When decision times come around I like to say - If you ask people their opinion, then do what you want to do they'll be mad. If you do what you want and don't ask people their opinion they'll be mad too. Such is life when you're trying to get a read on where people in your organization are at in terms of prospective initiatives. In my last district, leadership decided on 1:1, then had a teacher committee to help steer the direction of the project. I joked with my now former colleagues "they could pick any device they want, so long as it was an iPad." That group met a couple of times and helped make decisions...kind of. I'm not sure the people who were a part of that group felt like they were empowered to make decisions. Personally I don't think they ever in the position to make their own major decisions. I don't think that's a bad thing - leadership had a good vision. I'm trying to figure out in reality what's the best way to get people on board? Start small with pilot groups...tell people this is what we're doing and it's coming next year...let survey data drives all decisions?
I sent out my first survey this year, so now it's my turn to maneuver these delicate issues with an entire staff. As leaders, both informal and formal, we have to set a vision for what we think is best for our clients (in this case students). My vision, albeit an unoriginal one, is that students need to be using some sort of mobile device to aid learning. That's where we need to go, now we need to figure out what that looks like for our organization. I told myself I would keep my mouth shut my first year, but I can't.
So many of my leadership classes at UWM focused on change. Go figure, this is going to turn out to be much more complex than writing about a case study. Skeptics need to be convinced via education and site visits. We need to get the conditions set and get out of the way of teachers who have been ready to go on this five years ago. I've had one administrator ask me about 1:1, to which I responded, then the textbook budget becomes the student devices budget (take a look at SETDA's Out of Print report).
But that's a whole other argument. All these ideas, and we have no clue where the money will be coming from, but that's another tough discussion. And leveraging social media for learning, that's another one coming up too. Never a dull moment in this line of work...and we're always out looking for more work for ourselves. That's what makes it so fun though!
I sent out my first survey this year, so now it's my turn to maneuver these delicate issues with an entire staff. As leaders, both informal and formal, we have to set a vision for what we think is best for our clients (in this case students). My vision, albeit an unoriginal one, is that students need to be using some sort of mobile device to aid learning. That's where we need to go, now we need to figure out what that looks like for our organization. I told myself I would keep my mouth shut my first year, but I can't.
So many of my leadership classes at UWM focused on change. Go figure, this is going to turn out to be much more complex than writing about a case study. Skeptics need to be convinced via education and site visits. We need to get the conditions set and get out of the way of teachers who have been ready to go on this five years ago. I've had one administrator ask me about 1:1, to which I responded, then the textbook budget becomes the student devices budget (take a look at SETDA's Out of Print report).
But that's a whole other argument. All these ideas, and we have no clue where the money will be coming from, but that's another tough discussion. And leveraging social media for learning, that's another one coming up too. Never a dull moment in this line of work...and we're always out looking for more work for ourselves. That's what makes it so fun though!
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