How? What?

Today we’re having our Critical Thinking class students writing some blog posts about their vacations. This is a class taught in collaboration with Eddy Jones and later on in the year Dianne Gamage will be joining us.  I think it makes sense I model what I teach them. In this case we’re having them write about a moment in their summer vacation. So my next post after this one will be just that.

Cheers,

Brian

Ellis Melton’s “Introduction to Educational Administration” most important assignment, is a self reflection piece. We’ve been advised to follow the ISLLC Standards in this piece. I’m also pushing the boundaries of self transparency and instead of writing this in a word file and emailing it to him, I’ll blog this reflection.

There are some interesting hurdles as the paper requires us to have it double spaced and at least 4 pages long. To compensate this requirement I’ll copy and past this text into a word file and double space it.

Quite incredible, a whole day a writing and I’m unable to complete an introduction. It didn’t help deleting the first draft or creating 10 different ineffective intros or misreading the directions. I’ve never been a fan of standards, always feeling they constrained me more than helped. Even so, they’ll be used here, I’ll be writing a reflective overview of the standards detailing my weakness and summarizing areas of strength.

The art of a conversation is a struggle and I’m an expert at killing them. Even though communicating is the preverbal lynch pin in Leadership, I’ve been getting by, with my tool box of coping skills. For instance I always insure I’m grouped with an animated talker, drama teachers seemed to be the best, as they have the natural talents to draw out interesting conversations. These systems insured this weakness of mine wouldn’t become an obstacle in the work place. I’m taking these admin courses to improve myself hoping my coping tool box can be put to rest. Using the first 2 items from the Admin Tool box I learned the art of conversation. I happy as it was easy. Over the week both tourist and students we’re victim of my conversation practicing sessions. I’m excited as both my victim and I survived. If a week is an indication of a life time, then maybe, just maybe my special conversation killing powers have been extinguished.

Standard 3 or Organizational Leadership relies on effective information systems. While I’ve never seen a perfect system, our school has invested into a comprehensive Student Information systems from inResonance. Their Keystone product is used by all the employees and is instrumental in all aspect of daily business.

We use email, wikis and encourage the use of blogs in regards to Standard 4 or Collaborative Leadership. Even with all this technology, it’s still a personal area of weakness. I used to believe I ran good meetings until I compared it with the meetings checklist.  Even though my team rates our meets as good, through the process of Kaizen we’ll make them better. It’s a similar philosophy of using the “Baby Steps” concept seen in the movie What About Bob?. Well slowly introduce different systems into meetings, first experimenting with the warm up activities.

Ethical Leadership or Standard 5 has a relationship with websites like International Schools Review, Wikileaks and ratemyteacher.com Many school heads should study the music industries attempt at fighting the MP3 piracy fight with their costumers. The battle between review sites like ISR and schools is just beginning. Many should be thankful the other two sites haven’t caught on in the International market. While no school can be perfect, without an external independent international policing body, sites like these will remain relevant.

Debate is an element of Standard 6, encouraging different ideas and perspectives helps to foster an environment of excellence. Most recently we’re debating the book “The Dumbest Generation“  Mr. Unno the author of “IZ I DUM?” raised this question:

- Just as education systems haven’t change, the predominant models of examinations and assessment haven’t changed either. If we are to acknowledge that students have changed over from living hard drives to living search engines, does the classic exam culture remain relevant?

and Alan November raise similar questions in this video title “3 Skills Students Need to Succeed” A visit to our IT office and you’ll surely hear us talking about some problem and possible solution. We’re avid readers of Digg, and active users of twitter. All of this simulates big ideas, debate and discussion.

These standards give us a base line leadership frame work. I was unaware of these standards before this class. I do relativity well using my gut and instinct, while standards slow me down and constraint my creative side. Will I use the standards in the future? Maybe as something to touch upon. The standards themselves seem quite wordy and by this design fault they become less useful. A graphic depiction might make it a bit user friendly, especially for us visual types, or could the standards use with essential questions. In conclusion, I’ll continue to use instinct, experience, mentors, and information gleaned from classes in improving my leadership skills.

Just started TCNJ class EDAD 525 Introduction to Educational Administration taught by Ellis Milton . All week we’ll be working on this Admin Tool Box. This is what we have so far:

Admin Tool Box

• Bookmark Ellis “Meeting Resource & Handouts“
• Give up some “Air Time”
• Ask follow up questions: Tell more about, Help me understand, What the best thing you learned, Paraphrased
• Make, Post, use Org Chart
• Every document has a Dev date, Revised Date, update date: a wiki can accomplishes this automatically
• Most documents are public, a wiki can make this simple to do
• I don’t know that, I’m open to new ideas
• More dialog, less discussion
• Think – pair -share
• Sharpen the saw
• Admit problems
• Develop responsibility, ownership
• Post-it note consensus
• If you going to have a bad meeting minus well not have it
  “Prepare More …..   Meet less!”
  “Time spent on agenda building returns hundred-fold”
  “Agenda items should be detailed”
• 6 minute AB fluency review (A person speak on a topic for 1 minute, B person continues on the same topic and expands for another minute)
• Have a Survey before a meeting
• Someone that is against something. Ask: is this a Deep Belief or Personal Preference
• Ask for sabotage Ideas
• “Walking around” management, three minute walk through
• Five Finger Survey reference

Almost two months and I haven’t posted anything. Well it’s better to write a little bit than nothing. At this point in time, I’m taking a Law and Education class through TCNJ global studies course . It’s a interesting class as little or no technology is used. It’s a bit like an outward bound course for me. Just yesterday power cut out but it’s wasn’t a big deal, with the AC off it warmed up  a bit but the class went on. Wireless at the school is a bit weak but an airport express plugged into their LAN has fixed the issue for our class. The school uses a proxy so I’m now learning how to route other port traffic through it. So far only web browsers and twhirl work. No luck with mail or Firstclass, I’m guessing they’ve blocked smtp traffic

I hate writing. Why the hell would I blog? Trust me, I’ve got a syndrome, with the fringe benefits of learning problems. It takes days to write a simple little post. So why blog? It’s freaky! As hard as it is, with blogging I’m enjoying the writing process.

It’s a bit late, but this is supposed to be an introduction. I’m not promising anything but I hope to cover a series of topics. People’s comments are generating incentives for more posts. Both Chad & Jabiz comments, are spurring new thinking about recruiting. I’ll write a piece sharing my opinions on international schools review, Skype, and blogging. In it, I’ll ponder questions around the Recruiting 2.0 concept.

Johnny Lee’s $40 Interactive Board is an impressive demonstration of cheap education technology. We’ll be experimenting with it. Hopefully it works but if it’s doesn’t, you’ll learn about the failures.

We’re also throwing twitter at everything in our school and seeing where it sticks. This will be a long term project, in the mean time our updates will be tweeted.

Still need to do my reflection piece from last week’s workshop, I’ve got plenty of material, just need to compile and post it.

The task will be keeping an up-to-date blog. Over time, I’m sure I’ll learn short cuts, maybe I’ll skip this writing process and move right to podcasting. Soon enough we’ll discover the results. Until then all the best.

Ever since attending Alan November’s conference in Boston, I’ve been struggling with his vision. Are International Schools capable of accomplishing his bold blogging goals?

Last week Andrew Torris’s posted a question asking “Can a school leaders be “real” bloggers??” Could they? I wondered, and I emailed his post to our Senior Leadership Team. Very quickly I heard back, they wanted to know: why and what void does blogging fill? Instead of sweating over an answer, I thought let’s use the power of commenting and posted these questions to Andrew’s blog.

Less then a day later Andrew posted a response “Why is it important for school leaders to blog?” Our SLT had their answers and this time we hooked one. Wow! it worked, he really wanted to do this. Pondering wasn’t an option, we kept it simple emailing two free blogging choices wordpress.com or edublogs.org

Two days ago I receive this email from our Deputy Head Master announcing his blog. I’m puzzled, it’s done? and he didn’t need our help? We’re the IT department, we need a reason to exist. Actually I’m happy for him, there is hope this blogging thing could work.

So in a long winded way this is a good week, a few days ago YIS‘s first administrator posted this “Two Why’s (but not very wise)“. As some already know I’ve tweeted his post and many have commented. Thank you very much, as we all know it’s this commenting cycle that really makes blogging work.

Alan November’s vision speaks of having everyone blogging students, teachers administrator & even parents. It’s a bold vision and I wonder can schools achieve such a goal. Those questions remain unanswered, but at least we are taking our first baby steps.

How is technology improving student learning? It’s an excellent question asked by my twitter colleague Andrew. It turns out there are more questions, than answers from this query.

Sadly, it seems it isn’t a question that comes up until after a school has made large investments in technology. Not to say no one is asking these questions, it’s just a minority view point. In a metaphor technology is like paper and pencils. Do we ask “How are pencils and paper improving learning?” and if you are. What are your answers?