If you are reading this, please make sure to go back and read the blog post by my friend and colleague, Doug Timm @DougTimm34, and this post will make more sense to you. His post, "What I Thought, Is Not What It Is," got my mind in reflection mode so I decided to write. I'm challenging my friend and colleague Deanna @Hessteacherest to follow this post up with her wonderful insight to help Doug and I channel this in a great way that she always does.
There were 2 statements that Doug had in the blog post that captivated my thoughts. Here they are:
- "I thought my presence, title, and perceived power would bring my 'thoughts' to truth and facts."
- "It turns out my thoughts were wrong. It is a lot of hard work, constantly growing, and mindsets evolving."
To unpack it further, I am focusing on "thoughts" and "mindsets." As a school leader, these 2 areas are imperative to continually improve instruction and student achievement. One tip that I'd like to drop for school leaders is to ensure that you are in at least one Voxer group, thought group, etc. where you as a school leader are outnumbered by teachers. The key thing is that it is a group of teachers not from your school or district. This will push your thinking in ways that a graduate course or a conference may not. Let me break it down for you.
With every passing year in leadership, that is one more year further away from the classroom. For example, I haven't taught in the classroom since September 2014. The experience of the teachers I serve now is completely different from what I experienced. My students in 2014 are not the students of 2020. As I gain new learning about instructional technology, resources, and strategies, I can't rush to try to push it all on my teachers. In addition, the teachers I serve may feel uneasy about calling me out on my approaches to things or challenging my thinking on things that drastically affect them in their classrooms. By being in Voxer groups or PLNs where you are outnumbered by teachers, I can gauge how my teachers really feel about certain things without them having to tell me. The teachers in my PLNs can call me out or challenge me on parts of my leadership or practices that teachers are going to have problems with. Not only can they call me out, but they will also describe their own experiences or history in certain situations that I'm describing, and explain to me how it may have negatively impacted the morale of the school.
This is one significant way that school leaders can challenge their thinking and shift their mindset. A sample testimony of mine is that there have been many ideas that I've had that I wanted to present to my Principal for us to think about based off of what I saw other school leaders doing on Twitter or Facebook. It'd happen by chance that I'd find myself lurking in one of my Voxer groups, trying to catch up on a conversation, and teachers would be discussing a similar initiative or strategy being implemented in their school that I was thinking about, but the implementation was not going well for several reasons. It gave me a chance to gauge how that same thing could either blow up in my face at my building or how we would need to revamp it in order to suit our school.
Let's Rock!
