Leadership Day 2012 - Reevaluating The Plan...

A look back to look ahead...

As I gather my thoughts for this year's Leadership Day blog contribution, I thought I would take a look back at my posts from the past two years to evaluate my efforts. Back in 2010, my post Leadership Day 2010 - Two Of My Goals For This Year focused on connecting with my my administrative colleagues in Massachusetts and getting out and showing them the ways in which digital tools could help them to connect and collaborate within their schools, their communities, and beyond.

In last year's post, Leadership Day 2011 - A Few Thoughts,  I focused on the following quote from Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From:

"Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas." 

The main point again was that school leaders need to take the lead due to the fact that public schools tend to stifle new ideas.  I concluded with the following words:

Of course order to do this we need to get more school leaders on board using them.  As has always been the case, our schools need to teach literacy, citizenship, and responsibility.  However, the playing field has changed and we now need to embrace the digital realm as well.  If we do not accept this, we will shortchange both our students and ourselves.

As I think about my focus on school leaders and teachers over the past two years, I feel fortunate to have made so many connections with passionate educators who have started to embrace the power of digital resources to engage students in meaningful ways.  However, I also have been frustrated at the limited movement I have seen among educators in adopting resources which I see as beneficial in the creation of more relevant learning environments for students.

This year, I propose a change in focus, or better yet, an additional focal point in the effort to create learning environments that will better prepare our students for the growingly complex world that they will enter when they complete their formal education. It is time to go all-in with that group of people that many educators tend to avoid...the parents.  We need to engage the people that care most about our students and engage them in a meaningful dialogue about the schools their students need.

Parents play a key role in our move to create more engaging classrooms.

We need to have real discussions about the fact that the classrooms that our students enter are amazingly similar to the ones that their parents and grandparents entered decades earlier despite the fact that the world outside of those classrooms is in many ways unrecognizable from the world   of school children at those times.

There is no group that cares more deeply about the education of our students than their parents. However, it is up to us to show parents some of the new resources that were not available when they were in school. Even more important is that we show parents how to use these tools that are sometimes perceived negatively by those who have never seen them used constructively. 

For quite some time schools have lamented the fact that parents do not physically show up at school for these types of conversations, but fortunately time and place is no longer a hinderance with the plethora of digital tools we can draw from to get more people engaged in te dialogue. We  (school leaders) are the only ones holding us back from this endeavor at this time.  

The tools are there to connect and there is plenty to discuss, so let's have it! I look forward to sharing our movement in Burlington with anyone interested.

Here are a couple of reference points that will help us lead this conversation:

What Qualities Do "Bold Schools" Share? - from Will Richardson

 Race To Nowhere resources