creativity and competition and genuine want to learn that was evident in the sea of raised hands straining for attention was awe inspiring. Even the kids who were way off were keen to have a go regardless, and took the “not quite, but good try though” of their teacher in the spirit it was intended; and not as a condemnation of failure. The colourful and engaging classroom environment was not unlike many of our secondary classrooms – seemingly the only thing different was the height of the chairs (I still can’t get used to the mini furniture… so far to get up!) and that undeniable passion.

Perhaps there is a direct correlation between the height of the furniture and the passion displayed by students? Is THIS the reason Peter Pan grew up; he started sitting on big chairs?

I think what I love most about teaching, is the ability to take a seemingly unrelated stimulus and build it into a meaningful learning opportunity. @Linda_Pilko shared this YouTube channel on the weekend, and in particular this Rap Battle between Shakespeare and Dr Seuss. Aside from providing a great afternoon of fun for me (I know, I know… no life…), I suddenly realised that this was a perfect opportunity to help get across some points to my 12 English guys.

We’re currently looking at a unit comparing The Great Gatsby and The Truman Show as examples of a potentially unattainable American Dream, and a wider examination of American literature. The assessment piece is for the guys to choose two characters from the texts (not necessarily from the same text), to adopt the persona of one and be delivering the eulogy for the other at their funeral.

So what does that have to do with Rap Battles? Well, that’s the fun bit.

For me; I saw that this was a great way to identify a range of textual features that we’ve been working on in class, and to highlight the ways that these textual features inform the language choices and – by extension – the tone of the text. By discussing the ‘rap battle’ discourse, and the language choices that this makes, I was able to work with the kids towards understanding the choices they need to make around their own discourses. Intertextuality is a big thing in the battle, and that let me highlight the way that the kids could make intertextual references to other American literature that supported their characters. Audience identification was another area that we talked about.

Of course, the down side was that we were sidetracked into analysing a few of the battles (and you need to be careful about language choice in a few of them), but at the end of the day, I don’t mind spending a bit of time on some of those things if they are meaningful to the students – and engaging!

Just out of interest; try and count the number of intertextual references to Dr Seuss lines and Shakesperean language in there – I lost count!

Sometimes you write a blog, and then find a title. Sometimes, you find a title and then write a blog. Over the past twelve months, this post has written and re-written itself under the same title many times. It’s gone from being a plea for help as to why our iCafe sessions kept getting heaps of in-principle thumbs up, but only the same three participants; to being a joyous celebration at the consistent 20-odd participants at the same iCafe sessions (drawn from all three schools in town). I’ve wrestled with the title, and just what it’s meaning may be, over thousands of kilometres of ‘white line chasing’. Eventually, I think I’ve got it worked out.

I used to get frustrated by the fact that my team and I would put all of these awesome PD opportunities together or structures in place, have nobody turn up and then get slammed for not having provided enough PD. Our now seemingly successful iCafe was one classic example – for 18 months or more, my team and I would keep seeking advice from our teachers as to what PD they needed, organise a session, and then have nobody turn up. We tried to podcast, we tried to bribe, we tried to sing and dance; the response was always the same – “Great idea! Yes, I’ll be there!”, and then spend the session talking to yourself in the podcast. While this was disheartening to say the least, it did teach me a bit of a lesson in perseverance and what I think is the true message of the sardine analogy.

Sometimes, as leaders, we get caught up in the visible signs of success. Knight – writing in his article ‘What can we do about teacher resistance’ (2009) – observed that “one particularly self-destructive pattern that prevents real change from taking hold in schools is the ‘attempt, attack, abandon’ cycle”. To me, this sums up exactly the problem of ‘If I’m leading, why is nobody following?’. Too often, we need the immediate signs of success to know that we are on the right track. If they are not forthcoming following the ‘attempt’ phase, the ‘attack’ phase becomes pretty hard to withstand. Unless we have the evidence that what we are doing is working, self-doubt adds to the usual wave of criticism that comes with any change venture, and we lose sight of the final message – we lose the passion and belief that what we are doing is actually right.

In the case of the iCafe, there wasn’t necessarily a lot of vocal criticism of what we were doing – after all, who can really complain about non-mandatory PD that is helping to plug gaps in practice?! But the continual low attendance figures were far more damning than any vocal criticism. Without the support of a PLN and the ‘just keep swimming’ message, it would have been very easy to fall into the ‘abandon’ phase and to try something else.

What I think I have learnt from all of this though – now that I can enjoy being part of a self-perpetuating community of learners that could basically go on without my direct input – is that to really lead effective change, it needs to appear as if nobody is following. The sardines who are swimming against the school of ‘conventional wisdom’ might not seem like they are leading at first; but as that critical mass starts to build, suddenly the ‘conventional wisdom’ changes and people don’t even realise that they have been following a leader. To me; that is the quintessential ‘well managed change’ – the change where people don’t even realise things have changed until they are suddenly doing things differently. If you believe in your message, then you must have the courage to stick to it and persist with it quietly in the background; even if it seems that you are leading, and nobody is following – if the message is good, they will be following without realising it.

Similarly to the title of this blog, I’ve also been holding onto this quote looking for purpose for a long time. I think it just sums up the argument nicely:

“You must always remember to be humble. The world moves forward on the courage of your vision, but if you can’t share your vision with the world, then it will fall on deaf ears. The world has to believe the vision has something for them. So take time to reflect and think and come back with courage.” ~ Freddy Williams.

Vision, reflection and courage – a great toolkit for leaders not looking for followers, but for a community to move with.

References:

Knight, J. (2009). What Can We Do About Teacher Resistance?. Phi Delta Kappan. 90(7). P508-513.

I once read a quote to the effect that as a beginning teacher, one always worries about ‘classroom management’ and struggles for consistency in the classroom. The teacher who was writing went on to say that when they stopped worrying about ‘classroom management’ as a ‘thing’, they found that they stopped having an issue with it. Now this isn’t to say that managing a classroom environment isn’t an important skill for teachers to have – we’ve all taught an equivalent of Year 9 Literacy last block on a Friday and know that you need to be nimble on your toes to succeed – but I often hear criticism of flexible classrooms as being chaotic and unmanaged because it isn’t in neat lines and teacher doesn’t necessarily know what every student is doing on every laptop at every single second with military precision.

My response is this: do I need to know exactly what is happening on every laptop to know that they are safe and are learning? If I have taught my students how to think, then do I need to micro-classroom-manage their every moment? Sure – I know for a fact that at times my guys are off playing games, and I respond appropriately when I find this in monitoring the class and wandering around offering assistance; but if they have their laptop lids up and are merrily typing away while I’m talking at the front of the class, I’d take odds on the fact that the vast majority are engaging in the back channel appropriately or taking notes for themselves.

I don’t need to have totalitarian control of my class to know that it is my class – it is my student’s class as much (if not more so) than it is mine. I am there not as the purveyor of all knowledge with words so important that they deserve undivided attention… I am there as a fellow learner to help students to meet their needs and goals within my field of expertise. I understand that in certain circumstances, I will need to have undivided attention, and that I will need to have that control; but I also trust that I have worked with my students to know the time and place for that transaction, and the equal time and place for us to learn as a group.

The time for sitting in rows and listening attentively to the teacher at the front of the room is long gone; our students (much like we are ourselves during conferences/PD) are multi-taskers who are constantly engaged in backchannels and note-taking, even when we are speaking. Much like the student who used to draw little pictures to help focus their mind, our students today are drawing conclusions and picturing opportunities via technology while we speak with them – not at them. We need to focus less on controlling every aspect of our classroom if we are to engage our students in learning on their terms; and more on those engaging opportunities themselves.