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MARSHA
RATZEL
Diary #11
Leading
Leaders Is Exciting,
Rewarding, and Exhausting
Have you ever
had a dream about taking teacher leaders and pushing them? Pushing them
to stretch and speculate about the "what ifs"? This week presented that
opportunity not just once, but twice. I was so blown away by the first four
days of the week that I had to take a sick day Friday to recover.
There are 14
teachers who work on technology staff development. A multitude of courses
are taught year-round ranging from Beginning Word to Classroom Projects
to PhotoShop to Using Excel in Science Classes. Once a year, the district
is able to afford substitutes so we can gather to build a vision of what's
to come. This year, unlike all the rest in which I have participated, I
had to co-lead the day.
I had to be
so prepared that the best questions were ready to go -- on the tip of my
tongue. I had to carefully think about all the people who were attending,
figure out their strengths/weaknesses, and be able to orchestrate a dialogue
that challenging the status quo thinking.
Also in that
role of leadership, I wanted to not only take something away from the dayıs
work. I wanted to give training to the trainers -- a way to feed those that
provide the nourishment most of the time.
Some careful
advance planning
Planning that
day required finding articles and data that would force our teacher leaders
into re-evaluating our technology offerings. We scoured articles and websites
like the National Staff
Development Council and Knowledge
Loom for the best practices. The point of all this information was to
help draw out, from our teaching cadre, a plan for helping the entire district
faculty advance.
Excellent data
was pulled from the teacher's self-assessment. Each spring 90+% of the district
faculty fill out a technology survey about what they are doing and what
they still want to be able to do. These data tell us where there are holes
in what our classroom teachers are doing and what they want to do. We blended
new courses into the sequence of training to fill in holes and worked to
incorporate best staff development practices.
By the end of
the day, we had built a matrix of what a teacher might look like as they
progressed from a novice to an expert user along four technology strands:
web design; technology integration; graphics; and Office Tools.
Marco Polo,
Equill and Backflip were the new technology tools we showed. Marco
Polo is a website to research high quality lesson plans that tie directly
into national standards that can be used K-12. Equill
is a free, online tool used in processing web pages with virtual highlighter
tools, marking pens, and post-it notes. And lastly we demo'ed Backflip,
which makes sharing bookmark favorites easy. The brainstorming energy snapped,
cracked and popped with possibilities as everyone excitedly chatted away.
At the end of
the day, our leaders left tired but excited to use their new tools and we
had a detailed district technology staff development vision. It was awesome.
Flying higher
with the high-flyers
The next day,
without a chance to catch my breath, I met with a teacher that pushes the
art technology envelope. His students go to college knowing how to use PhotoShop,
digital video editing, and image creation, which are typically introduced
in the first years of art school. Right now he wants to make art technology-interactive
projects -- for example, a digital image might use the science classroom's
proximity probes to change how it displays itself depending on how close
you stand. Or how about responding to the viewer's body heat with a different
sound as they look at the digital video?
But our art
department is a Mac island in a sea of PC users. So every piece of equipment
has to be fought for. And I want to change that. So does my boss, but there
are limits to keeping everything at the state of the art. I want to be an
advocate for art technology and actually use the system to support innovations.
This teacher wants to grow and I'm going to work as hard as I can to define,
fund and help his vision move forward.
But I don't
know a darn thing about state of the art tech stuff in the Mac world. So
the learning curve is huge and I have to show my ignorance by asking a million
dumb foundational questions. I had to learn what an
AirPort was and why it was important. Then I had to learn about FireWire
and where it comes into building this state of the art electronic media
classroom. And where can we get a midi mixer and sounding morphing software
to experiment with the sound art students put into their videos? It's going
to be hard, but I'm committed to making some dreams come true.
Leading well
can suck some life out of you
So what did
I learn this week? Leading leaders is exhausting. I worked too hard. And
found myself utterly spent on Friday. So much that I had a migrane that
sent me to bed. I'm still not ready to go back to work Monday. But I will
because my other huge project, the virtual fieldtrip with almost a hundred
participating classrooms, is coming to a close. I'm needed to make sure
we have the culminating projects that help students sort through all their
experiences and come to some concluding thoughts. I need to make sure we
do the assessments that tell us whether this trip has been a nice, fluffy
project or if it has impacted student learning. I need to be there pushing
and encouraging.
If you do
a good job, it sucks the life out of you. I never felt this way when I
worked with students. I always thought I got more from them than they
got from me. But that's because, I realized after a bunch of hours mulling
it over, I never wanted to be perceived as being worthy of my leadership
position. I just did my best and let things work out however they did.
Now I need to step up to the plate of making "it" happen for our district's
best and brightest teachers -- whoa . . .
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