I’ve been trying to frame this blog all day and my original thought was to call it Being Change without Being in Charge, but that isn’t quite right. Besides, the only thought I could come up with under that title was……..

Back to the book.  Here are some important things I learned about being a leader and being able to influence change, with a little commentary.

1.  The Power of One

Remember learning about Stanley Milgram?  The social scientist who had ‘teachers’ shock ‘learners’ when they didn’t get answers right, and even though learners kept messing up, 65% of the teachers kept shocking them, to near fatal levels.  The final limit was 450 volts where most were presumed dead or passed out as a result. However, if scientists added one person to the teacher’s room that said things like “keep going, its okay” that number went up to 90% of the teachers shocking to a deadly level.  But, if that same 1 person said “I’m not going to do this anymore” then the shocker stopped shocking.  The idea is that the power of one is all it takes.  One other person can influence us to do great or horrible things.

2.  Opinion Leaders, not Innovators bring about change
Innovators are often thought of as the misfits who are disconnected from the rest of their environment.  They aren’t respected because they are on a different plane.  However, early adopters / opinion leaders are connected to and respected by their peers and others in their community.  If you want real change, you have to be (or have to find) an early adopter.  You have to be connected to your peers.  You have to be respected by them.  Then, when the innovators come in with their cool new tools, you decide whether they are worthy and promote them.

This one takes some self-evaluation.  I have one other person at my school that would be considered the innovator.  He got me excited about Web 2.0 and the possibility of engaging students on a whole new level.  He has introduced some amazing ideas to our staff.  However, most haven’t taken to changing their style of teaching to meet the demands of today’s students. He is an amazing learner.  That being said, I don’t what I AM?   I don’t think I’m an opinion leader because I’m not vocal enough about the emerging technologies that I’m using or the impact they are having on the select kids using them.  In some instances I’m helping kids get excited about school again. That is a good thing.  I need to be more vocal about it, but it’s hard, especially when you don’t respect so many people in your organization.  That has to change.

3.  Influence agents have to engage the chain of command
“Smart influencers spend a disproportionate amount of time with formal leaders to ensure that the leaders are their social influence to encourage vital behaviors.”

Basically, if you want change then align yourself with the people who can make it happen in your community.  For most of us, that is our bosses who are automatically given the title of leaders when they take the job.  For those of us that have bosses that are ineffective at bringing about change, we need to pick people in our organization that can (people who are the head of cliques), and try to show them what we are doing.  If they like our ideas then they will take it to their small groups and change will spread.

4. To become an opinon leader/ early adopter:

• You must be knowledgable about the issue you are trying to change
• You must be trustworthy, people have to respect your opinion
• You must be generous with your time

This hits home really hard.  We have a knowledgable administration.  However, not all are trustworthy.  Most of our faculty does not believe our administration will handle situations appropriately.  They don’t trust them to do the right thing.  Some of our administration is very generous with their time.  Others can never be found.  Do your leaders fit these three criterion?

5.  Make the undiscussable, discussable
There has to be a public discourse over the issues that are hurting your organization the most.  The elephants in the room.

Power to change comes from the ability to force undiscussable topics into the public discourse.  Long settled beliefs are suddenly opened to question and discussed at every corner, workstation, and shop- and eventually reshaped

We can’t sit in our classrooms, complain on our PLN’s, and just talk to our spouses about what is wrong, what needs to change. We have to get our ideas moving, make them kinetic, make them a fabric of our community.

In an ideal workplace, you have an “environment where formal and informal leaders relentlessly encourage vital behaviors and skillfully confront negative behaviors.  When this happens, people make personal transformations that are hard to believe”

What are you doing to influence your environment?

So how do I stop it? How do I not be so serious?

Which one of these is stopping you from having more fun?

I really wanted to get on here and just rant about something I saw at work a little while ago that was the ultimate insight to a problem we have had all year, but decided that there are a couple risks in doing so.  First off, you probably don’t want to hear me complain.  Secondly, I probably don’t want my work to hear me complain.  So I’ve been sitting at my computer with my blog open, and just thinking a little more in depth about why I didn’t want to write out exactly what has been bothering me about teaching at an online school.  I began having a debate. The debate consisted of three things:

1. Do I go into detail about a common problem at our online school, and possibly address a bigger problem in education?
2. If I do go into it, will anyone care since it’s a personal grumble?
3. If someone does care, will that someone be from my own school who happens to read this?

Lets clear one thing up, only a couple teachers from my school read this blog, probably any blogs for that matter, so the risk of them reading about a complaint that may alienate me from my peers is only a risk if they catch onto this down the road and go back through the archives.  But there is always that what if?

That led me to the realization that I have to pretend a little on this blog.  I have to wear a couple masks.  I have to oblige the persona that is more conducive to appeasing a broader readership.  The idea of keeping a professional presence separate from your personal presence online is something I dealt with and adapted to a couple years ago. However, I’m just now thinking about having to have multiple professional personalities if I want to be honest about the problems at my online school, which just might happen to be problems that other online schools, and other more traditional schools might also be having.

I’m sure many writers have had to worry about alienating themselves or coworkers in their blogs, and many have probably gone the easy route and just chosen not to say anything at all.  But I’m wondering if there is another way to handle this where you can still get your message out, still share your ideas, still be controversial, but not go down a path you wish you could take back later.

Something has been really bothering me lately. I’m taking a college course called Introduction to the Internet for Educators. When I first saw the title I was really excited because I figured the teacher would be teaching me all about how to use the Internet to help kids learn. However, thats not quite how it played out.

I am in a Master’s in Educational Technology program and the professors are all Ed Tech specialists. From my homely status as a teacher, I thought their goal as instructors would be to teach us how to all be better educators, not better technologists. At least not technologists in the old sense. The C++ sense. Maybe I’m totally off base here, but shouldn’t education classes teach you how to help kids?

With all the amazing tools available online, is our time learning about the Internet best spent learning how to code html and css? I don’t think so. While I agree that a basic level of understanding about those languages is important, to spend 15 weeks learning how to handcode and program seems a waste of a semester.

How often do Educational Technologists train their teachers to code pages? Seriously. My degree is supposed to teach me how to run an Edtech program at the school or district level. I cant imagine going into a school and doing a professional development session on CSS. I CAN however, imagine going into a school and teaching a group of teachers how to use wiki’s, or Google Docs, or even make videos that you can upload to Youtube. The only html you need to know to do that is how to copy, paste, and embed a given code.

Please tell me if I’m totally mistaken. In fact, tell me if I’m right too, an affirmation a day keeps the doctor away.

Don’t despair even though the numbers aren’t there. This is still going to be the best year ever. Okay, what do I mean? Well last Friday we submitted unsats for each of our classes. Any students with a ‘d’ or ‘f’ in any course would receive an unsatisfactory notice home. Our Assiss. Principal ran the numbers today and here is what we got. 726 students, 650 receiving at least one unsat, 76 with none. That means, hold on let me get out my trusty windows calculator, 89.5% are not passing at least one class 6 weeks into the school year. I like to think of it this way, 10% are passing every one of their courses, yayyyy!

Pretty disparaging. So why am I optimistic? Change takes time. We have implemented drastic changes to our school from the way we deliver our content to the methods we communicate with our kids. Its a HUGE change and we are only 6 weeks into the year. I know that I’m doing more than Ive ever done before, and I trust that is going to save more kids from dropping and failing out than Ive saved in previous years. There are a couple of us doing this, we will make a big difference to our students. Other teachers will begin to make the necessary changes, jump on the bandwagon so to speak, as we get into the school year further. They just need a little time, but not too much time because students drop like flies at our school. Also, they may need some not so gentle nudging from admin. I know some of us who are maxed out would like to see some swift kicks to those who waste sooooooooo much time. It’s obvious to us admin, just ask.