You often hear how it is the “leader’s” responsibility to help create the culture of a school.  Leader, in this case, is often referring to a principal, superintendent, administrator, etc., and although they do have a significant role in establishing this culture, it is everyone’s responsibility.  I have heard teachers become frustrated with others on staff, yet when you work with them to address others, often they are fearful of saying something to a colleague.  To me, silence is consensus.

I read this post from Jamie Notter this morning and he shared a video from the Australian Army Chief talking about the issue of sexual harassment in their military.  The Chief shared this short but powerful quote:

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

Notter followed up with some of his own thoughts:

We all create the culture we’re in. Our actions, our words, even our thoughts. People in leadership roles often have the opportunity to leverage those words, thoughts, and actions, due to the attention they get, but we all are creating the culture every day. Be intentional about it. Be clear about what is valued and what drives success. And choose to behave consistently with that understanding, even if that feels like the harder choice in the moment.

I have always believed that the first place we always need to look is at ourselves before we starting talking about the deficiencies of others.  I have been guilty of this as I assume many of you are that are reading this post, but we still have to make a concerted effort to look inward first.

Someone said that when we point one finger at someone else, we have three pointing back at ourselves (who knows what your thumb is doing!).  Culture is something that starts with individuals before it becomes the norm.

I heard this story on a motivational mix that I was listening to recently and thought I would share it (paraphrased).

Two young boys were skating on ice when all of a sudden, one of them fell through and got trapped under.  His friend started to punch the ice in hopes of breaking it but could not get through.  In desperation, the friend climbed a tree and broke off a huge branch,  came back down the tree and started smashing the ice, eventually breaking it and miraculously saving his friend.

As emergency services came after the boy was safe, they sat in amazement and wondered how the little boy was able to break off the branch, smash the ice and save his friend.  As they were sharing their amazement, an old man walked up and said, “the boy was able to do it because there was no one here that told him he couldn’t.”

Pretty powerful story for what we do in both administration and teaching.  How many times has a great idea or thought been extinguished by simply telling someone that it wasn’t possible?

I am reading a few books right now, and one of them is Phil Jackson’s, ”Eleven Rings: One Soul to Success“.  To say that I respect what he has done (as a coach) would be an understatement, but what I find really powerful is not what he has done, but how he has done it.  As the winningest coach in NBA history (11 championships), I loved this quote:

It takes a number of critical factors to win an NBA championship, including the right mix of talent, creativity, intelligence, toughness, and, of course, luck. But if a team doesn’t have the most essential ingredient—love—none of those other factors matter.

As more businesses are seeing the importance of focusing on the human aspect of their organizations and seeing the value of people, there is a trend that seems to be happening in education to move towards turning everything into “numbers” and become “data-driven”.

So what happens when your sole focus is on numbers?

“…it’s institutionalized with No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top; teach to the test – worst possible way of teaching. But it is a disciplinary technique. Schools are designed to teach the test. You don’t have to worry about students thinking for themselves, challenging, raising questions. And you see it down to the lowest level of detail. I give a lot of talks in communities and places where people are concerned about education and I’ve had teachers come up to me and say afterwards, you know, I teach sixth grade. A little girl came up after class and said she was interested in something that came up in class, and wanted to know how to look into it. And I tell her, you can’t do it; you got to study for the test. Your future depends on it; my salary depends on it.” Noam Chomsky

When we always focus on numbers, we have kids learning about things that they don’t care about, in hopes that they will get a certain “grade” to justify our work.  The problem is we lose to many kids when we focus on them as a number, instead of just focusing on them.

Data is important, but schools should always be “people-driven”.  It is at the heart of what we do, and who we are.

I recently saw the movie “The Internship” (which was a great movie in 2005), that had some funny moments, but actually shared a really cool practice done at Google when hiring new applicants called “The Layover Test”.  In an interview about the movie, Shawn Levy (the director) discussed the process:

It’s something they actually have in their interview process and it is at the end of the day, beyond what school the kid went to, beyond GPA, etc., who would you rather be stuck in an airport bar with on a six-hour flight delay?  They call it the layover test…So Google often accepts people employees and interns with kind of outside that Silicon Valley box way of thinking…

This made me think a lot about the way that we hire in education contrasted with the talking of being creative in the way that we teach school.

As a university student, I remember people in my class that were “average” in their marks, but were amazing teachers.  Yet when many of the jobs opened up, the students with the top marks in school would often get interviews and positions.  Seeing some of these candidates teach, they knew all of the right answers, but they had a lot of trouble relating to people.

When I ended up in administration, that memory stuck with me, so I wouldn’t even look at marks (other than that they graduated), and I would just talk to them.  I had a few questions, but I wanted my time spent with them to be a conversation.  It was more important to get to see how they interacted, as opposed to how they answered questions that often had a generic answer.  I guess at the time, I was trying to do a shortened version of the “layover” test.  Those “interviews” were an opportunity for me to not only learn about the candidate, but hopefully learn.  I wanted to hear some new ideas and grow from the experience as well.

Shouldn’t that we be the type of people that we want to hire? The one’s that push our thinking not the one’s that are able to recite it?

In this work, I have realized how truly important the role of principal is in building, not only in creating a positive culture, but an innovative one.  These schools continuously strive to understand the changes happening in our world to not only catch up, but to lead the way in providing amazing learning opportunities for our students.  Often times, as the principal goes, so does the culture of the school.  This is not to say that individual teachers can not be leading the way within the school themselves, but this goes back to the notion of “pockets of innovation” as opposed to a “culture of innovation”.  It is unlikely for an entire school to be “pushing the edge” if the principal or administrative team is not helping to pave the way for their community as they learn alongside of them.

Due to the observations of the past few years, I have decided to create a visual that discusses the correlation of the school mindset on technology innovation in learning, and the alignment it has with administrator support, professional development, and the corresponding hardware/infrastructure within the school/classroom.  Although what I have created is not an exact science, you will often see the overall belief of the school community align with many of these practices.

I have colour-coded the graphic so it is not confused with a rubric”, but more to show alignment between beliefs and practices.  The graphic is below (first draft).

If you are interested, you can get the full graphic on Flickr, as well as access to the Google Document where it was created (thanks to Jesse McLean for helping to edit this!).  Please feel free to share and use this within your own work or share any of your thoughts.

As I was listening to someone talk about “Digital Citizenship” practices in their school district, I wondered if this was really setting the bar too low in our practices within our schools.  As I think more about our world, and what kids have to deal with, it is pretty tough for them to just be “kids” and screw up the same way we did.  They live in a totally different world where many will “google” them before an interview, and because of something that they have done at the age of 16 or 17, they might lose a job.  If that was true when I was 17, I have no idea where I would be today.  I had the ability to screw up but the mindset was not to share your life publicly.  Now I believe that we have to be empathetic and give our kids some leeway and understanding for their mistakes, but does everyone feel this way?

The standards for kids aren’t just really high for what they do online, but what they do offline as well.  It is easy to do something inappropriate when you are sitting with friends, have one of your buddies record it on their phone, and share it with the world.  It reminds me of the time that a girl fell into a fountain while texting and it was posted for the world to see.  Something unintentional that happened offline now haunts her online without her permission to post.

We can look at this and realize that kids don’t have the way we did and feel bad for them…

Or…

We can also realize that our kids have opportunities that we never had.

Remember the movie “Pay it Forward”?  One of the big ideas from the movie was that doing something kind for others, and eventually, AMAZINGLY, it went around the world.  At that time, that was a pretty cool notion.  Now, when I write this post, anyone in the world can see it immediately.  I have had comments from people in Asia, Australia, Europe, as well as all over North America.  Getting an idea around the world is as easy as pressing “publish”.

So with the unfairness of what our kids deal with and a lot of the privacy that they (often on their accord) give up, are we trying to tip the scales in the other direction?  The idea of being “good” online is not really that inspirational, and reminds me of this quote that I have used before:

“People do not fail in life because they aim too high and miss. They fail in life, because they aim too low and hit.” (Unknown)

I like to think that our kids have an opportunity to make a real difference in our world and I love the idea of “Digital Leadership” to push our students to think of doing something more with social media.  The “Sincere Compliment” video did not only inspire kids in their school, but because it was shared openly, inspired many students/teachers (especially within Parkland School Division)  around the world to do great things for others.  I have seen a seven year old student in our district write one blog post, and receive 43 comments on her first try (some from her, but many from people all over the world).  She is learning at a young age that she has the power to share a message across the world with ease, and I believe if kids realize they have the power to make a difference, they will give it a shot.

This is more than just “existing” and “being good” online, it is about making a difference.  Isn’t that the bar we want to set for our kids, and if they miss, and are only good to one another, aren’t we still better off?

I was teaching a math class probably about 10 years ago, and I remember one of my top students (academically) goofing around and distracting others.  I talked to her about her behaviour, and how although she understood the material, others were having issues and she was disturbing their work.

During the same class, I remember one of my struggling students, who was often a distraction in class, doing extremely well on an assignment.  I went on to praise the student for the effort and how well he worked on this particular assignment.

After class, the “high flyer” in my math class came up to me and said something that has stuck to me for awhile.

“You know, I work my butt off in class, always do well, always help others, yet when I do one thing wrong, you get on my case. You never tell me how good I am at the work that I do, but only get on my case when I do something wrong.  Then you have another student who goofs around all of the time, does no work, and when he does well on one test, you act like you are going to throw him a parade.  Do you think that I don’t like the recognition? It seems really unfair.”

Huh.

I have thought about that conversation so many times since I had it that time and how we treat the people that “excellence” seems to come easy as compared to those that struggle.  I don’t think that we need to forget about giving recognition to students/staff that struggle and then end up doing some great stuff, but we do need to think about the ones that do great stuff all of the time. It is not that they need the recognition to do the work that they have already been doing, it’s just that everyone needs to feel valued no matter how well they do.

Now many people will say that people that always do great things will get awards, money, etc., but I am guessing those awards (I’m not big into awards by the way) seem empty if they don’t feel cared for by those that they see everyday.

How many times have you ignored those students/your staff that do great everyday?  I know I did and that conversation always reminds me that everyone needs to feel valued.

Here is some interesting information from the “Pew Internet & American Life Project” on teen use of social media:

Teens are increasingly sharing personal information on social media sites, a trend that is likely driven by the evolution of the platforms teens use as well as changing norms around sharing. A typical teen’s MySpace profile from 2006 was quite different in form and function from the 2006 version of Facebook as well as the Facebook profiles that have become a hallmark of teenage life today. For the five different types of personal information that we measured in both 2006 and 2012, each is significantly more likely to be shared by teen social media users on the profile they use most often.

• 91% post a photo of themselves, up from 79% in 2006.
• 71% post their school name, up from 49%.
• 71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%.
• 53% post their email address, up from 29%.
• 20% post their cell phone number, up from 2%.

In addition to the trend questions, we also asked five new questions about the profile teens use most often and found that among teen social media users:

• 92% post their real name to the profile they use most often.²
• 84% post their interests, such as movies, music, or books they like.
• 82% post their birth date.
• 62% post their relationship status.
• 24% post videos of themselves.

Huh.

I guess that push from schools teaching kids to be anonymous online hasn’t really been that effective.

How about the following slide?

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Plug Us In

Are we anywhere near that in our work at schools?  I think in PSD70 with our Digital Portfolio Project, we are closer than many, but we still have a lot of work to do.

Maybe instead of continuously pretending kids are staying (or even care to stay)anonymous online, maybe we need to change the conversation and talk to them about being appropriate.

Maybe it is the jet lag and lack of sleep that I have been getting, or my recent talk with the Techlandia crew that really got me thinking about the work that we do as educators and how sometimes it can be overwhelming.  I remember sharing Rita Pierson’s Ted Talk saying that “Every Kid Needs a Champion”, and being inspired by her message.  One of the quotes that stuck out to me was when she said, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.”

What about adults?  Do they get excited to work with people when they don’t feel valued?

I remember someone saying to me that when someone complains about their lack of pay, the pay is not their biggest concern.  I thought about how accurate that is for many people.  I have many teachers that have confided in me that they are pushing the edge yet they do not feel valued or appreciated for their work.  Especially with so many that are sharing what they do, they have told me that others appreciate them, but their own principals never even walk into their classroom.

Doesn’t every adult need a champion as well?

I guess they don’t need a champion, but wouldn’t it make what we do that much better?  Does it not make a difference when you know that the people you work with value and promote the great work that you do?  This doesn’t have to be a boss (although it always should be), but at least someone you work with.

Two questions:

1. Who is your champion?

2. Who are you a champion for?

I think we would be a lot better off if we could easily answer those two questions.

For more from this day, you can check out the entire playlist from my interviews as well as others.  I really liked the idea of taking these short interviews (theirs, not mine) and using them as discussion starters with staff.