Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 3

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

The top 3 things I learned on the final day of training:

It's all about the meeting.

1. How to plan a meeting.  I thought I knew how to do that.  The corners I cut in creating agendas the day before and getting people the info within 24 hours was all well and good, but I learned that every bit of planning that I can do ahead of time for the meeting pays off.  

2. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of intervention." They say it pays off, and in the greatest currency I could wish for: Meetings that go smoothly.  Members that don't mutiny.  Most importantly, the meeting is more efficient in accomplishing goals and moving the team forward.  

 

3. This last one has taken awhile to sink in (with this late blog post, I've certainly given myself plenty of time to think).  It's that soapbox moment, when I get passionately argumentative about a controversial topic.  I used to think that every time I did this, I was being heroic.  I learned that leaders just don't do this every chance they get.  Who would follow that person?  In Facilitative Leadership they don't call it a soapbox, they call it a ladder:

Every once in awhile there's that particular piece of data that triggers someone.  When I'm "up my ladder," you'll probably find me spewing my beliefs forth from my lofty height, and maybe the conclusions I've drawn and the assumptions I've made.  Am I interested in a conversation?  Perhaps I'm more interested in grabbing my pitchfork and marching.

It's usually later when I look back on that moment sheepishly.

Between Wednesday, when I learned this, and Monday, as I write this, I caught myself up my ladder at least a half dozen times.  I'm proud to say I apologized a couple times, and I even stopped myself once before I even began.  

Baby steps!

-B

 

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 2

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

The top 3 things I learned today:

1. The Iceberg! How to go from micro to macro with a problem you're solving:

The iceberg exercise asks the participants to keep an eye out for "levers" in any of the different depths that can be pulled to make a change.


2. Consensus!  And what happens when you can't get it.  Turns out I found myself as one of the people creating an obstacle to consensus with an issue I felt strongly about but not many others did.  I felt a lot of involvement, a lot of ownership (see the graphic below)

3. This wonderful quotation from the Facilitative Leadership text made a big splash in our group:

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 1

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

Here are my top 3 highlights from today's training:

1. In the triangle below, I learned that Process and Relationships are equally important to success as Results.  "You must unlearn what you have learned." -Yoda

2. There are three parts to a discussion: open, narrow, and close.  What I didn't know was that I, like most people, am most comfortable in one of these parts over the other two.  This means that if I'm discussing something with a person whose preference is to open the discussion while I'm a closer, we could have some trouble communicating together if we're not aware of it :)

3. This wasn't from the curriculum, but I talked to a colleague in the training who taught me to find out "where everybody gets their cookies." This is a way of saying that each person identifies a different source of reward from his or her job, and we're always trying to get to that place.  For the people we're working with, learn their source in order to create win/win scenarios!

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 30

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

And this is the last day!

Day 30
What would you do (as a teacher) if you weren’t afraid?

Wow, this question seems to directly respond to my last post, where I explain how I've changed in the last 7 years of teaching: 

How comfortable am I in sharing who I really am?  Being a teacher is a weird thing.  In grad school they told us that one teacher got fired because she was tagged on facebook drinking a glass of red wine in a photo from her trip to France.

What?

I know a few teachers who divide themselves between their school personae and their personal lives.  I did that for awhile when I was singing in a band.  Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy?

My biggest change was overcoming this fear.  How did I know I'd beat it?  Suddenly I felt free to teach what really mattered to me, and I stepped back one day and thought, "Whoa, where'd all this curriculum come from?  Why wasn't I doing this earlier?"

I was afraid to do something that hadn't been done in the middle school before, and I was mostly afraid of the parents' reactions.  I found out all I had to do was communicate it ahead of time.

• I led the school in a 360 degree assessment of diversity and inclusivity.  The school cannot grow unless it is always reflecting on the strength of its own community.

• My childhood fascination with designing my own video games, which was hardly possible for a 12 year old in 1991, is now not only possible, but immediately gratifying!  GameSalad, Gamemaker Lite, Pixel Press Floors, Unity, Source Filmmaker, and more.  This is an excellent way for students to learn computer programming and digital storytelling.  I unpacked one of my storage boxes from childhood and brought it to one of my classroom cabinets:

• Several education futurists praise Minecraft's educational potential.  I took the risk last week and offered a project to a couple students to create a scale model of the school campus in Minecraft, which will be linked via Aurasma's GPS functionality to offer the option of jumping between the real world and the 8th-grade-student-generated minecraft world with a few swipes of a mobile device's touchscreen.  I wasn't quite sure about it - I didn't trust the students fully - but I saw the progress yesterday, and OMG.  The creative ways they built the soccer field goals!!  The mathematical ratios they used to determine scale!  When I saw the gym, I got a little vertigo walking down the hall and into the locker room of an incredibly accurate architectural rendering.  At the time, they were building a machine that allowed the bleachers to open and collapse at the push of a button.  Engineering!

• I'm leading a social media safety class that asks the question, "How can social media be used safely to help me reach my goals and dreams?" I was inspired by my friends who have successfully used crowd sourcing sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to do amazing things like record an album or invent a 3D printer that prints in metal.  I'm able to present this to 11-year old kids, who aren't even supposed to be using social media yet.  They can be guided by trusted adults on safe usage BEFORE THEY EVEN SIGN UP!  Imagine that! (And many are already using it anyway - social apps are kind of the biggest deal right now)

• Projection mapping for the school plays?  Didn't know how to do it but there's FREE SOFTWARE to make it happen!  And tutorials on youtube!

We live in a beautiful world, and I am no longer afraid to share it in my classroom.

Also: 30 DAY BLOGGING CHALLENGE COMPLETED!  Achievement get!

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 29

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 29
How have you changed as an educator since you first started?

This is a great question!

With teaching, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that there are a lot of "starts" - 

• I started teaching when I taught evening technical classes at an arts organization in Seattle.
• I started teaching when I began to substitute teach.
• I started teaching when I began to tutor in high school.
• I started teaching when my student teaching began.
• I started teaching when I was hired to teach middle school art.

All of these were different jobs, and they required some of the same skills, but the contexts were so different that each one has been its own universe of professional expectations and growth.

Navigating the teaching profession itself is a process, and it takes years to find one's place.

When I started, I was really focused on fitting in with my colleagues.  Do they know and accept me for who I am?

How comfortable am I in sharing who I really am?  Being a teacher is a weird thing.  In grad school they told us that one teacher got fired because she was tagged on facebook drinking a glass of red wine in a photo from her trip to France. 

What?

I know a few teachers who divide themselves between their school personae and their personal lives.  I did that for awhile when I was singing in a band.  Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy?

I was caught in that landslide for years.  Perhaps it can be summed up by calling it a crisis of priorities.

I'm happy to be able to look back and say I've gotten past these questions.  The double life thing is exhausting.  I discovered a really comfortable place where I can be myself with my colleagues, my students, their parents, my parents, my friends, everybody.  I discovered that my career is more rewarding than the personal pursuits that were splitting me down the middle.  I still perform and record music, but now it all fits together nicely.

Will this process begin anew if I take another position at another school?  Or is this a rite of passage that teachers need only endure once in their career?

Any way the wind blows...

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 28

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 28

Respond: Should technology drive curriculum, or vice versa?

I don't think it's like that.  The student should drive both.  What is the reality of technology use in the world that our students are growing up in?  I pay attention to what technology they're using outside the classroom.  My middle schoolers are using their parents' smartphones, their own ipods, xbox, google docs, online gaming, instagram, snapchat, skype...

Next step, teach with those technologies in the classroom.  And teach how to use them responsibly, with health and safety in mind.  The class content vehicle is student-driven.  Relevance is key.  For Media Arts, I'm not going to ask my school to invest in a bunch of cameras when there are cameras on the devices in their lockers not being used.  #BYOD (bring your own device)

Curriculum also looks at the student's world.  Media Arts in general ought to teach kids about voice, mass communication, storytelling, media literacy, collaboration / teamwork, project management, and how to take a good photo.  Now - when I apply this to instagram, for example, I need to consider what the student's needs, desires and definitions of success are for that medium.  The curriculum is shaped to the student's real world experiences.

Technology has been a hot topic in education for a long time, and for obvious reasons.  Computers have ruled the realm of knowledge acquisition and application since their invention, gaining ground in this arena year after year at a dramatic rate.  Ever since the day in 1983 when all those classrooms got Apple IIe computers, technology has been an integral part of education.  Curriculum of course has been around a whole lot longer, but from our students' perspective, there's no priority between the two.

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 27

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 27
What role do weekends and holidays play in your teaching?

Haha I'm here in my classroom on this Saturday morning!  I guess that says it all.

I was just having this chat with my S.O., also a teacher.  We were going in to work today and talking about how we were going in to work on a Saturday.  We love it.  We love our jobs, and we only love our jobs if we're on top of our responsibilities AND able to pursue our pet projects.  These help us grow as professionals and as people.

As a montessori teacher, her pet project is literally to bring a pet into the classroom.  She already has fish, but she wants something furry and cuddly.  Her students would love that, and they'd learn so much from taking care of a mammal.  Most of her evenings this week were spent researching the possibilities of welcoming a rabbit or a guinea pig into the school community.

Prep time does not afford us the peace of mind, the space for research and experimentation, or the hours to devote to these projects, so we make that time for ourselves.  This is how we learn, this is how we grow.

Saturday!