Developing Leadership

Leadership is an elusive thing. I think it's difficult to track or to guage effectively. I've often heard about "servant leadership." I think that phrase is valid, for in my experience, the more I'm willing to do for others, the more willing they seem to be to acknowledge my leadership and ask for more.

For example, this past week I demonstrated with my class an example of technology infusion...or at least how I define it. The students had illustrated a fact they had learned about bears on a kid pix program and I then collected these and made a slide show out of them to show the school. I thought that this demonstration of student learning would be one teachers would embrace and would therefore ask me how else technology could be used to meet learning outcomes, etc. It hasn't happened yet.

But, one teacher is asking me to help her out with getting her Grade 2/3 students on the computers. She, by her own admission, is petrified of all this technology and was unable to even approach it with her students. So, I offered to help. When asking her what she wanted, I realized that she had not even taken the first steps of putting her class list together and choosing courseware for the students to experiment with. One morning I showed up extra early and asked her for her classlist so that I could start on this. She was eager to observe and within 10 minutes, we had her class ready to sign on for the very first time. As she left me that morning, she said "This is exactly what I needed..someone to show me what to do and how. THANK YOU!"