Scott Mcleod has invited bloggers to post thoughts on Educational leadership on Leadership Day 2010, Friday, July 30. OK, I know that it is Sunday, August 1, but I am going to take the lead of Chris Lehmanm who has called for it to be Leadership Weekend.
School leaders need to be willing to transform themselves before they can transform their schools. So many well meaning leaders are often through no fault of their own, ardent supporters of the status quo.
The tremendous shifts that have occurred in our society are often pushed aside as mere distractions to what is believed to be what schools should be. The desire to fight for the status quo is supported by popular opinion, parents, politicians, and teachers. If the test scores are good, if our kids are getting into college, then all is well, right? Meanwhile the world is changing. And our schools, for the most part, are not.
So what advice would I give? We need to encourage school leaders to connect. Encourage them to subscribe to some blogs, use some Google Docs to collaborate, and start to connect with other teachers and admins on Twitter. And maybe an unconference? Sounds simple. But imagine if we could get half of our school leaders to do this?
For those of us who have stepped into the connected world of the read/write web, we have seen how we have learned. We have seen how we have changed. We have learned to share, to be transparent, and have enjoyed the process. It then becomes easy for us to see that we need to transform our schools if it works for us, it has to work for our kids!
The challenge is for all of us who blog and/or tweet to stretch our learning and build connections, we should adopt a school leader and give them a supportive push toward self transformation. Who knows, it just might work!
Our schools will never become the communities that they can be until the leadership can fully participate and model the willingness to learn in a multitude of ways. And it is Leadership Day (weekend) 2010. The time is now. Choosing the status quo is not an option.
