The Blur Between Leading and Teaching


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Philou.cn

At the coaxing of some, I wanted to share some of my thoughts from the Learning 2.011 conference in Shanghai earlier this school year. It was an absolutely amazing experience, but then again, most conferences where you get the opportunity to connect face-to-face with educators that you connect with online are. There is so much value in building upon those relationships, and no matter how much joy I get connecting online with people, face-to-face is always better.

Although I would love to talk about the city of Shanghai, I spent a lot of the first few days sick in my room and avoiding any food that wasn’t Kentucky Fried Chicken. I will spare you the details. I did get to see the Shanghai World Financial Center which was absolutely amazing, although the drive there (and everywhere) was terrifying.

As the cohort leader of the Technology Leader group (which we changed to the ‘learning leader‘ group as we wanted to ensure we always focused on learning), I was a bit of unsure of what our time would look like together. Although I had some thoughts about the  “big ideas” that we would work on, I did not really have any specific outline for what my sessions would look like.

On our first night, I talked to the group and made sure that we had time to connect with one another. It was amazing the diversity of the group; positions ranged from IT directors, superintendents, teachers, principals, along with other roles. Even though I knew that each may have had a different role in their school, we were all there to focus on creating the best opportunities for kids. Each person with a similar focus, yet different strengths. On the first night, I talked about some ideas that would help guide our work:

  1. Anything that we do with technology has to be focused on learning first.
  2. We need to always focus on “why” we are doing something before we focus on what and how.  We also need to clearly be able to articulate that to those we work with.
  3. Any plans that we create must help to build capacity within schools so that all stakeholders benefit.

Knowing that I had no real plan for the following few days, the best place to start was to ask the group what they wanted to learn about. I knew that people had paid money to be at this conference and traveled great distances so it was essential that they felt that they had received something valuable from the experience. From the group’s many ideas, we decided to create groups so people could explore based on what they were most interested in or had some expertise. Although I had some experience with some of the ideas presented, I could have not provided in depth learning about all of them. In fact, I knew that even if I could provide some great ideas about some of the topics, I could not compare to the wisdom of the group.

This model was something that was totally different from what I have seen at other conferences and it was amazing the work that was being done by the groups. The conversations were extremely rich and deep, and people had shared some amazing ideas while building connections with one another. This was much better than anything I could have provided on my own.

When the cohort leaders reflected as a group, I shared thoughts on my own learning experience.  What I shared was how working with a group of “leaders”, I saw a distinct parallel between the characteristics of great teaching and great leadership. Here were some of my thoughts:

  1. Give trust, gain trust. As soon as you show that you trust people to do great things, they are more likely to do them.
  2. Provide some clear goals and objectives to the work you are doing.  With those in mind, ensure there is flexibility in the way people achieve those goals.
  3. Let people build and share their strengths and interests.
  4. We can learn much more from a group than we ever could from only one.  Do your best to bring people together and empower them to be leaders.

If you look at the list above, there should be no distinction between what falls under leadership or teaching; they clearly work in both areas.

As I have progressed in my own learning, I have seen the importance of building classrooms  and systems similar to the work environments that we both want to work in and excel.  Great leadership and great teaching have so many things in common; this was just again confirmed by this experience.

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