Book Review: All The Roads

I don’t read nearly enough fiction, so when a colleague and close friend, Jessica Cotter, recently self-published her first book, I devoured it…uncomfortably because of our friendship.  At times it felt like I was walking around in parts of her brain where I shouldn’t be!  Alas, this is the risk authors take by putting themselves into a work, and that she has done.

“All The Roads” is marked with richly authentic characters, Jay and Elle, whose roads cross at romance – or is it? J. Cotter takes readers down these roads and builds anticipation of what these two characters learn during a specific time in their lives. Audiences for this novel could as easily be the twenty-something navigating that space between independence and interdependence, as much as for mature audiences looking back at the connectedness of life’s events that don’t seem so when we’re living them. For all, it is an emotional journey down the winding paths of relationship and our own place within them.

While it should not be, in this day and age, self-published thought articulated so carefully and intricately continues to be a charming surprise! I give this 4 SutterStars! Get a copy soon and support indie publishing:

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An Education Allegory

The fourth-grade safety patrol tells his side of the story like this:  “I told this second-grade girl that she needed to stay off the snow on the sidewalk because that’s the rule.  Then she asked me where she was supposed to walk because there was snow all over the sidewalk.  I told her to walk on the edge of the street and she got an attitude and told me it was dumb and dangerous to walk where cars drive.  I was just doing my job and she was being mean and not listening to me.”

As I listened to his interpretation of the dialogue, I knew he wanted validation for his valiant efforts upholding the school rule.  He wanted vindication that he was right.  He wanted intervention because he was older and had the orange vest, but no real authority.

He came to me for support and he didn’t want to hear that sometimes the rule doesn’t make sense.  He didn’t want to consider that perhaps someone he perceived as below himself might have sound logic.  He wasn’t ready to look for alternatives, compromises, or pragmatic solutions.

The fourth-grade safety patrol, who in class would gladly listen to reason, only saw his side of the story, because we gave him a title, a post, and an orange vest.  But I thanked him, no less, for enduring my questions and allowing me to push him toward empathy and a little common sense with that second-grade girl.

Then I walked away thinking how ironically close his story is to our own story in the world of education.

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Moving Leadership Along, Teacher Leadership Series Finale

In our work as cross-district teacher leaders, we have explored leadership and its many dimensions. Leadership in education has morphed over the past sixty years from institutions with a principal as manager and social pillar (Newsome, 1949) to more recent expectations of distributed leadership roles that include teachers, principals, district administration, and even reaching into communities as partners for a shared vision of learning and leadership (Lambert, 2002).

Recognizing that the demands and trends in the industry of education continue to outgrow the resources provided, the benefits of teacher leadership outweigh the costs.  We need to embrace and nurture the concept of a “leadership disposition” among teacher leaders that includes these key characteristics. As we support one another in this important work of our children’s learning, we should intentionally develop adaptivity, problem-solving, and self-directedness, all grounded in servant leadership.

I do hope you have enjoyed this series of posts and taken the time to reflect on these dispositions in your own work environments.  I am especially grateful to my co-author, Jessica Cotter, for contributing to the research and writing of this series.

Lambert, L. (2002). A framework for shared leadership. Educational Leadership, May 2002, pp. 37-40

Newsome, N.W. and Michelson, P.P. (1949). The Role of the Principal in the Modern Elementary School. The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Sep. 1949, pp. 20-27; University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/998273

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Servant Leadership, Teacher Leadership Series #4

In his book, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power & Greatness, Robert Greenleaf defines the servant leadership that is the final, critical trait we have found among effective teacher leaders, underlying the first three attributes of the leadership disposition:

Servant leadership begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.  Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.  (Greenleaf, 1977)

Choosing to lead out of a servant-oriented mind frame has proven powerful as teachers come together. The teaching profession is as much a service industry as a knowledge industry. It seems, sometimes, that the service portion of the day is focused on students and families, and we forget that we are also here to serve our professional community.  Being a teacher leader, in the end, is so much more than simply developing a PD calendar or sharing lesson plans. It is a support network of adaptive problem solvers, each looking to improve the school environment for students and staff.  A true benefit of being a teacher leader is the development of such a community.

A cost we have encountered in cultivating this mindset concerns the process of developing this sense of community. While within buildings this develops fairly naturally, between buildings or across grade levels, this can be tough. It is hard to serve others when we do not have the time or space to learn their needs. Supporting one another through leadership work is also different from paradigms that have existed in the past; whereas some work that may have been done as a paid position is now a part of a teacher workload.  Inside, it feels different to create from a need to serve others, than it does to work for an external motivation; this mindset takes time to change.  Teacher leaders are asked to be a part of several communities, to transition from their classroom to their grade level or department, to their building, and finally to the district.  In developing this broader sense of community, a teacher may feel a loss in the comfort they once held in being a part of a small, more intimate community. This is to be honored and acknowledged, while servant leadership is the disposition we have seen that makes the reach possible for teacher leaders.

Greenleaf, R. (1977). Servant Leadership: A Journey to the Center of Legitimate Power & Greatness. New Jersey: Paulist Press.

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Self-Directedness, Teacher Leadership Series #3

The third key component of the leadership disposition is self-directedness. Self-directedness is a professional characteristic that includes self-correcting, self-managing, and self-governing behaviors.  Systems that nurture these traits are more effective than those that attempt to monitor and manage behaviors (Sanford, 1995).   Interdependence through collaboration is an intentional structural design to enable self-directed behaviors and is naturally connected to problem solving and adaptivity.  Teacher leaders should select curricular, instructional, and professional learning needs together.  The intent of this is for collective priorities to influence independent choices (Little, 1990) so that a student-centered, cross-district view manifests in classrooms, by originating from classrooms/

To enhance this effect, our district supported an intentional shift away from tradition through coaching administrators to not create and lead all professional learning, but to develop skills for delineating staff meeting content from instructional improvement needs.  Simultaneously, Building Leadership Teams, including principals, are supported in planning new professional learning experiences, goal-driven by academic outcomes and instructional needs. In doing so, teachers are able to have the ever-important sense of autonomy, as well as draw more organic connections between the work they do both outside and inside the classroom. There is, in general, a greater sense of ownership over the work that teacher leaders are invested in.

A challenge we have seen, however, has been creating connectivity between many different teacher leader groups. Since our district is fairly large, the need for a common thread to tie the work of grade levels, departments and buildings together is great.  Also, there is sometimes uncertainty concerning who is completing which tasks and to what degree. For example, developing common assessments across six elementary buildings can be difficult, unless the group has a consistent definition of quality and agreed upon vision for the finished product.  Another example, at the secondary level, developing literacy expectations in the content areas spanning several buildings can be daunting if teachers are uncertain about what is happening in other courses.  Communication remains crucial as leadership becomes more shared; since this method is new, the infrastructure for dynamic communication horizontally and vertically through the organization is always being refined.

Little, J.W. (1990). The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in teachers’ professional relations. Teachers College Record, 91, 509-536

Sanford, C. (1995) Myths of organizational effectiveness at work. Battle Ground, WA: Springhill.

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Adaptivity, Teacher Leadership Series #2

The second critical component of a leadership disposition is adaptivity.  As things change in the educational landscape, and be assured they will, an adaptive leadership disposition supports the teacher to remain effective and reduces anxiety.  Adaptivity is different from reactivity. Whereas reactivity focuses on a particular situation, adaptivity focuses on clarifying identity and changing form in order to build capacity (Garmston & Wellman, 2012).

Traditionally, schools operate in a reactive mode, and not always for negative reasons. For example, we often plan far ahead to give people time to prepare.  In turn, such planning makes it difficult to respond to a changing environment.  Professional development calendars were often planned in advance for the coming year, reducing the responsiveness to learning needs of staff as they arose, while personalizing learning to the interests of a few making the plans.  This practice has been replaced with using academic and implementation data for buildings to develop visions for a limited number of student-centered improvement efforts around which Building Leadership Teams can rally and bind their work.  This adaptability to identified systemic needs, rather than fast-paced reactions to live problems, led our district to the creation of different meeting schedules for the leadership teams, to allow for more regular assessment of their work. This has led to more meaningful and self-directed professional learning by teachers.

While a benefit from this work has been a clearer definition of needs and vision, a cost is that some teachers perceive there is seldom closure to the work being done. Since adaptivity requires continuous clarification and goal setting, the ability to celebrate task completion can be lost in the cycle. At first, this can appear as if we are accomplishing very little; when in reality it is a giant systems change. The cost is a larger burden on the intellectual capacities of teachers as they maneuver through their school year and move through lessons, but at the same time never feel their work as a teacher leader is “done”.  Seeing the work as connected, flowing, and related to the needs of students is powerful, but it requires a shift in the idea of what success looks like. Previously, success came from finishing a project. Now, it comes in the constant connection between the work we did yesterday, the work we do today, and the work we will continue tomorrow.

Garmston, R. & Wellman, B. (2012). Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar Learning Guide. Highlands Ranch, CO: The Center For Adaptive Schools

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Problem Solving, Teacher Leadership Series #1

The first attribute of the leadership disposition is problem solving.  As we work to empower a system, we must see ourselves and our roles clearly within the system. More than being productive members of the teaching community, teacher leaders are expected to see the forest and the trees. To build the capacity of teacher leaders, the skills and competencies must be more than theoretical.  Teacher leaders must have a clear vision for what work needs to be done; training and coaching on collaborative norms to facilitate meetings that are different classroom work or PD, as well as continual support on developing problem-solving strategies.  Successful teacher leaders use these skills and authentically approach issues at all levels of the system as problem solving, not credit grabbing or blame casting.

The basic problem-solving model is to identify and analyze needs, plan for action, implement the plan, and then evaluate for continuous improvement.  Teachers experience several benefits to working through this model.   Teams of teachers in our district have developed consensus-building strategies, clear goals in dealing with problems, as well as norms that have supported group work over individual behaviors. When a problem is personal, it generally receives deeper attention and so we’ve observed that when the teacher leaders are empowered to identify problems in curriculum, professional learning, or structures, there is higher commitment to resolution.  Subsequently, the problem analysis is richer with the contribution of multiple thinkers around a shared interest.  Essentially, the work of professional learning communities is, in many ways, problem solving.

These accomplishments, however, have not been without cost. Often there are several problems to address, and deciding which get priority and resources is difficult. In general, the time needed to solve complex, multi-faceted problems is hard to find, or fund. We have also found that in conditions where a clear vision is not established or readily apparent, the problem-solving model needs additional nurturing by objective teachers or administrative leaders.

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Teacher Leadership Series

A colleague and I have been watching our district’s attempt to shift its leadership structure to be more distributed.  The nature of distributed leadership in education expands the roles of teachers and changes their interactions with principals, the community, and one another.  Teacher Leadership is a model of organizing that I have come to believe is extremely powerful for continually improving education because it doesn’t exclude other aspects of education, such as professional learning, unionized labor, current research, but it includes and empowers those closest to the work of children.  For Teacher Leadership to be effective, we have realized that the traits of the individual are even more important than the structures created to organize the many. Watching these professionals closely, we have analyzed four critical characteristics in common among successful teacher leaders: problem solving, adaptivity, self-directedness, and servant leadership. We will expand on each of these attributes of in the following series of posts.

Recognizing that the demands in the industry of education continue to outgrow the resources provided, the benefits of teacher leadership outweigh the costs.  We need to embrace and nurture the concept of this “leadership disposition” among teacher leaders that includes these key characteristics. As we support one another in this important work of our children’s learning, we should intentionally develop in each other, adaptivity, problem-solving, and self-directedness, all grounded in servant leadership.

Enjoy this series and please join the conversation.  How is your district growing teacher leadership?  What might you do to grow in these traits?  How can you develop them in the educators around you?  Let’s talk!

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Full Plate

So many times we go into a professional learning session, meeting, or our classroom to teach even, and the litany of distractions in our minds starts to roll like film.  There’s even research now to show that people who don’t take their smartphones into meetings are more successful! We live in a ridiculously fast-paced world, so here’s an icebreaker to help shelf some of the distractions and focus on what we gathered together to do.

    1.  Hand each participant a paper plate and a pen.
    2. Explain that we are all busy, we are all preoccupied, and no matter how much we all want to be here and now, there are some things that creep into our brain because our plates are so full.
    3. Direct each person to “fill their plate” with all the thoughts, to-do items, concerns, and distractions that might keep them from focusing.  Watch how differently people go at this task…list makers, artists, anarchists, etc.!
    4. Go around and share a few of the things that you’ve put onto your plates, then flip them over and write the purpose of your gathering in the center with nothing else.  Focus the group on that purpose while you are together and let them know when you’re done, they can flip it back over and get back into all the things on their minds.

 

(For an online class, have participants make their plate as a Wordle…then add the focus word 25 times so it shows up as the center of the poster.)

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Six Degrees

This community building activity is reminiscent of the old “6 Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon” where people had to associate actors or movies and relate them to the actor Kevin Bacon in 6 steps or less.  The purpose is to create a sense of community through seemingly shared experiences, while learning about others in your cohort/group.

1.  Ask each student to write a short profile/bio of themselves as a bullet list of personal trivia, such as favorite foods, place of birth, birth order, number of offspring/siblings, occupation, hobbies, previous careers, etc.

2. Have other participants read each others bio, and then create a new posting that connects the cohort to him/her self through a minimum number of connections.  If the cohort is small, they should include all members.  If it is small groups, they should include 6 degrees of separation (or 6 other members).

3. In person this can be an oral activity.  Online, this can be two separate discussion boards, one for the bios, and one for the connections.

For example, Mary loves nachos from Chili’s.  John used to work at Chili’s in Detroit.  Fred was born in Detroit and his dad is a welder.  Lori took a welding class last summer at a folkart camp in the Appalachian Mountains.  Cindy grew up in the Appalachians and is the youngest child in her family…and I am the youngest too.

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