Leadership 2.0: Who Do We Need Our Leaders To Be?- Chris Lehmann

Leadership 2.0: Who Do We Need Our Leaders To Be? with Chris Lehmann

Conversation Description:

If educators cannot successfully integrate new technologies into what it means to be a school, then the long identification of schooling with education, developed over the past 150 years, will dissolve into a world where the students with the means and the ability will pursue their learning outside of public school.

Model and exemplify the pedagogy of the Educon conference. Let’s all learn from and with each other. That is simply good leadership. If we want our schools to be inquiry driven, what do we need our leaders to be.
We need to create a common language.

1. What does this idea mean?
2. What does this idea mean for education?
3. How could this idea affect our schools and communities?
4. How does this idea inform my personal practice?

Ideas:

• Inquiry
• Technology-Infusion
• Communities of Care

Inquiry

• evolves around students set the course for learning, give the learning more relevance in students mind
• follow the lead of students
• spirit of inquiry is natural to small children
• Teachers need to model inquiry that for students
• Open inquiry vs. guided inquiry
• inquiry as mean of differentiation
• Find your “unknown” and learn about it (very different than “what do I need to do to get that “A”)
• Inquiry gives permission to infuse curriculum with creativity.
• Inquiry is a process is getting to “an” answer, not necessarily to the “right” answer.
• Inquiry is a creative process. how can we align with state standards/Standardized tests

Technology-Infusion:

• part of what you do every day
• can’t be an add-on. The same school it has always been plus technology
• invisible but present everywhere
• learning experiences that demand technology, without the tech, the experience would not be possible
• does not have to be part of EVERY lesson
• not about the bells and whistles, it is about the skills
• technology is a tool and layer to help teach all the other layers of teaching.
• how can the social network in students life can have an academic component?
• analogy of blood infusion- can’t live without blood. Take something out that is not working for you and replacing it with something that is.
• Tech tools should be TRANSFORMATIVE

Communities of Care

• How do you define community
• Model the care as a leader
• The care of students, but also teachers need to be apparent
• Character Education has to go deeper than hanging posters around school
• Mutual transparency. Kids understand that teachers are there to help them achieve. That leads to accomplishing a goal.
• Care is at all levels. The teachers also have to feel cared for.
• Caring is also setting boundaries
• You have to carve out space and time for a community of care
• There is an increasingly social aspect to our students’ life

A leader needs to ask their community:

• What are our strengths
• Listen to a consensus
• Make meaning out of it together
• Take the ideas, synthesize them and then lead

Leadership:

• Build a vision that is powerful enough to attract the right people, broad enough to own it and flexible enough to lead it.
• Articulate values to allow a conversation to happen

Visioning:

• Developing Ideas

Modeling:

• How can leaders publicly live these ideas?

Servant Leadership:

Top Down Support for Buttom up ideas

Leading:

• How do we get everyone on board

Quotes from Chris Lehmann:

Top down support for bottom up ideas

Leadership is to be able to get people on common ground, then move ahead

As a teacher don’t say that you teach “Math” or “Science”, but that you teach students!

Care is a transaction… a give and take…

You can’t bully teachers into caring for their students

Days of top down mandates will never get us to a community of care (trust)

Every good teacher knows how to outlive a mandate