Our school board is currently in a process of revamping the models of teacher leadership in secondary schools. They’ve changed the concept slightly from one of Department Head to that of Lead Teacher. The Lead Teacher will have specific responsibilities for various curricular areas. If it’s a large school, with a large department, then one Lead will have only that area, but in smaller schools, or for smaller departments, there will be consolidations. The idea seems to be to have the Lead Teachers focus not only on the managerial responsiblities, but also on the large school goals that are framed in the School Improvement Plan. I think that there will be opportunities to provide input and drive the school plans.

The driving force seems to have been a joint group lead by OSSTF and the school board. In recent times, the role of school leader has altered in many places, and this is an effort to revitalize the positions to have leaders in place who are wanting to drive changes at the school level.

I heard it said somewhere (and have often used the line myself) that there are 2 things that teachers hate. Change and the way things are.  For those of us striving to move our classroom practice towards more student-centred and skills based approaches this is an interesting opportunity. Will the mandate be to simply implement the changes that are directed from the Ministry of Ed and the school board administration, or will there be opportunities to drive the agenda at the school level towards goals that we find valuable? Time will tell I suppose, but if there is one thing I have learned, it is that if you are interested in making change in education happen, it pays to be at the table where they are discussing what changes should be made.

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I had the great fortune to spend this past Friday with a room full of educators at the 2012 Abel Leadership Summit. The day was led by the dynamic trio of Alec Couros, George Couros and Dean Shareski.  They did a great job of facilitating and leading discussions.  There were a few lasting things that stuck with me, and as I went back over my tweets from the day I thought I’d jot a few other things down. I used Twitter as a backchannel as we often do, but I found myself also thinking about how I would access the things I was posting later on, and in my mind it became my note taking for the day as well. 

Digital Literacy VS Digital Fluency
This was an intriguing idea that I hadn’t heard expressed in this way before, and that’s the idea that there is a difference between literacy and fluency in a digital way. And that a person can have a certain amount of competence with digital tools or media, and be ‘literate’ but that to truly be fluent is another level of understanding altogether. The analogy of a carpenter having the basic skills to make a basic structure, but not the indepth skills to make a truly nice house really struck me as effective.

Play
One of the themes that came up several times was the idea of play. And that for educators, it’s a tough one to get our brains around sometimes. But it became clear that all learners, regardless of age, could benefit from some unstructured, and more importantly, un-tested time to play and learn in whatever way suited their learning.

Urgency
One of the ideas was that planning to do things in cycles of several years is a huge disservice to the students in our clases now. If you have a 5 year plan to make things happen, then the students in Grade 8 will be out the door of Grade 12 before you finish your plan. Kids deserve more than that. Makes for tough decisions, but its something that we must consider.

Stories
George spent a bit of time telling stories about how important stories were. And it struck me that we don’t spend enough time doing that. We often hear talk about how important reflection is to us as learners and educators, but it seems to me that doing it as a story telling time might be more valuable. There is an honesty and a simplicity in the telling of a story that doesn’t seem to have much of the same baggage associated with it as the concept of reflection. Imagine if we had 20 minutes at the end of the day to sit in the staff room and just ask each other to tell the stories from the day.

Do They Know They’re Awesome?
Dean talked about the idea of positive deviants, and that there are many of them out in the schools across the country. The teachers who are doing wonderful things with kids, and are unaware that they are, in fact, awesome. It’s important to start to point that out to people in a true rich way. Not with the intent of kissing butt, but to simply point out the amazing and awesome things that teachers are doing everyday. Sharing the stories.

All in all it was a great day of learning and thinking and sharing.  There was much more in the day as well. If you search the hashtag #ABELSummit on Twitter, you’ll find all this and more!

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I started reading Inside Apple this evening, which is a book that lays out some of the inner workings of Apple as a company.  I was struck by one part where it talked about how Apple and Steve Jobs never worried about things like focus groups or  costumer surveys when deciding what product lines to pursue.

[Jobs] found Apple’s prototype customer in the mirror, and the company came to develop computers that Jobs, at one time or another, decided he would like to own.

It got me thinking about decision making and how we structure our eduction systems. Then I hit upon a really interesting question. If you’re an educator, have you ever asked yourself if you’d like to buy what you’re selling? As you do everything you need to get ready for teaching a class, do you ever stop to ask if you’d like to be in it?

Just some end of weekend random thoughts.

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I just had the pleasure of faciliating a webinar session through OTF Connects. The Ontario Teachers Federation has started this venture to bring free, online and easily accessible PD to Ontario Teachers.  There was about a dozen enthusiastic educators in this webinar tonight, and some great ideas where shared around how to use web tools as tools to support student inquiry.

I recommend checking out the schedule and signing up for one or more of these free PD sessions.  By teachers, for teachers. Great folks doing great things.

I’ve embedded my presentation below for use if wanted. It is slightly different than that one used in the webinar as I had to remove a few things to get it below the free level allowed by Slideshare.

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