Culminating Experience - CEDO 599 Week 1

"And now, the end is near..." -Frank Sinatra

Well, we've started the last class of this Masters program.  The idea behind this last class is to come up with an idea for a culminating project and put it into practice.  We spent a few weeks in the Portfolio Experience class (CEDO 555) coming up with an idea for the project and some of us went further by planning it out.  For my project, I am going to try and implement and manage a Learning Management System (LMS) with an assignment.  A secondary goal is that I'm hoping to make it a collaborate assignment where I can help integrate technology into the lesson.  Here is a little back-story...Last year I had spent some time showing teachers different ways to facilitate electronic assignment submission.  It was a fairly successful endeavor but the problem became a matter of uniformity.  There are many different tools out there that will accomplish the electronic submission goals but it can get confusing to the students, staff, and parents if every teacher is using something different.  To achieve the highest efficiency and, ultimately, proficiency - I feel standardization is necessary.

After meeting with the instructor (Louie), it became evident that I should narrow my focus and edit the timeline a bit.  Instead of trying to give the assignment, allow time for the students to work on it, and then grade and return the assignment...the altered goal will be to find and use a LMS, collaboratively create the assignment with the classroom teacher and have everything in place for the implementation and electronic reception of the assignment.  Louie and I felt it was a necessary adjustment because it allowed for a much more realistic timetable.

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 6 (Final)

OK, final week.  We were to answer a few questions posed to us.  My definition of leadership has changed in the respect that leadership can come in many forms and through many styles.  One leadership style is not necessarily better or worse than another...just different.  A lot of it can be situational but the best leaders try to incorporate a lot of different management styles and motivational methods.  The best leaders also learn as they go instead of trying to force their style upon people no matter what.  Leadership can be situational.  In certain situations it is good to have a leadership style of a calming, level-headed person.  In other situations it might be better to have a leadership style of an active, creative, assertive, and inspirational personality type.  The leaders that can adjust to different situations and adapt their management styles offer the best chance for success.

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 5

This week we continued "The Game".  It was supposed to emulate Years 2-3 in the planning process of accomplishing some bigger picture items in a school district.  Even though we had learned a lot from playing the game in the prior class, we still ran into some unforeseen problems.  We still had issues with the sequence of the planning process.  Just when we thought we were prepared for something, the game would make us go back and revisit something we had already done.  We also noticed that the people with a negative attitude pretty much stayed that way and it was more of a pain than it was worth to include them in any of the big decisions.  The consensus was that we keep moving without them and they will either hop on board, or leave.  The choice was theirs.  It was a little frustrating to have to keep going back and talking to people before allowing us to advance but perhaps that was the point that the game was trying to make.  The bigger a school district is, the more and more red tape you'll have to go through.  The more committees and planning groups you may have, the longer it will take to gather information and get decisions done.  There is no perfect answer, just some hints for effective practices and putting the right people in the right places to accomplish goals in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 4

So this week we started "The Game".  It is an engaging leadership exercise in which you emulate the process of getting things accomplished in a school district structure.  I will admit that at first I was thoroughly confused by all of the charts, history of the players involved, and how the game was to be played.  My group quickly adapted, however, and we learned as we went along.  After a short time it became clear that this game was extremely deep and had many complex layers that made up the dynamics of how it was played.  Some things we learned after this initial "year":

• Include the Superintendent (Al) in everything - things will not advance unless he is on board
• Talk to the constituents and stakeholders a few times and gather information before forming any plans
• When performing events that ask for a group of people, try to include a diverse population of individuals making sure to cover the various categories (Admin, teachers, parents, students)
• Be aware of influential people, who they may influence, and what type of influence they provide
• You can't please everybody and sometimes it is best to just move ahead with plans once acquiring a majority of approval

We are looking forward to continuing the game next class with our newly found knowledge.

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 3

Change, change, and more change.  This week's activities all revolved around change.  I liked it when my group member, Zac, said "Change is the only constant".  It's not a new concept but it was a good reminder.  As technology directors, trainers, or integrators we are after times the harbingers of change.  As we all should know from prior experience in our own lives, people fear change.  As the bringers of change (technology) we need to be cognizant of those feelings in the people we are bringing the change upon.  Understanding and empathizing with those feelings will allow for a much smoother transition.  During in-service days I was able to sit in on a presentation by Ian Jukes and he had an interesting underlying theme when referring to educators.  He used the acronym TTWWADI and it stands for That's The Way We've Always Done It.  That phrase seems to be all too familiar when we look at what's currently being done in education.  I walked into many classrooms last year at my school where we would politely ask the question of "Why?", as in why were they doing something. The answer often times included a lot of hemming and hawing and then something to the effect of "Well, I've been doing it that way for the last 22 years and it works just fine".  What those teachers don't realize is that for every year that they keep employing an outdated teaching method or curricular piece, they are creating more and more of a disconnect between themselves and the students.  The world keeps evolving and so should the way that students are taught.

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 2

Well, I got a new job since my last post so some of these next assignments will be a little more challenging.  I used to know pretty much everything about my former school in the technology department after teaching there for 10 years and now I am transitioning into an entirely different school and environment.  Exciting for sure, but it'll make these last 2 classes of this degree program interesting.  Well, enough about that since I'm playing catch up here...

I'm still struggling through the Data Retreat paper because I was going to write it from the point of view of my old school, but it is a Catholic School and therefore difficult to get a hold of test scores or any other meaningful data.  So then I started  to write it from the perspective of my new position since it is a WI public school and their data is available on the WINSS website.  I was running into problems when it came to some of the deeper questions, though, because I am not familiar with procedures and processes yet.  I may end up writing it using both situations but we'll see.

In answering the forum questions I used the test data from WINSS for my new school, Bayside Middle School.  I chose to use the disparity in scores among the different ethnicity groups as a point of discussion.  The "White Not Hispanic" ethnic group were the most successful group when looking at the test scores and I tagged that as an area that my school needs to improve.  Some suggestions that I provided were:

1. Evaluate the curriculum. Look for any content or methods that might have a slantedness towards one ethnicity or another.
2. Evaluate the staff. Look to see that they are truly identifying with each child and being aware of background or cultural differences.
3. Evaluate the tests. Do they have a history of being skewed or providing biased results.
4. Research the students' backgrounds whose test scores are suffering. Try to identify a common thread that might provide insight and use this information to find innovative ways to reach these students.

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 1

     So we got underway this first week by doing a lot of self-assessing and talking about qualities, virtues and traits of leaders.  We also studied a Framework Approach to Leadership by Bolman and Deal consisting of 4 Frames: Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic.
     I'll start with the self-assessments.  While I didn't really get any surprises in the results of my self-assessments, it made me think about my leadership qualities a little differently.  All of my results reflected my strong interpersonal relationship skills so that was nothing I didn't know already.  I also, not surprisingly, ranked low in creativeness and vision.  The thing I really started to think about though, was that these were self-assessments and the results were essentially reflections of how I viewed myself.  If I was ever going to mature as a leader and become proficient in vision and planning roles, the place I needed to start was my self-perception of my abilities concerning those roles.  I am receiving training.  I am becoming more confident.  I am showing more assertiveness in presenting ideas.  All of those things are leading me to become a better leader, especially in my former weaker areas.  Now I just have to start believing in my abilities and the growth that I have made in order to be perceived as the balanced, effective leader that I am striving to be.
     I thought the framework approach was interesting but it was often hard to distinguish between situations where Human Resource and Political frameworks applied.  My group made the observation that name "Human Resource" has certain connotations that go with it and it would have been easier to keep it separate from Political if it had been named something different.  The labeling exercise was pretty difficult because we felt that a lot of times you have to use skills from several frameworks to achieve the best possible result.
     As far as my leadership role at my school goes, it is really an intriguing situation to try and analyze.  In one respect, my position of Technology Coordinator/Integrator has many of the characteristics of being "one of the gang" of regular classroom teachers.  I work with them hand in hand on collaborative projects, we interact with the same students in similar ways and I have similar teaching, grading, etc responsibilities.  On the other hand, I am charged with other responsibilities that would fall under the category of leader or administrator responsibilities.  For example, I run a portion of the staff meetings where I address the direction of the school concerning technology.  I also run and administer training sessions where I try to introduce ways that I think the teachers could incorporate technology into their classrooms.  I try not to make the teachers feel like they are being forced to give my ideas a try, but there is a certain expectation from myself and the administrator that they will make an effort to use what I have taught them.  I have also recently been running informational parent meetings where we communicate the school's future initiatives.  Each year it seems that my position transforms a little more into an administrative/leadership role.  I welcome the changes and feel that I am prepared for the shift.