Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

[I posted this on LeaderTalk earlier today.]

I had a whole post ready for my “official” LeaderTalk day last Friday but in the end I just couldn’t bring myself to click “Publish.” I was a little frustrated when I wrote it and I think it needs to simmer for a bit before it’s ready for prime time.

Fast-forward to this morning and a great keynote from Karl Fisch about literacy in the 21st century. Karl said a lot of great things and challenged the thinking of a lot of people in the room. This led to some great conversations throughout the morning and throughout the day.

But Karl’s talk got me thinking about my “unpublished” post. I’ve been spinning a lot of half-formed thoughts around in my head all morning and this is my attempt at putting them together in some quasi-cohesive form.

Most of us reading LeaderTalk and publishing our blogs are basically in agreement that school, in its current iteration, leaves something to be desired in terms of its ability to meet the individual needs of students in a way that doesn’t look like an assembly line. Though the methods proposed to address this deficiency vary from blog to blog and person to person, there isn’t a lot of disagreement that something needs to change.

The question I’m left with, then, is that with all of this ideology around how things should look, and all these great conversations “out there,” how do we carry these conversations back to our schools? If we (the schools) are supposed to “be the change [we] want to see in the world,” then how do we start talking about this change at the micro level in one school?

More pointedly, how do we have a real discussion about these real ideas that doesn’t somehow degenerate into (a) “If the school/district would buy me a projector/computer/document camera, then I could do this stuff,” or (b) “Let’s talk about tardy policies and consequences for cell phone use…”?

Is this the majority of teachers? Probably not. Are these equipment and policy issues important? Sure. Are they the most important? Not to me.

Nonetheless, I would love to get beyond them in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m minimizing the concerns of the teachers for whom these are the Big Issues Of The School.

My struggle right now is trying to frame these big ideas in a simple, straightforward way that is accessible to everyone and doesn’t alienate any particular group of teachers. On the other hand, part of me feels like waiting around for buy-in from everyone means we’re wasting a lot of time when we could be moving ahead.

I guess don’t have a lot of answers, but I sure have a lot of questions.

I had an amazing weekend. We had no school on Friday (payback for two grueling nights of parent-teacher conferences on Wednesday and Thursday), but I opened my email that morning to learn that I was selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator. For those who know me, that’s a little bit like the mother ship calling me home.

I’ll be in Florida in July for a week of hands-on learning with the good people at Apple. To say that I can’t wait would be an understatement.

On Saturday I gave a talk on “Leadership 2.0” which I really enjoyed. It was my first time speaking at this kind of event and I think I did OK. I know I could have done better, but I got a lot out of my session — probably more than some of the attendees! — including a great experience that I will be able to take with me as I continue to learn and share.

A Missing Link

Where are all the school administrators? I mean, I know we’re out there. We blog, we tweet, but beyond that it feels like we are underrepresented. I might be missing something, but follow me on this…

Of the 52 ADEs that were selected this year, there are teachers, school technology coordinators, college professors, and district-level tech folks. But as far as I can tell, I’m the only school administrator. What’s up with that?

We’ve got amazing teachers doing great things in the classroom and we’ve got district people with good intentions. But if there is no one in the middle, who’s going to be the liaison between these groups?

A big part of my job is clearing away the big boulders from my teachers’ paths so that they can worry about the little pebbles. If the web filter is blocking a legit site that was working yesterday, I can make the call to IT. If you want to make something happen but need more time or resources, I’m there to help you pull it together.

Building administrators are the vital link in this chain. How can we get more of them thinking about change? How can we expect our teachers to think ahead if so few administrators do?

Here are the links I know you’ve been dying to have for this Saturday’s Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.

• Links to all Elluminate Sessions
• Direct link to the room for my session (My talk begins on Saturday, February 21, 2009, at 9:30 AM MST / 1630 GMT)
  
• Link to the (still in progress) wiki for my talk

I look forward to seeing you there (in-person or virtually!).

I had the good fortune of listening to one of my favorite educators talk to a group of pre-service teachers about discipline and classroom management. I asked her to give this talk because she deals with some of our most challenging students, yet has very few attendance problems and almost never has a discipline issue.

I don’t even think she realized the power of what she said this morning because she kind of glossed right over it, but she told the soon-to-be teachers that as soon she sees a possible attendance issue emerging with a student, she will pull him or her aside and say (in her best tough-love delivery):

You know if you get to six absences, you and I are going to have a talk.

Consider just for a minute the difference between a statement like that and:

You know if you get to six absences, I’m going to send you to your administrator.

The difference is subtle, but it’s there. If you’re a student, one of those says, “We are going to work this out,” and the other one says, “I’m going to make you someone else’s problem.”

Guess how many of her kids get to six absences.

Michael Wesch blogged recently about “How to get students to read 94 articles before the next class.”

Essentially, each student in his class had to find, read, and summarize five articles before the next class. The summaries were consolidated using Zoho Creator, and, well, according to Wesch:

By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles.  This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation.

I hear the term “leverage” used quite a bit – mostly as a fancy (read: incorrect) synonym for the word “use” (E.g. “Students leveraged their cell phones to call GCast…” or “The principal leveraged technology to show a PowerPoint presentation…”). As a former physics teacher, the word “leverage” has a specific meaning in my mind. It implies compounding resources to gain some mathematical or mechanical advantage.

Leverage is like mechanical gestalt. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You know – like having 15 students collectively read 94 articles before the next class.

Such a simple idea with so much potential for use in the classroom and in professional development.

(Don’t even get me started on the use of the word “potential.”)