Education - Leadership, Competencies & 21st Century Skills

Week 2
I would like to start by saying thanks heaps to the people who were supportive of the first post, you guys totally rock! It really did spur me on in doing this next one so thanks heaps. I’m determined to keep this up so yay for blog post number two! As you might have read the first one you have probably noticed that I do dribble on a bit - I’m sorry about this. I’ll try to keep it a bit more succinct but I’m unsure if I’ll manage as it’s a bad habit of mine and worse when I’m nervous.

Anyway on with the job, so, for the ‘flipped learning’ task (basically homework in preparation for the next class) we were encouraged to read an article - "Towards Reconceptualising Leadership: The Implications of the Revised New Zealand Curriculum for School Leaders Case Study". By Wayne Freeth University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti University of Oulu, Finland.

It was pretty hardcore reading and did require a coffee break for me to finish it but from what I can gather it had a few interesting themes. I think (I’m still a tad unsure) that Wayne was basically looking into how school leaders are re-interpreting and implementing the 2007 curriculum. In particular he was interested in the links between the new understandings of knowledge and learning and how these ideas would flow over into changes required in leadership to reflect these new understandings. His more specific focus was on distributed leadership and how this links to knowledge as a noun vs verb.

If we first go back to the older more traditional understanding of learning as a noun and something we accumulate or soak up this kind of view is reflected in leadership that is autocratic, bureaucratic and hierarchical. Basically a leader holds the knowledge and skills that the follower is trying to gain, essentially leading from the top down. However, if we look at a more modern understanding of learning as a verb that people co-construct together, this view fits better with more distributed, democratic and transformational leadership styles. In this way one person does not own or hold the knowledge and this requires us all to be leaders and learners at the same time, this includes all teachers, management including the principal and the students. So is this more modern approach reflected in the structures of school leadership in our schools today?

These ideas kind of made logical sense at first, of course we should implement flatter structures to reflect this new understanding of learning etc but thinking about it a little deeper it does not appear to be such a simple idea in terms of how this might actually be implemented due to maybe the more practical aspects of people's roles, decision making processes, time and resources. Essentially an older view is so ingrained, we label ourselves and place ourselves into hierarchies all the time. In my last blog I bleated on about being a digital technologies teacher and elearning learning leader and avoiding the math subject as a secondary teacher despite being trained to teach this as a second subject area. These are very narrow hierarchical views. I was talking about silos and people being the gatekeepers of knowledge based on job titles and experiences etc.

However, if I really try to shift my outlook to learning as a verb and being about co-construction, I see my roles quite differently. Although I have specific job titles I actually facilitate learning that involves literacy, math and other specialist knowledge. These kinds of knowledge are such an integral part of creating any digital outcome. Anything we create in a digital way is about communicating a message or can be interpreted. Whether it is using language, numbers, symbols, images or sounds etc it still all communications (the C part of ICT) not simply digital technologies as my subject specialisation states. You can’t create a computer program without eventually running into logical math expressions or text or graphics etc.

In our school we the teachers and students are co-constructing new knowledge daily. Whenever we teach our integrated modules (two subjects with 2 teachers), we bring our knowledge as teachers and students together to create new understandings. For example in my current class this week I (as a digital technologies specialist) am working with a languages specialist and together the students are creating weather forecast videos in french. We including myself have all learnt something different because we all came with different prior knowledge and skills.

I am wondering are our job titles and leadership titles actually necessary? Do they just perpetuate an old and outdated view of knowledge, and gatekeepers of knowledge. In fact I used to sign off with my Job title as ‘Learning Leader - elearning ‘but a while back I dropped the elearning bit off and I think I even had Digital Technologies teacher on there before that which I removed prior to that even.

I’ve also been wondering - what if when I left school I just decided to study something different rather than take the IT pathway like science or art? Would I have been just as successful in my career? I actually think I would have been if I had put in the same amount of time and effort. But I guess out of practicalities we start to specialise at secondary schools and definitely when undertaking tertiary study and jobs. Is there a right time to specialise into areas, should we just do this later in life? I believe we can simply learn whatever we need to, whenever we want to if we have been able to develop the skills to know how to learn and are motivated to learn. Although I was an apathetic average teenager who didn’t like secondary school much, I am still very grateful for having learnt the basics of being able to communicate with text, language and numbers (which happened to be very seperate subjects at the time). I’m also very grateful that my parents valued education, despite leaving school early I was still expected to continue learning whether it would be at a job or at some other kind of formal education.

If we really took these new ideas of learning and teaching onboard and worked more collaboratively, how flat would we and could we make the leadership structures in our school without creating a fair bit of chaos. Is my view a little pessimistic, maybe this would be possible to do quite successfully? Are we all simply people first, who are both learning and leading at the same time it just depends on the situation? Should we just get rid of our titles, labels and curriculum silos and divisions altogether? We made the decision to call teachers by their first names at our school to remove some of the hierarchy and older views of knowledge being held by particular people and the power imbalance of knowledge as a noun. How far do we take this? What should we write onto a “Hello my name is….” sticker just our name and leave off the title that often follows this? How would we define ourselves as learners and teachers without labels? Does our job title define who we really are, what we really believe, our success and what we are trying to achieve in our schools? So back up the truck, I think I’m lost down some crazy rabbit hole now! Time to hit the reset button and get to some kind of point.

Ok, so, clearly I got a bit lost in the reading and I found it hard to keep up with all the ideas presented. My brain was overheating and that was just one of the many themes. In the end the article talks about multiple truths and I guess I totally concur with him on this one as I personally think one truth doesn’t really exist as everyone interprets situations in their own unique way and truth is simply someone's perception of an idea or situation so it is only true for that one person or others who agree and see it the same way. In a lot of ways we are all walking contradictions, we say we believe knowledge is a verb but busily label ourselves and others and conform to ideas of subject silos and hierarchies for many practical reasons.

So we live in a constant dichotomy of multiple truths and I guess it is much like a swinging pendulum depending on the specific situation we discuss. In school for example we can say we believe that knowing how to learn and the 4 c’s (communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking) for 21st century learners are the most important skills learners should develop and then in the same breath carry on busily writing our curriculum progression rubrics for our subject areas in our subject silos and plan our learning objectives based on our specialist silos of knowledge and make sure we are cover the appropriate parts of the curriculum and tracking the exact bits students have “learnt”. We can’t always be so idealist, we have national curriculum, directives we must confirm to and only so much time and resources. But maybe we can do more to move forward.

Our school has tried to put dispositions at the forefront of our ‘school curriculum’ with our CLOAK values (Challenge our mindsets, learning is connected, ourselves as learners, ako always, and kindness and respect) - but do we really keep them at the forefront of our learning or are these crowded out by our silos of curriculum and content knowledge and areas of compartmentalised leadership? Are these really 21st century or even current or future focused enough? Maybe they are good as a broad umbrella and the 21st century skills come out from underneath these?

I guess I’m left with more questions than answers on this one and am hoping the in-class time will help unpack this thinking. I’m pretty spent on thinking about all of this, my brain is officially fried.

In Class Week 2 - Leadership - Key Competencies in Leadership
So we discussed the above article in class and I had a light bulb moment - I thought the new ideas about knowledge were similar to the notions of the ‘fixed’ vs ‘growth’ mindset ideas of Carol Dweck. It is fair to say it is also a much more empowering and hopeful view about learning and knowledge.

We then moved on quickly to look at the Key Competencies and how do we role model these as leaders? How are these linked to our professional standards? We also had a discussion about how we assess and focus on the KCs. Many teachers said that we didn’t really explicitly teach and assess these but when comes to writing report comments and in our relationships with our students we do focus on these and can comment on these in this way. The key competencies from the NZ Curriculum:

• Thinking
• Using language, symbols & texts
• Managing self
• Relating to others
• Participating and contributing

When then looked at ITL (Innovate Teaching and Learning) research and 21st century skills rubrics.  Another colleague and I couldn't believe we had not come across this before, I was quite excited about this. I also cynically wondered what Microsoft might be trying to sell us, however, I was quite relieved as it appears to all be pretty useful and relevant stuff with no costs involved (so far). ITL came up with guidelines about how to practically integrate 21st century skills into the design of learning tasks and reflect on the impact of these teaching practices which boiled down to these aspects:

ITL 21st Century Skills

• Collaboration
• Knowledge construction
• Self-regulation
• Real-world problems / innovations
• ICT for learning
• Skilled Communication

If you compare them to the KCs they are pretty similar but the role of ICT & digital fluencies are not explicit in the KCs, although it could fall under using language, symbols and text.  Also where would computational thinking fit?

In Class Week 2 - Digital - 21st Century Skills
We moved on to look at the rubrics and flowcharts developed as part of the ITL research. We formed fairly random teams. I ended up with one work colleague and a couple of other people I hadn’t worked with yet. We made an awesome team it was a fun, energetic and a crazy time spent developing a video that we didn’t quite finish and upload on time (so can’t insert awesome but embarrassing video here yet). The course facilitator also used a very large on screen timer to keep us focused in the planning stage and then the construction phase. This timer idea was very simple and effective which I used the very next day in class and it totally helped the students with time management. I had used timers before on an individual basis but not as a whole class, this was a great simple tool.

We were given the first skill collaboration and these were the progress indicators we were trying to explain:

1. Firstly Students are NOT required to work together in pairs or groups. 
2. Students DO work together BUT they DO NOT have shared responsibility. 
3. Students DO have shared responsibility BUT they ARE NOT required to make substantive decisions together. 
4. Students DO have shared responsibility AND they DO make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work BUT their work is not interdependent. 
5. Students DO have shared responsibility AND they DO make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work AND their work is interdependent.

So in making the collaborative video about collaboration we pretty much walked the walk and talked the talk. Four of us had to work together and relied upon each other to make key decisions to come up with the final outcome, we had our ups and downs just our students do. I was quickly reminded of how similar we are to our students giggling, getting mixed up, reshooting, running out of battery on our device, being late in finishing, generally being eggs. We were just older versions of our students. So good to be reminded of what it is like to be a student. Had great conversations with the students about this and our learnings the next day when they were finishing their french weather forecast videos.

At our school we use Pam Hooks SOLO rubrics as progressions for depth of knowledge and the 5 progressions in the ITL resources do appear to align with the SOLO stages. I’m pretty sure our facilitator did talk about these being based on SOLO however, I can’t see this in the documentation anywhere and would like to look into this further. I think these are great practical simple rubrics and flow charts that could help us plan meaningful 21st century learning. I would love to explore how we could integrate and use these in our Digital Fluencies Advisory curriculum and other ways in 2018.

We also looked at how we could easily link the professional standards to our blogs using the ‘labels’ keywords on our blogs which I’m going to give a go.

We finished by brainstorming and discussing problems or challenges we have in our teacher practice. Our first assignment is to explore how innovation could be used to help solve one of these issues. So we were like ‘where do we start?’ I had a few ideas I’ll explore further and hopefully have some good chats with staff and students in the coming week to narrow down to one issue:

• How could I more effectively differentiate and scaffold learning for students?
• How could I more effectively help students to develop future focused dispositions/to develop our CLOAK values/use our learning process to enhance learning?
• How could I help the community gain a better understand our school vision and why and how this is implemented?
• How could I help students be more effective communicators and caring as a community?
• How could I helps students be more reflective in their learning and share their learning effectively with their family and wider community?
• How could I build a more inclusive school culture?
• How could I help students develop more effective student agency?
• How could I empower staff to feel passionate and confident in helping students to develop their digital fluencies?
• How could I empower staff to feel passionate and confident in developing their e-learning skills?
• How could digital fluencies be developed for students in all classes in a fun and sustainable manner?

So I will ponder these questions to narrow these down to one focus for my assignment in the upcoming weeks. Watch this space...please let me know if you also have some thoughts about this.




Sandra, and I 💗 learning with people.   Thanks for reading this and keep cool till after school, Ka kite anō …


References
(n.d.). Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society - NEA. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf

(2014, April 4). Key competencies / Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Key-competencies

(2015, September 30). ITL Research - Microsoft in Education. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research

(n.d.). SOLO Taxonomy — HookED - Pam Hook. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://pamhook.com/solo-taxonomy/

(n.d.). Julian Moore Interim Chief Executive - Education Council. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/Introducing%20the%20Code%20and%20Standards.pdf

Education - Knowledge & Followership

Introduction

Well to cut a long story short, I'm not actually too sure about who might be interested in reading about my thoughts and why anyone might even be slightly interested. But, I figure, if I give you an idea of why I've started this blog and what I might be bleating on about you can then decide if you would like to read on, or you would rather close this and go check Facebook or do something else.

I'm currently a New Zealand secondary school teacher who in a past life didn't really enjoy secondary school so left a bit early and completed an IT degree. I then worked in the IT industry initially before training to become a teacher. So the journey is a little bit ironic in that I ended up becoming a teacher after busily trying to escape school.

However, I have always loved being creative and having fun with techy stuff so my specialist teaching area is digital technologies (apparently I'm also supposed to be able to teach math but have avoided this due to panic attacks about recalling times tables. Being a bad speller is bad enough as a teacher having to write on whiteboards without a spellcheck in my brain). Anyway, at this point I'm currently employed as a Learning Leader specialising in eLearning and am a foundation staff member at a new Junior High School. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly my job entails at this school as my job description has changed and evolved somewhat since I started.

It has been a crazy couple of years being part of starting a new school and during these past 2 years we started with about 600 students and have grown to about 1000 students. It would be a wee bit of an understatement to say that we have been a bit busy and it's a little mad but myself and four other work colleagues have started a postgraduate course in collaboration, elearning and leadership. The idea is that I'll put my thoughts and learning into a blog, this will serve as a way to organise my thoughts and reflect and share what I've learnt with anyone else who might be interested. I have always thought I should try this blogging business out and have started down this track in the past with some of my students but have not really ever carried on with them. I would really like to see this one through till the end of the course. I am interested to see how it might help me reflect and improve my teaching and leadership practice and how it might be received by others.

I am pretty petrified about publishing this and am pretty much pooping my pants (trying to be PC and a good role model about this but you can probably imagine what I'd actually like to say about this process). I was more of a sit at the back of the room doodling under the radar type of gal at school. Writing was not really my buzz I would have rather poked my eyes out with a stick than go to my English class and I failed miserably at writing essays for my History class. So, I'm sorry in advance about the quality of the writing and thank goodness for red squiggly underlines and right-clicks (actually I've had to retrain myself to do 2 finger taps now that I'm using an Apple). I have also learnt a lot from English teachers like the words a lot are two separate words not one and to not end student report sentences with "she is capable of" because you can't end sentences with a preposition whatever that actually means I'm still unsure so I just changed the sentence.  It's a great strategy I've used many times and so is procrastination. So speaking of which I'd better get cracking on with a reflection of the first session.

Basically for the first half of the course there are two separate themes running throughout each session. One is leadership and the other is digital collaboration.

Week 1 Digital Collaboration- What is Knowledge?

So we had discussions in groups and some of us discussed "what is knowledge" (ying) and other discussed "what is education" (yang). We used playdoh (yes we are adults and despite some initial reservations we actually enjoyed this) to represent these ideas. We then looked into some research around these ideas and refined them. Finally a ying group and a yang group came together to create a collaborative representation and videoed or photographed the final outcome.

We looked at the ideas that many of us are familiar with such as knowledge not being a noun, that it is more like a verb. It is not simply absorbed, we take action when learn and do stuff with knowledge. I also feel that the context of learning is social and that we develop some kind of shared understandings when we learn and that we all bring something to the experience and can learn from each other, similar to the māori concept of ako. I believe education is about acknowledging our part in the interdependence of ourselves with others. Ideally education should motivate and support people in becoming happy well adjusted members of society in our own country and in the wider connected world. But I guess the more complex issue involved is actually how exactly can do we do this successfully and in a sustainable manner in our schools today. I feel like this is what we as educators are often pondering and grappling with at times.

Week 1 Leadership - Followership

So we were then asked to reflect on what kind of follower we thought we were during the task of creating the video. Ideas from Kelley (1998) were presented:

• Sheep - passive and seek motivation and need their leader to do the thinking for them.

• Yes-people - positive and support the leader but still need their leader to do the thinking and they will ‘do’.

• Alienated - negative followers that think for themselves but pick holes in the leadership

• Survivors - sit on the fence and are passive, won’t be the first to jump on board with the leader but won’t be the last either. Maintain the status quo.

• Effective - think for themselves, positive engery, accept leadership and still have own opinions which they can still disagree with and offer alternatives and help when needed. 

I guess we would all like to think we are effective followers, but if I’m honest with myself at times I’ve probably had a turn in all the above categories in different situations in my life. During our little video challenge I did at times express my own ideas however, I was pretty awkward. I was also nervous as I didn’t really know most of the other people in the group so tended to hang back. Others confidently took the lead and were doing a great job in all aspects and the techy bits too. So I guess this is kind of my default which is, as long a team is heading in the right direction I’m happy to do what I can to help when needed, I guess I try to be a good follower by sitting back at times so others can take lead. But on the flip side maybe at times I could step up more often and allow others time to follow.

The other bit of homework was to reflect on what I consider a good leader to be like. So rather than particular dispositions springing to mind I thought about one of the best leaders I’ve even known in the school context and I would describe her as the following, based on how awesome she made me feel as a follower:

• A great communicator
• Down to earth
• Forthcoming about decisions and how they were made
• Inclusive of others
• Respectful of others
• Empathic and could see issues from all angles and points of view
• Resourceful
• Supportive

So these are all traits I guess I aspire to develop myself as a leader. I’m sure we will unpack these ideas more in the coming weeks and I’ve spent waaaaay too long sitting in this position, my back has totally seized up so I will leave it there and move on to some final coments.

Final Comments

So being a bit of a nerd I’ve gone back to check that I’ve completed all my tasks. One of the tasks for homework was to reflect and consider sharing my knowledge with a wider audience, so check it out, I've nailed this one right!

However, another task for (optional) homework was to reflect on how my understanding of the purpose of education is visible in my classroom. First of all yes you know you are a nerd when you feel the need to complete optional homework (which they call “reflect after” learning lol).

Well this is an interesting idea as I don't really have a classroom.  We work in an innovative learning environment (ILE) which I think might be the most recent acronym for open plan flexible learning spaces, there have been a few including MLE etc. I used to have a computer lab back in the day (just over 2 years ago) and quickly worked out that I’ll just go with a portable lab idea. When a class is about to start I simply burst out of a nearby cupboard with my nerd trolleys that store all the specialist gear needed like robots and laptops etc. So basically CLOWs (Computer Labs on Wheels) instead of just COWs. Each term I might be timetabled in another part of the school with no computers or gear which might freak out some digital teachers but that’s all good I just take over another cupboard. I guess we don’t really use the walls (not really that many of them either being open plan) much either as it always feels a bit temporarily and shared I never really feel like our class 'owns' it. So keeping my understanding of the purpose of education visible in my classroom is probably not so much about what is actually visible like things on walls in my classroom it is probably more invisible like the atmosphere of the class. This comes through in my communications, attitude and focus of learning and how I engage with the learners and this climate becomes my “classroom”. Oh man I hope some of that actually makes sense when you read it!  I really need to call it a day and go to bed.

So I just asked google how long a blog post should be and apparently top ranked blogs average about 2416 words for a blog post. I have not quite hit the mark yet but this is so close enough and I even added a picture so this should be some bonus points.  It took me way too long to write this, and I’m not sure if I can keep this up each week but anyway I’ll give it a go. But it could end up much like diets I’ve started on a Monday only to give up by Tuesday. It is awesome if you have read all of this so thanks very much for entertaining my ideas for this time (even if you did just skim read and jump to the bottom, I’ll forgive you). So the challenge is on. Will I write another one? Does anyone care or find this interesting? I guess time will tell. Have an awesome day and you can now get back to checking Facebook.

References

• Kelley, R. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66(6), 142–148.

• I would also like to take another look at some of Gert Biesta's ideas about education