We are pleased to announce that Edcamp Leadership 2013 is officially on!

Join us on Monday, August 12th for a day of organic, participant-driven discussion about K-12 school leadership.  While formal leaders such as principals and superintendents will certainly be in attendance, self-identified leaders of all backgrounds are welcome: teachers and other non-administrative school staff, parents, community members, and anyone else who has an interest in contributing to the day’s sharing of knowledge, ideas, and action.

As with all Edcamps, the attendees determine the topics of conversation for the day, thereby ensuring that everyone gets what they need from the event.  And as always, the “Rule of Two Feet” applies: participants are encouraged to leave sessions that aren’t meeting their needs and find another one that does.

Please join us at the gorgeous New Jersey Center for Science, Technology, and Mathematics (STEM) at Kean University (get directions here).  As always, admission is FREE but you must register to reserve your spot as space is limited.  Click here to get your ticket!

See you in August!

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My research will focus on analyzing and evaluating how a suburban K-12 school district in NJ has implemented distributed leadership practices.  As I stated in the first chapter of my dissertation, my goals are:

• to provide a thick, rich description of distributed leadership practices at a mid-size suburban New Jersey school district, particularly teacher leadership
• to explore, per Spillane, et al. (2004), the hows and whys behind effective district-wide and level-specific distributed leadership practices
• to quantify teacher attitudes and perceptions relative to distributed leadership practices in their district.

There is a gap in the research base on context-specific (e.g., high school, elementary school) distributed leadership practices, and I aim to contribute to that emerging body of literature with this study.

I’ve been interested in the idea of distributed leadership, and teacher leadership in general, since before I even applied to this program.  I have worked in environments where leadership was distributed to some degree, as well as in very traditional “top-down” districts, and I know which one I preferred: the one where I felt I had a voice or some stake in what was happening.  I felt trusted and respected as a professional in the more distributed environment; not so much otherwise.

In addition to the stated goals, I’m thinking/hoping that my research will help me understand the reasoning process behind why the district makes some of the decisions it does with regard to distributed leadership.  In doing so, I hope to gain a greater understanding of the decision-making process behind implementing DL so that I can do so effectively when I’m in an official leadership position (e.g., principal, director, etc.).  While a school leader certainly can’t make all the employees happy all the time, I think there’s a lot to be said for having employees who feel valued and respected, even if they don’t always agree with you, and how that impacts on their ability to do their job and serve children.  In short, I’m thinking this dissertation field research is the next best thing to on-the-job training for me when I get my own shop to run.

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Disclaimer: This represents where I stand on my dissertation as of the date of this post.  Much can happen between now and the end of 2014, when I plan to finish, so things may change.  Also, this research will all be dependent on securing the necessary permissions, which I have not yet done.

Last time I wrote one of these posts, girls were too pretty to do math.  I guess a lot has changed in the STEM world in the last two years, because now they get their own pretty pink telescopes:

(circles and arrows mine)

In case you started to get the crazy idea that anyone could have whatever color telescope they wanted, please note that the pink one is clearly marked “For Girls” and the blue is clearly marked “For Boys“. 

I get it.  It’s perfectly OK for girls to like pink and boys to like blue.  My daughter loves pink and would undoubtedly love a pink telescope, car, cell phone, and anything else that can come in a color (in fact, she asked for this as soon as she saw it).  But is it not a bit patronizing to engage in this kind of gender-specific marketing (that worked so well for Bic, if you recall) in 2013?  Is it even necessary for items like pens, telescopes, soda, and chocolate, all of which seem fairly gender-neutral in their appeal?

Things seemed to run a little more smoothly in general simply because it wasn’t our first time at this particular dance anymore.  From what I am told, our staff settled into their discussions pretty quickly on the whole.  One big difference since our last FFM was the range of conversation topics.  For our first FFM, our staff could choose from ten proposed discussion topics.  This time around, based on staff feedback about which topics they’d like to see again (or wanted to attend last time but couldn’t), as well as suggestions for new topics, there were 19 topics to choose from!  We ended up shutting down two due to lack of interest and combining some others, but I think this definitely demonstrated both interest and investment on the part of our staff.  If you empower your educators to take charge of their own learning, they will do it.

For my part, I ran a slightly more traditional tutorial on Google Drive.  There were just three others in the room with me, but thanks to the small group size, each attendee was able to bring an idea to the group that we all helped shape and flesh out a bit.  Everyone seemed to leave the session happy, taking with them a tangible product for further development and implementation with students.

While we haven’t surveyed the staff yet for feedback, the general vibe surrounding the afternoon seemed to be positive.  One comment that has stuck with me was relayed to me by our assistant principal.  She told me that on the way out afterward, one of our colleagues said to her that she enjoyed the session, and that “it’s such a respectful way for us to spend our time, working on what we feel is important”.

How would it impact school culture in the long term if faculty members regularly left staff meetings feeling respected, valued, and that their time was spent wisely?

I received an email early last month through the “Contact” page on my website with the subject line, “Do you know a child named Kiera who would use a winter hat?”

This caught my attention because, as luck would have it, I do indeed have a daughter named Kiera, and who can’t use a winter hat in February?

Not sure what this was all about, I read on.  I’m glad I did, because it turns out it was an email from Dr. Linda Quirke, a sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.  Turns out a friend of Dr. Quirke’s made personalized wool beanies as party favors for a four-year-old’s birthday party, but misspelled one of the partygoer’s names as K-I-E-R-A, and therefore couldn’t use it.  Hating to see a perfectly good hat go to waste, Dr. Quirke took to Twitter to search “daughter Kiera”, to see if anybody had a child who spelled her name that way.

She found a tweet to me from my Twitter friend Diane Cordell (presumably this recent retweet of me announcing Kiera’s birth five years ago?), went to my Twitter profile, where she found a link to my website, and then the “Contact” page, from whence she sent me her message.

Never one to turn down free hat offers from the Internet, I e-mailed Linda my address and sure enough, about a week later:

Nearly six years after becoming active on Twitter and Facebook, the ability of these services to create connections between people still amazes me.  That we are so eminently searchable online these days (some of us more than others, granted) is something I am convinced we need to embed in our teaching and learning.  Some schools approach it from the standpoint of “be careful what you say/do online”, but beyond that, think of the relationships – personal and professional – that can arise through social media.

In Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich proposes - among other things – that we raze the current educational system and learn through apprenticeship instead, identifying our areas of need, seeking out masters of their trade, and learning at their feet.  The logistics underlying that idea are not as far-fetched as they may have once seemed.  The network already exists; it’s here.  Will we teach our students to use it to make connections with other smart people, regardless of geographic location, and learn from and share ideas with them?  Will we teach students not only to take from these resources, but also to contribute their own learning to the mix so that others may learn from them?  Or will we simply use it to keep up with what celebrities and athletes are eating for lunch?

I know it’s a stretch to go from this cute hat story to Ivan Illich, but I think the bigger point is that anyone who has a Facebook page or a Twitter account – whether they like it or not – is a node in a network, and it does students a disservice to not: a) make them aware of this, b) illustrate that for them, and c) help them realize how to harness and contribute to the power of that human network.  That will go a long way toward creating the “21st century” and “lifelong” learners that we are so fond of referencing in the edu-jargon.

Johanna and Linda, thank you so much for reminding me of this, as well as for Kiera’s hat.  She loves it, and I love how she got it.

ANYWAY – just putting it out there that my wife Stephanie was a contestant on the American game show Wheel of Fortune back in November, and her episode is airing this Wednesday, February 27th.  I’m pretty sure it airs on your local ABC affiliate in the evenings (it’s 7:30pm here in eastern Pennsylvania), but if you’re interested in watching my beautiful, talented wife pick consonants and buy vowels, you can check when it airs in your local market here.

Happy viewing!

I’m not going to delete my Facebook account; even if I was, I’m not that dramatic that I’d do so with such fanfare.  Much like my telephone or postal address, it provides me with one avenue of connecting with people.  But in his Lifehacker article “Why I’ve Opted for a Piecemeal Social Network over Facebook or Google+”, Adam Pash pretty well addresses at least one of the reasons I’m not so big on Facebook any more: instead of focusing on one or two services and doing them well, it tries to be everything to everyone (e-mail replacement, photo sharing service, location check-in) and only does a so-so job of it.

Of course, the flipside to that coin is that one can choose to use many different services, all of which only serve one or two of Facebook’s many functions.  As Pash notes in his article, the benefit to doing this is that if I become unhappy with any service (remember the Great Instagram TOS Debacle of 2012?), I can feel free to pull the plug entirely on that service without losing EVERYTHING.

In my grand tradition of tech-related navel-gazing self-reflection, I’ve put down a few thoughts about how I use what I use, and why I use it:

Top Tier Services

Twitter: My first social network (I was active there several months before joining Facebook), I use Twitter primarily for professional purposes: connecting with other educators and sharing resources and education-related articles (with occasional silliness!).  To contrast my use of the two, I’d say I use Twitter more for professional connection, and Facebook more for personal.

My blog: This is my personal, public space where I can write and reflect.  Unlike Facebook Notes, this space of mine is open to the world, and as I’ve said before, since I pay for the domain name and webhosting, I feel a greater sense of ownership over it than when I wrote on a free, hosted blog.  Edit, 2/17/13: Just came across this piece by Doug Belshaw that frames the self-hosting argument in light of the recent announcement that Posterous is shutting down.  Greater ownership, but also greater control.

Flickr: After a hiatus, I’ve come back to Flickr for sharing photos.  The Pro accounts are somewhat pricey, but Flickr has a robust community of photographers, and I am more comfortable with the level of control I feel I have over how my photos are used, or if I allow them to be used at all (via Creative Commons licenses).  I deleted my Instagram account amid the aforementioned TOS kerfluffle, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with Facebook’s approach to user photos; as a result I don’t tend to post a whole lot of personal pics on the service.  In addition to Flickr (which is for public sharing), I also keep my family’s digital photo album on Picasa.  It’s not for public consumption, but I can share privately with family members via a specific link so my parents, in-laws, etc., can see them as well.

Aside from Facebook, these are the services I use most often (and most dynamically) for social networking.  Other services I use either much more infrequently or without the same social focus.

Second String Services

Foursquare: I sometimes push my location checkins to Facebook or Twitter if I feel they are share-worthy (most aren’t), but I use it mostly to update the map on my professional portfolio website.

Google+: I’ve tried so hard to get into G+, but I just can’t, at least not now.  Maybe it’s social network overload, but I just can’t.  I push my blog posts to my G+ account, when I remember.

LinkedIn: This one probably makes the most sense to maintain and keep current, which I do.  Right now it’s pretty much just to have a presence there, but it may become more valuable to me in future endeavors.

Goodreads: I enjoy seeing what my friends are reading, and occasionally chat with them on this service.  I use it mostly for my own record keeping about books I’ve read or want to read.

RunKeeper: Same rationale as Goodreads.  Tracking my running stats is incredibly motivating for me; the social piece of this service is secondary.

Diigo: I use this to bookmark sites relevant to special education & school psychology.  I auto-publish my Diigo saves to Twitter via IFTTT, but don’t actively “friend” people on Diigo itself.

Delicious: Same as Diigo, but I use Delicious to maintain an archive of interesting articles I share to Twitter.  This service replaces the long-defunct “Shared Items” function in Google Reader.

Of course, much of what I do on these services gets pushed to Facebook anyway, but that’s primarily because that’s where most of “my people” are.  As with any social network, the real value is in the people, not the tool, and right now, most of the people in my life are on Facebook, which keeps me tethered there to some extent.  It’s why I didn’t leave Twitter for identi.ca back in 2008, and why I haven’t quit Facebook for Google+.  Still, on the tool side, I’m finding less use for Facebook these days and more for these other services.

1. shift rote information delivery to an electronic format (e.g., email) to be consumed outside of the meeting
2. make our faculty meeting time meaningful for the professional learning of each staff member

That second point is open to wide interpretation, of course, and just like there’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s, there’s no wrong way to flip a faculty meeting (or at least, there are several right ways).  The option our school went with, at least this time, was to have the Jan. 14 meeting function as a mini-Edcamp, in which teachers could select from a variety of workshops on topics generated by staff and facilitated by our colleagues.

One major difference between our FFM and an Edcamp, of course, is that Edcamps are 6-8 hour events, with self-selecting (read: voluntary) attendees and plenty of time to develop workshop sessions.  We, on the other hand, had just one hour for our FFM, and all faculty members were required to attend.  The time issue especially meant that a lot of pre-planning had to go into this so we could all hit the ground running at 3:45pm and have our experience go as smooth as possible.  Here’s how we did it:

Pre-Planning

At a faculty meeting in October, our principal asked the faculty to think about what it was we felt we needed PD/training/more time spent on.  Our staff of 150-200 was divided into breakout groups, and each group discussed amongst themselves and put individual topics down on index cards.

Our School Improvement Team (SIT) met at some point since, reviewed the index cards gathered from the faculty, and identified common themes/strands. From there, they turned the common themes into ten areas (which would later become our topics for the FFM).

With this information, I created a survey so attendees could indicate which session they’d like to attend.  It’s worth noting here that the Edcamp ethos of “the rule of two feet” applied here – if attendees did not feel a workshop was meeting their needs, they were free to go to another one; however, we asked people to complete the survey simply so we could get an idea of each session’s attendance beforehand (and if we’d have to split any into smaller groups, as we did for one workshop, or cancel any due to lack of interest, which we also did).

We also created a separate Google Doc for each session, which would be used as a brainstorm/scratchpad for attendees prior to the FFM sessions.  We felt that the development of essential questions beforehand would be instrumental not only in guiding the conversations, but also in getting us off and running as early in the hour as possible.

For the inaugural FFM, SIT members (and I) agreed to facilitate the sessions.  From the time I rolled out the idea of the FFM to the whole faculty some time in December, I have been talking it up and reiterating at every turn that this is not “sit & git”; it is a collaborative conversation and/or workshop environment.

Finally, the SIT created signage that indicated where each session would be held.  There would be no large group meeting to start off the hour; we all just came in from our afternoon duty and got to where we needed to be.  Efficient, no?

On The Day

After bus duty, we all went our separate ways and got to work.  Our principal and the district Director of Instructional Services toured the building and dropped in on all the sessions.  I can’t speak to the quality or direction of all the conversations from first-hand experience, of course (I was facilitating in a computer lab), but the preliminary chatter I overheard in the hallway on the way out was all positive.

We surveyed our faculty members toward the end of the hour, and the results were overwhelmingly positive.  Of 63 respondents, 54 indicated that the format met their needs, 7 said it did not, and 2 said “Yes and no”.  Positive comments generally centered around the following themes:

• It was great to have time to discuss what we feel is important
• It was helpful to see what other teachers are doing to inform our own practice
• The format lent itself to productive discussions in small groups
• Time to brainstorm with colleagues was beneficial

We also got some good suggestions for future sessions, including:

• Smartboard training
• Vertical subject area articulation between grades
• Reading strategies
• “Share a Center”

Some constructive criticism revolved around the following themes:

• Nothing offered pertinent to my subject area
• Time allotted was insufficient
• More variety of topics needed
• We need an “expert” in this area to guide us; not enough expertise in the room to fully develop conversation (primarily in regard to the new Common Core State Standards)

Moving Forward

At this point, it is my understanding that the administration would like to hold another FFM sometime in February.  I’m all for that, as long as that gives us enough time to reflect on the strengths of the format and work on areas in need of improvement.  Personally, I would like to see this model employed for building-level (or – dare I say it – district-level?!) professional development days at some point in the future, perhaps in a way that more closely models an actual Edcamp (multiple sessions throughout the day).  I also think that as people get more comfortable with the format, we may see more volunteering to facilitate conversations – several people indicated on their surveys that they would indeed be interested in doing so next time!

As of now, I still have not sat with the principal, assistant principal, or SIT to do a proper post-mortem on the FFM, but informal conversations with all have been positive.  If nothing else, I hope this post can serve as a model to school leaders who want to make more efficient and productive use of their faculty meetings.  In 13 years as an educator, I have never attended a faculty meeting and received information that couldn’t have been better (or quicker) delivered as an email or a memo.  I’m not saying that it’s never appropriate to share information in that forum, but I don’t think it should be the default function of the meeting.  Let’s use that time together to collaborate, share ideas, and tackle some of the more challenging questions of the day together.  Teaching can be isolating enough as it is, so let’s make better use of that time to interact with each other instead of always just sitting and listening, together, alone.

• 208: Miles run since hip surgery and physical therapy
  
• 1: Tough Mudder completed
• 13: Pounds lost via Intermittent Fasting (in a 10-week period)
• 950: Pictures taken (and kept) in my family digital photo album
• 3: Edcamps attended and co-organized
• 1: Cruise taken with my wife, kids, and parents
• 1: Nationally syndicated game show recorded featuring a relative as a contestant (to air in Feb 2013 – more info soon!)
• 6: Doctoral courses completed
  • 8: Doctoral courses completed in total
  • 8: Doctoral courses to go
  • 0.6: Doctoral thesis left to write
  • 4,060: Approximate mileage traveled from work (Lawrenceville, NJ) to grad school (New Castle, DE) to home (Perkasie, PA) (not even gonna tally the tolls paid; too depressing)
• 5: Years I’ve been blogging (as of 1 Aug 2012)
  • 199: Total blog posts published as of 31 Dec 2012 (I published #200 on 1/1/13; this is #201)
  • 25: Blog posts published in 2012
  • 0: Months in 2012 in which I didn’t post at least one blog entry
  • 1: Months in the last five years in which I didn’t post at least one blog entry (damn you, November 2008!)

In 2013, I’d like to keep track of these:

• Number of new beers tried
• Number of books read

as well as whatever else happens to catch my fancy.  What numbers were important to you in 2012?

While it’s a brand new (Gregorian) calendar year, educators in the US are just about smack in the middle of the school year.  Seasonal Affective Disorder notwithstanding, it’s easy to get a little down in the period post-Christmakwanzukkah festivities.  The trees come down, the lights get put away, the gift-giving and family & social engagements die down, and everything gets a little greyer for a little while.  With that in mind, I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on a part of my day that brings me much joy year-round.

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Since moving from a high school to an intermediate school schedule a year ago, I don’t have to get up as early anymore.  My wife – a high school teacher – is up, ready, and out the door by 6:15 am (or so I’m told).  I spend the hour or so between when she gets up and when I get up in a half-awake, half-asleep state, enjoying the toastiness of the bed as well as the newly-doubled space.  But while that’s very nice, that’s not the best time of my day.

The best time of my day is a five-minute period from 6:30 – 6:35 am.  That’s when my 7-year-old son wakes up, turns his alarm off, pads down the hallway, and climbs into bed with me.  Sometimes he snuggles into the crook of my arm and lays his head on my chest, sometimes we just lie next to each other in mirror-image fetal positions.  Sometimes we talk softly, sometimes we lie in complete silence.  Either way, it’s a peaceful time that is special for just the two of us.

He’s at a time in his life when he is testing boundaries and discovering himself.  He no longer believes in Santa Claus, he has started to neglect his once-dear army of stuffed animals, and he asks his parents “Why?” and “Why not?” with much more force, sharpness, and challenge in his voice than when he asked as a three-year-old.  He’s seven going on seventeen, and most days I look at his tall body and lean face and wonder where my chubby-cheeked baby boy went.

But for five minutes every morning, he comes back to me, at least for now.  I know it won’t (and shouldn’t) last, but for now, that five minutes is our special time, a time when everything is perfect and calm.  As 6:35 rolls around, we get up, I get my daughter up, and we all start our respective morning hustle and bustle.  I can’t speak for him, but as for me, having that time together in the morning is soothing and centering, and starts my day on such a positive note.  I am so pleased with and proud of the young man he is becoming, but I am also acutely grateful that while he spends so much time within himself figuring out who he is and isn’t, he continues to grant me just five more minutes each day.