Dangerously Irrelevant

Chuck Heinlein, Director of the Leadership Center for 21st Century Schools at the West Virginia Department of Education, will be our guest tomorrow on the 4 Guys Talking podcast. Chuck has an incredible job. Over the past few years he has run hundreds of administrators in his state through year-long institutes on 21st century schooling. As far as I can tell, West Virginia is far ahead of other states when it comes to investing in a statewide model for 21st century leadership development.

You can join us and Chuck on May 26, 1pm Central, for the live podcast. Feel free to call in and join the conversation yourself and/or help us brainstorm some questions for Chuck beforehand. The podcast also will be available for download afterward. Thanks!

Continuing the theme of my last post, how great would it be if every school, district, or university Twitter feed was in one place? The aggregated posts would give us a sense of what each level of schooling thought was worth publicizing. I’m guessing that we’d also discover lots of interesting information that is typicallly hidden from the view of most of us…

Schools Twibe:

Districts Twibe:

Universities Twibe:

After a recent presentation here in Iowa that included some discussion of Twitter, a superintendent came up to me and said, “Okay, I’m in. But how will I find people that I want to follow?” That fantastic question led me to create the Iowa Administrators group at Twibes:

While I was at it, I also created the Iowa Teachers group at Twibes:

Shari Barnhart, Technology Coordinator for the Oskaloosa Schools, then created the Iowa Technology Coordinators group at Twibes:

So what we have here is a burgeoning effort to create spaces where Iowa educators can find others in the state who are on Twitter, see what they’re saying, and sign up to follow them. Maybe there’s a better way to do this but for now I think this has some promise, particularly if folks are willing to sign up and pass this along to others. I believe there are some great conversation and resource-sharing possibilities if most of the Iowa educators on Twitter are following each other.

Two girls post a cartoon video on YouTube that depict “The Top 6 ways to Kill Piper!” Piper is an elementary school classmate of theirs at Elk Plain School in Spanaway, Washington.

The police decline to file charges, saying that “We just don’t believe it was done with any malice or hate.” The girls who made the video apparently are remorseful, although it’s unclear whether that is because they a) now realize how hurtful it was to Piper, b) have been exposed to the larger ramifications of what they did, or c) got caught. Piper and her mother are understandably upset.

And the parents of the two girls? Well, one of the fathers was apparently too busy “cooking dinner” to talk to Piper’s mother about the incident. And, of course, the girls were able to spend hours making the video at home without anyone noticing and/or objecting. Nice parenting…

Here are my top 10 2008 K12 Online Conference podcasts for busy principals and superintendents (in no particular order). These are the K12 Online presentations that I think are most likely to interest, educate, and entertain administrators as well as make them think!

1. There’s something going on here you need to know about… (Dennis Richards)
2. Current leadership models are inadequate for disruptive innovations (Scott McLeod)
3. The voices of School 2.0: School reform as described by the words and images of the people of the Science Leadership Academy (Chris Lehmann)
4. I like Delicious things: An introduction to tagging and folksonomies (Chris Betcher)
5. Telling the new story: Leverage points for inspiring change orientation (David Warlick)
6. Oh the possibilities (Lisa Parisi)
7. Games in education (Sylvia Martinez)
8. Facilitating technology integration: A synthesis of the research (Jon Becker)
9. “What did you do in school yesterday, today, and three years ago?” (H Songhai)
10. Parental engagement in the 21st century: Leveraging Web 2.0 tools to engage parents in non-traditional ways (Lorna Constantini & Matt Montagne)

Load these onto an iPod, hand it to a busy school administrator, and say, “Here are some presentations that I think you’ll enjoy while you’re exercising or driving around. After you’ve listened to a few, let me know what you think!”

Yesterday

• See my list of the top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators.

See also

• The Moving Forward wiki’s Podcasts page

Related posts

• Creating digitally-interested administrators
• Professional development for the leaders
• Great education podcasts meme

Here are my top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy principals and superintendents (in no particular order). These are the TED presentations that I think are most likely to interest, educate, and entertain administrators as well as make them think!

1. Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web
2. Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom
3. Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library
4. Jonathan Drori on what we think we know
5. Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together
6. Patti Maes demos the Sixth Sense
7. Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
8. Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
9. David Perry on videogames
10. Stuart Brown says play is more than fun
11. Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves
12. Charles Leadbeater on innovation
13. Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain
14. Dave Eggers’ wish: Once upon a school
15. Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us
16. Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas
17. Howard Rheingold on collaboration
18. Erin McKean redefines the dictionary
19. Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning
20. Ann Cooper talks school lunches

Load these onto an iPod, hand it to a busy school administrator, and say, “Here are some presentations that I think you’ll enjoy while you’re exercising or driving around. After you’ve listened to a few, let me know what you think!”

Stay tuned

• Come back tomorrow for my list of the top 10 2008 K12 Online Conference podcasts for busy school administrators.

See also

• The Moving Forward wiki’s Podcasts page

Related posts

• Creating digitally-interested administrators
• Professional development for the leaders
• Great education podcasts meme

I’m trying to get a handle on who’s reading Dangerously Irrelevant (it’s not as easy as you might think). So I thought the best way would be to just ask!

I created a 2- to 4-question survey. It shouldn’t take you more than 60 seconds. Please?

[If you follow me on Twitter, here's my 60-second Twitter survey. Thanks!]

Here’s a recent Twitter conversation that I had, followed by some additional thoughts…

Okay, Russ, I’ll bite. How should it be?

Well, of course, in an ideal world educational leadership faculty should be seen as "leaders of leaders." If we’re preparing educators for formal leadership positions such as principal, superintendent, or special education director, we should be seen as credible authorities and thought-leaders. And we educational leadership faculty are sometimes seen as "leaders," I believe, in specialized arenas like research and (maybe) policy circles. 

I'm not sure, however, that educational leadership faculty often are seen as "leaders" by administrators in the field. Sure, we're usually seen as good people who often provide a decent (or at least not horrible) credentialing experience. But that's not the same as being looked to for leadership. 

I think this situation occurs because educational leadership faculty typically are not deeply engaged with schools and/or the people who lead them. Other job demands and institutional reward structures both work against tenure-track faculty spending a lot of time in the field. To be honest, many higher education faculty also aren't that interested in being too involved with K-12 practitioners. A great number of us are pretty introverted (as Sir Ken Robinson notes, we faculty 'live in our heads'), a trait which is okay in academe but typically isn't associated with great success in K-12 school administration. 

If success in academia is a four-legged stool – research, teaching, service/outreach, and grants/external funding – service/outreach is definitely the short leg of the stool. When we do define "service" in academe, it's primarily seen as disciplinary service such as serving on editorial or advisory boards, as journal editors, as officers in academic organizations, as proposal reviewers for conferences, and so on. The idea of service as "active engagement with and assistance of K-12 educational practitioners" is not very high on most faculty members' agendas. Often we see our teaching and credentialing (and an occasional meeting of a statewide committee or task force) as fulfilling that role of service to the field. When educational leadership faculty ARE involved with schools (i.e., we actually leave the university and go inside school buildings), it's often simply for a research project that may or may not have much tangible benefit to the participating school organization. We also like to have our 'clinical faculty' (i.e., non-tenure-track and thus, at many universities, "lesser" faculty) be the ones that primarily go out and work with schools, not us tenure-track folks.

We can point to isolated examples where what I've said here is inapplicable, and I'm sure that some of my academic peers across the country would take great exception to this post, but I believe that I've accurately described the general trend for most educational leadership faculty at most universities (particularly our most prestigious research universities), whether we want to admit it or not.

As those of you who regularly read or interact with me know, I'm a bit of an anomaly within my academic peer group. I see university education faculty as being in a service profession, one which should be serving the needs of K-12 (or higher education) practitioners. That's why I struggle with our definition of "service" as internally-focused service to ourselves rather than externally-focused service to others. That's why I struggle with academic publication hierarchies that value an article in a "prestigious" academic journal that no practitioner ever reads over an article in a still-selective practitioner journal that's read by tens of thousands of school administrators. That's why I struggle with a system that, for myself, can't (or won't) figure out how to value things like

1. trying to serve as a thought leader that hopefully can mobilize an entire state's (and maybe down the road an entire country's) K-12 leadership community to move their schools into the digital, global era; 
2. providing professional development and technical assistance to tens of thousands of administrators and teachers on issues that are really important; or 
3. blogging, podcasting, and providing other online resources that reach hundreds of thousands of educators all over the world.

Will my "roll up my sleeves and get into schools / write in places where others can find me / actually try to be helpful" path be successful in the long run in academe? Will my current university figure out how to place a value on the things that I do? Should other educational leadership faculty view writing and/or service/outreach more like I do? Only time will answer these questions. In the meantime, however, don't hold your breath waiting for much help or thought leadership or, in fact, any kind of "leadership" for K-12 administrators from educational leadership faculty. The system that currently exists places value on other activities and it's not changing any time soon.

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week…

LeaderTalk

At LeaderTalk, Barbara Barreda proposed that we “join our teachers in the ritual of closing down the school year by taking stock of our office and jettisoning the bottom 20%… the things that are good ideas but not great or critical.”

When we’re drowning in social media, Angela Maiers reminds us to just BREATHE.

Chris Hitch asked how we can find ways to motivate our staff in non-monetary ways during these difficult budgetary times and offered a few suggestions of his own.

EdJurist

Over at EdJurist, CASTLE’s education law blog, Justin Bathon said that we can learn a few things from NASCAR about randomized drug testing of teachers.

Justin also noted that

We absolutely need clarity from the courts on whether school resource officers are more like school employees or more like police. This having it both ways stuff (to the detriment of the students in all cases) has got to stop.

Finally, Justin posted Episode 4 of EdJurist TV, which focused on interesting student discipline cases from last year.

Dangerously Irrelevant

Here at Dangerously Irrelevant, my post, It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s us., generated quite a bit of interesting commentary.

I posted a new video from Stephen Heppell and another of Seth Godin at TED. I also pointed to an interesting graphic from Tech&Learning regarding what students want in e-textbooks, highlighted AASA’s upcoming Seattle Summit, and showed the name badge ribbons that I’m bringing to NECC. I gave updates on my quest to identify model 21st century schools, the number of recipes on BlogTweetCook.org, and the lack of effective communication in my local school district.

Oh, yeah, Episode 5 of 4 Guys Talking (with Lane Mills) is now available.

Happy reading!

I often hear educators say…

We could be teaching differently if it weren't for ‘the tests.’

Or…

We could do a better job of meeting our students’ needs if it weren't for ‘the tests.’

I emphatically dispute these assertions. We must take ownership of our own culpability.

Our prevalent instructional model that emphasizes low-level, decontextualized, factual recall was dominant long before ‘the tests.’ Our challenges of providing higher-order thinking experiences, opportunities for authentic collaboration, and real-world connectedness existed long before the No Child Left Behind Act. Our inability to effectively facilitate empowered technology usage, true cultural/global awareness, and other necessary skills for a digital, global, information age is a byproduct of long-held, deeply-rooted cultural and pedagogical norms, not recently-acquired beliefs and behaviors.

Is anyone willing to argue that achievement gaps were smaller before evil NCLB came along and messed us all up? Does anyone think that we were doing a fine job of meeting the needs of underserved populations before ‘the tests?’ Have we all forgotten that school has been boring for generations?

It's not ‘the tests.’ It's our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better.

It's not ‘the tests.’ It's us.

UPDATE: There are some phenomenal comments below. I hope you'll take a few moments to read them. Be sure to also read Greg Thompson's reaction to this post.