Please email your mailing address to jennifer@jennifer-roland.com, and I’ll get your book in the mail. I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks to all of you who visited and especially to those who commented. I had a great time writing this post and reading your feedback.

And, again, thanks to Scott for turning his blog over to me for a day. I appreciate it!

Jennifer

This really resonates with the context I am in as a lowly educator pushing buttons at the building and district level. Emails, workshops and PD sessions tend to be information-driven whereas coming along side someone in a mentoring role is relationship-driven. In Fullan (2007, p. 153) Elmore said, ““Improvement is more a function of learning to do the right things in the settings where you work.” For many of us, building relationships with fellow teachers is the “right thing” because we do not influence the PD schedule. In another classic book, Diffusion of Innovations, Rogers takes a stab at this idea, too “The heart of the diffusion process consists of interpersonal network exchanges and social modeling by those individuals who have already adopted an innovation to those individuals who are influential to follow their lead” (Rogers, 2003, p. 35).

The “interpersonal networks” Rogers speaks of are the mentoring relationships suggested in the article by Gora and Hinson. Ironically, the “answer” to system-wide change may indeed lie in the power of “one” where each person is moved along this continuum via individualized professional learning.