by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.
The Power of Personal Relationships
By Thomas S. Mawhinney and Laura L. Sagan
Phi Delta Kappan, March 2007
The essence, the very essence, of what I believe as an educator is summed up in this understanding:
We now understand that higher-level thinking is more likely to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, upset, anxious, or stressed. (para.5)
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It’s almost a moot point – why technology in schools?
Because.
Because, as is so strikingly underlined in Did you know 2.0 (Shift Happens) technology can not be separated from the rest of life, it has become enmeshed with what we know, do, and understand about many things. In particular for our students today who were born in, around, and since the mid-90s.
As a teacher I felt obligated to continue my learning around Internet and video technologies since those were the communication technologies through which my students learned best.
As a leader I continue to feel that obligation because I whole-heartedly expect the teachers I work with to have the same kind of passion for how their students learn as I do. If I am going to work from within these kinds of expectations, I need to know the technologies that students are using now. I need to know the technologies that can help our increasingly visual and kinesthetic learners to know, understand, and do all of the competencies that are set out for them by the Quebec Education Program.
In order to be an effective leader for technology I need to walk the talk. I can not expect the teachers I work with to try something new if I am not willing to learn as well. We know that as teachers we are constantly modeling the behaviour kids will determine as appropriate just because we are modeling it. The same goes for educational leaders, we are certainly not above that level of scrutiny.
So how do I lead something that is constantly changing? That is the fun part! I need to allow myself to be a constant student, I need to be constantly learning.
:)
This post was inspired by Scott McLeod’s July 4th call for posts on technology leadership.
Image: Crystal by louisa-catlover made available on flickr by a creative commons license.
I found this little video (link at bottom of post) through Dr. Scott McLeod’s blog dangerously irrelevant
It is a speech given by Dr. Richard Elmore and it is a sobering description of a present reality in today’s schools that cries out to me in strong terms the need for change, for structural change, in the way we do things.
Here is Dr. McLeod’s commentary from his blog post of July 02, 2007:
“One of the reasons Dr. Elmore’s speech speaks to me so much is that it raises quite vociferously the issue of misalignment. In my work with schools and districts, I see numerous examples of misalignment, including:
- classroom pedagogy that fails to regularly employ high-yield instructional strategies to achieve optimal results;
- professional development plans that are based on teachers’ preferences rather than students’ needs;
- staffing plans that fail to put the best teachers in front of the students who need them the most;
- intra-organization funding decisions that fail to put resources where they are most needed;
- a lot of wasted instructional time;
- and so on (I’m guessing that you can add to this list!)…
We say that we want results. We say that we want high levels of achievement for all students. But we are not doing what it takes to achieve the results that we say we want.”
The comment I left in reference to this post was:
I appreciated listening to this speech and reading your comments. They are very much in line with my own thoughts on the matter.
I am discovering, in working with different school communities, that in order to shift the incredibly resilient teacher culture towards a culture that makes sense for student learning I need to access individual teacher’s values and passions around teaching, around caring and helping. I need to make their own learning make sense for them.
here, by accident, at a Physics blog by teacher Dean Baird. I’ve bookmarked it.
Hmmm – I like this kind of a challenge!
Helping educators become more supportive of
students is critical, but doing so produces more significant
improvements in student learning when combined with high expectations
and rigorous instruction.The challenge
now becomes how to create the conditions that allow such solutions to
flourish together and how to get them into the communities and high
schools that need them the most. High school reform is achievable. But
if reformers are to be successful, they must leave very little to
chance.
from Surprise — High School Reform Is Working By Thomas Toch, Craig D. Jerald, and Erin Dillon, Phi Delta Kappan, Feb. 2007
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Image: aafad 38/365 the name is lom… by lamont_cranston made available by a creative commons license on flickr.
I just read an article by accident, on addressing the issue of racism in school, because I was looking for a different article in the March 2003 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. That one wasn’t available but this one, Ending the Silence by Donna M. Marriott, is. The title intrigued me, and this bit yelled out to me:
…classroom teachers are the only real agents of school reform. It is teachers who translate policy into action; who integrate the complex components of standards, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment into comprehensible and pragmatic instruction; and who balance an ever-changing array of political, economic, social, and educational factors while trying to meet the individual needs of children.
That first line in particular screams truth. In order for us to create vibrant, learning-rich, successful classroom communities we need to start with teachers. Too often teachers are handed new sets of guidelines called reform that they are expected to carry out. Very often they fall flat. They have no meaning for anyone beyond the policy-makers who crafted them.
If teachers were involved in a process to improve their classrooms for the success of those in it – in a process that reached out to their values as teachers and as people, then there will be true reform.
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