Cracks widening... :)

What a difference a few days make! As my first post says, I was very discouraged with how my school staff was responding to my attempts at showing leadership in the area of technology. But I went to school the next day armed with my strategies ready to try again. I stopped in at my principal's office first thing and said I was going to offer to help other teachers get their classes started on the computers if they would teach my class during that time. My principal said, "No! That teacher needs to be there, too, so I'll cover your class while you go help!" Then he says he'll put my offer in the weekly newsletter to staff and suggests I write it down on the staff bulletin board, which I promptly went to do. Before I had even finished wording this announcement, I had a teacher claim me for a time and we immediately went and booked a time that worked for all of us involved. So this morning, my principal was in my room and I got to lead another grade 1/2 class in their first exploration of our new computer lab. It went so well that the cooperating teacher expressed "I'll just call you Mrs. Computer from now on!"

What else has gone well? I was able to have a great discussion about the use of technology in education with teachers around the lunch table. I've already been approached by another teacher to help her get started on the computers with her class. My own class and I had a very successful time on the computers where we did research together. Their learning was definitely enhanced by using computers in the classroom. I had another conversation with the teacher librarian about how to communicate with the staff in this school. A lot of the teachers in this school do not use e-mail and refuse to use the district "first class" system. She had learned, when she first came to the school, that the staff prefer to use the staff wall as their main method of communication in the school, and that they don't want e-mails, but rather personal conversations. I've learned how to use the projector connected to the computer....

So what have I learned about leadership?
- leadership takes time to develop relationships, trust
- leadership can happen unexpectedly
- leadership means recognizing what is already there and working within the system


While researching, I came across this quote:

Because technology innovations require support, input and knowledge from so many diverse components of school organizations, they stand to benefit from an emerging view of school leadership style called “distributed leadership” (Spillane, Halverson and Diamond, 2001). In this view, leadership is an emergent property of how organizations operate, instead of as traits held by individual actors. In an environment that values distributed leadership, knowledge, feedback and most importantly, decision-making authority can be shared among those who are most integrally involved in enacting the innovation."

from part of a research paper by Judith Keegan Yoho entitled Technology Leadership, Technology Integration, and Student Achievement: A Correlation Study in K-12 Public Schools Technology Integration

http://www.lhup.edu/jyoho/psu_website/researchproject.htm