This entry is cross-posted at Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irrelevant as a part of a week-long guest blogger project answering the question, "What do Teachers Need from Administrators?"

As a founding member of the Teacher Leaders Network and a guy who is passionate about
trying to stay in the classroom for my entire career, I’ll never forget the
first time that I paged through IEL’s seminal report, Redefining the Teacher as Leader. 

Strange, huh?  People remember lots of “first times”—riding a bike, kissing a
girl, driving a car, landing a job, getting a paycheck—but remembering your first time with a policy
document churned out by an edu-think-tank?

Not so much. 

Maybe that’s why I feel like such an odd duck—a label that my TLN colleagues
and I wear with pride. 

Download Slide_OddDucks

Admittedly, there’s not a lot of teachers whose skirts get blown
up by policy documents. 

But there are TONS of teachers who care deeply about serving as leaders in
their schools and communities, creating what the IEL team writing Redefining
the Teacher as Leader almost a decade ago described as:

“A potentially splendid resource for leadership and reform that is now
being squandered: the experience, ideas, and capacity to lead of the nation’s
schoolteachers” (p. 2).

And there are TONS of edu-experts that argue about
the importance of teacher leadership all the time.  Need a sampling?  Take these
two quotes for a ride:

• "A crying need exists for excellent, practicing teachers to advance---to
  lead---by taking a more formal and explicit role in the supervision and
  improvement of instruction."  Mike
  Schmoker

• "The leadership shortage may be dire, but the leadership development
  potential is great, if only schools and systems will tap into the potential of
  teacher leadership.  Even though 50,000 leaders will retire in the first few
  years that this book is in print, hundreds of thousands of teachers will be at
  the peak of their professional experience."  Douglas
  Reeves

Sadly, I’m here to tell you that the vast majority of our schools
are still squandering the experience, ideas and capacity of our nation’s
schoolteachers. 

In fact, little has changed in most buildings—despite the never-ending rhetoric that surrounds conversations about
teacher leadership.  Most of us teacher leader types are still stuck in a hapless search for organizational juice. 

Need proof? 

Then consider that over half (53) of the 140 teachers I recently surveyed are dissatisfied with the teacher
leadership opportunities available to them and that just under half (49) don’t
believe that teacher leadership is valued in their schools.

Download Infographic_TeacherLeadership

Pretty discouraging, huh?  Teacher
leadership has been an uber-buzzword for so long that you’d think we’d
see more promising trends in these kinds of numbers. 

Now, knowing full well that us odd ducks can be a bit hard to
understand, I had some of my buddies share their thoughts on the kinds
of things that teacher leaders need from administrators. 

Here’s a sampling of what they wrote:

“I need a principal to do more public acknowledgement of the work and effort we've put in.”  David Cohen

“What I wish every administrator knew about
teacher leaders is that whether they're born or made, genuine teacher
leaders are outstanding teachers first and foremost.”  Gail Ritchie

“I would like to be utilized…I would hope
that I could bring a vital perspective to problem solving in the school
and be asked to be involved at that level.”  Heather Wolpert-Gawron

“I need to know that my principal  is a true member of our school.  I need to see his/her face in the hallway, at PLC meetings, and at sporting events.”  Sarah Henchey

“As a teacher leader, I need an adminstrator who trusts me to think independently, make on-the-spot educated decisions, and have the ability to problem solve educational issues.”  Cossondra George

“Teacher leaders need the freedom to try
new things in their classrooms. We are intelligent leaders who are
learning and may hear about things before you do!”  Becky Goerend

“Teachers need…a safe place to wonder in
and personalize their learning. We do not make it easy for students to
learn by making it difficult for teachers to learn.”  Nancy Stuewe

“Teacher Leaders need trust, freedom, and instructional leadership from our administrators.”  Paul Cancellieri

“Teacher leaders need an administrator who
allows others to have input into how to (i) set the direction of the
school, (ii) redesign the organization; and (iii) manage the
instructional program.”  Tania Sterling

“I would say I need to be listened to, and to receive honest and helpful feedback on my ideas.”  Bill Ivey

Interesting stuff, huh?  Basically, what we’re saying is
that teacher leaders need nothing more than the confidence and trust of
their administrators.

And the even better news is that, in my survey of my teacher leader
friends,  "informal words of thanks and praise from principals" rates as
the most important reward necessary for encouraging teacher leadership----placing higher than release time from classroom responsibilities AND additional compensation. 

To put it simply, we're competent and qualified—we're reading as much
as you are, we're studying our craft in deep and meaningful ways, we're
studying organizational theory, we're perfecting our professional
development skills---and putting our knowledge and skills to work ain’t
going to cost you anything more than a willingness to let us lead!

That seems like a good deal to me.

(Can I get an Amen from the choir, please?)

One of the most popular questions that I’m asked by new education bloggers is, “How did you go about growing your audience?”

While page views, subscribers and comments are not the primary metrics that I use to judge the success of my online efforts, seeing new visitors is definitely rewarding—and a result of authenticity, bravery and consistency, three key behaviors described by Amber Mac in Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business (2010).

I figured I’d create a series of posts describing each of these behaviors—and showing what they look like in action on my blog. 

Here’s the first entry, which introduces authenticity as a characteristic of successful education blogs:

Tips for Growing Your Blog’s Audience: Authenticity

For better or for worse, our interactions with businesses have become increasingly impersonal in the past two decades. It seems that each year, we spend more of our lives listening to prerecorded messages or poking our way through websites instead of connecting with real human beings.

This shift has left individuals highly sensitized to poor customer service and distrustful of any organization that they stumble across online.

Breaking through these barriers and building trusting relationships with readers requires demonstrating an authentic desire to listen and to interact with your audiences.

That means if you want to see your blog’s subscriber and page view numbers rise, you’ve got to think of your entries as a part of a larger, ongoing conversation with your readers. Simply crafting new entries without ever engaging readers makes it look like you’re shouting from your very own electronic soapbox, a digital preening behavior that is unlikely to encourage repeat visitors.

Authenticity also means that you have to be willing to share a bit of yourself with your readers. They’ve got to see you as something more than the impersonal reporters and customer service representatives that they’re used to interacting with every day.

Instead, you’ve got to convince them that you’re a “regular guy” that they can imagine knowing in real life. Bloggers who aren’t willing to add personality or voice to their posts aren’t likely to ever develop a significant audience.

To make authenticity a part of your blogging behaviors, try developing a series of posts that are intentionally designed to let your readers know more about who you are and what you value.

Share your passions—and be passionate while doing so. Include honest emotions in your posts early and often. Concentrate on being something more than a blogger to your audience. Instead, be human, with all the strengths and flaws that includes.

Also, remember to add provocative questions to the end of every entry to elicit responses. Then, make sure to follow—and to respond to—the comments that are being added to your posts. Consider using comments from readers to build new entries.

Each of these behaviors shows that you are genuinely interested in learning with—instead of preaching to—your audiences, an important characteristic of the education blogs that gain the largest followings.

Authenticity in Action on The Tempered Radical:

While years of experience as instructors leave most education bloggers prepared to be authentic online, it might be helpful to look at a few examples of authenticity in action on the Tempered Radical:

Letting Readers See Who You Are

http://bit.ly/twitseries

Some of my favorite posts to write on the Tempered Radical are a part of a series that I call, ‘This is Why I Teach.’ TWIT posts were originally designed as a personal reminder of why I love teaching—something that I tend to forget in the grind of a typical school day, week, month or year.

TWIT posts, however, have become much more than personal reminders of the joys of teaching. Instead, they’re honest reflections of who I am as a person—and those honest reflections resonate with readers, helping them to see me as something more than just a blogger.

Converting Comments into New Posts

http://bit.ly/authenticity2

One of my first experiences with authenticity in blogging happened way back in 2006, when edublogging superstar David Warlick cited something I’d written in the comment section of one of his entries in a new post that he had written.

That post was tangible evidence that I’d been heard and that he was listening—and it felt like my very own 15 minutes of fame!

Since then, I try to regularly convert comments into new entries, something I’ve done in this 2007 piece about pulling technology integration efforts off in my middle school classroom.

Converting comments into new posts is a simple way to show readers that their ideas are valued, an important behavior for anyone interested in developing an audience.

What’s interesting is that most of these behaviors are just common sense, aren’t they?  Authentic individuals are embraced whether they’re working online or in our workrooms.

Another interesting question is how authentic are the communications shared by your school? 

Are your principals and district communication specialists working to come across as genuinely interested in their audiences, or are your messages as cold and impersonal as the messages that leave you frustrated with businesses? 

I spent the better part of the day yesterday exploring infographics on the Digital Buzz blog (see here and here), and in the process, I decided that I wanted to start making infographics.

Here's my first:

Download Infographic_CellphonesinSchools  

Whaddya' think?  It's simple--but that's the whole point of an infographic, right? 

I chose to use PowerPoint when making this simply because it's a tool I know I'll have access to in school--so if I can figure out how to make good looking infographics with PowerPoint, I'll be able to show my kids how to do it, too.

Looking forward to your feedback---and I hope you can use this slide somewhere in your work.

It’s hard to believe, but our focused three-day conversation with Adam Garry and Meg Ormiston—authors of Teaching the iGeneration and Creating a Digital Rich Classroom respectively—is quickly coming to an end.

The end result is a conversation that will challenge your thinking!  Take a few minutes exploring the summaries from the first and second days of our conversation and then poke through our thread online. 

You might also be interested in the comments that I found most interesting today:

On slide 2, Dan Greenberg—who has started a ton of interesting strands in this conversation—talks about all of the devices that today’s students typically own but that we don't allow them to use in our schools. 

Dan’s point was echoed on slide 4 by Renee Moore, who works in a system that struggles to meet the hardware needs of its schools.  Easing restrictions prohibiting students from using their own tools in schools, Renee believes, might just help schools integrate technology in tough budget times.

For me, Dan and Renee’s points resonate:  As mobile devices—cell phones, iPods, iTouches—become more and more widely available, shouldn’t we find ways to incorporate those tools into the work we’re doing with students? 

What message do we send to students about our respect for their learning styles when we ban the devices that they’ve adopted from our buildings? 

Also, how do we start conversations that might just convince skeptics that the tools our kids have embraced have learning potential in the classroom?

On slide 5, Dan Greenberg and Matt Townsely work together to make the distinction between "the effective use of digital tools" and "the use of technology in the classroom." 

While that may seem like a subtle semantic distinction, it's actually a huge shift in thinking, isn't it?  I wonder how many teachers, administrators and district level leaders can really tell the difference. 

My guess is that in the majority schools, using technology in the classroom—whether or not that use is effective—is celebrated and given priority simply because so few people can define just what “effective use” looks like in action. 

Maybe that’s the first step that school leaders need to begin taking.  Providing opportunities for teachers to see progressive lessons in action and then spotlighting the differences with traditional practices could build systemic awareness of responsible instruction.

Also on slide 5, Mark Clemente—a good friend and TLN colleague who is working as a teacher on loan with the National Institute of Aerospace this year—wondered about the consequences of our desire to have control in our classrooms when he wrote:

When a tech lesson fails, (the common perception is that) control has been lost and the teacher has demonstrated that they don't know it all.  I don't agree with either idea but I think it is still a prevalent mindset in K12 education.

Interesting point, isn’t it?  For whatever reason, the “we’ve-got-to-be-in-charge-all-the-time” mindset still has a firm grip on our collective teaching minds.

What would it take for teachers to feel comfortable with the "loss of control" that defines the best student-centered classrooms?  What's keeping us from feeling comfortable in situations where we're not in charge?

Eric Townsely—a middle school principal from Iowa—introduced us to something he calls the “umbrella effect” on slide 7. 

As Eric explains it, that’s the tendency in most schools for teachers to expect that once one teacher gets a new tool—an IWB, a set of student responders, laptops and data projectors—ALL teachers will be given the same tools.

While I think there's real value in the argument that providing technology is the first step towards seeing our teachers use digital tools to create new learning opportunities, I wonder if school and/or district-wide rollouts leave us limited.

Shouldn't we hold back some of our tech budgets, spending that cash on high quality PD and/or release time for teachers to document their work with digital solutions instead of providing everyone with the same hardware or software solutions? 

Would we have a greater impact if we invested strategically in a handful of teachers in our district or school and used them as models of what could be?

Interesting stuff, huh?  And questions that any school working towards teaching for tomorrow are going to have to wrestle with at some point or another! 

Now, our conversation is officially over, but I’ll leave it open for commenting until the end of the day tomorrow.  That way, you can sneak in to leave any final thoughts that you want to share.  Meg and Adam will be stopping by once more as well, so if you’ve got specific questions for them, get ‘em up quick!

Hope this all makes sense to you---and thank you for being a part of my professional growth.  I love listening to and learning from y’all.

So we’ve made it through Day 2 of our conversation on teaching for tomorrow with digital change experts Adam Garry and Meg Ormiston, authors of Teaching the iGeneration and Creating a Digital Rich Classroom respectively, and I’m loving the time that we’re spending together!

Every time that I stop by the conversation, I have my own thinking challenged, that’s for sure.  And that’s what I love the most about the Web 2.0 world:  I get to learn from people that I’ve never even met.

Too cool.

If you haven’t had a chance to join us in Voicethread yet and you’re looking for a way to catch up on the conversation quickly, consider checking out this summary of yesterday’s interactions. 

Also, here are some highlights from today’s discussion:

Steve Kabachia—a teacher of English Language Arts and Humanities in Central Alberta—started an interesting strand on the very first slide of our presentation when he asked how teachers working with Web 2.0 and mobile technologies in the classroom can best deal with the support and/or interference from stakeholders. 

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?  In my experiences as a teacher using technology, the only given is that there is ALWAYS going to be support AND interference from stakeholders! 

Sometimes that’s the well-intentioned principal who spends a ton of money on the wrong tool and other times that’s the parent who refuses to embrace the potential in lessons built from digital opportunities. 

So what lessons do y’all have for Steve?  What steps do you take to build both awareness and support for new teaching practices in your buildings?

Paul—otherwise known as Mr. Monkey—started one of the most important strands in our entire conversation on the second slide when he argues that the biggest difference that he sees in his classroom today as compared to his classroom yesterday is between the ability levels of high and low performing students. 

He wonders how we can use technology to improve the basic literacy skills that so many of our students are currently lacking.  Our worry shouldn't be with those who are already academically successful, but instead with those who are struggling to succeed. 

Does your school get that balance right when they’re talking about teaching for tomorrow?

So often, our conversations are full of AMAZING activities that would extend the learning of even our highest achieving students—but will the same opportunities improve the skills and abilities of students who our schools have traditionally failed to reach?

On slide four, Hether—an art teacher working with digital tools—raises a point that can’t be emphasized enough in conversations about teaching with technology:  The key is finding the right technology tool to go along with the right content and the right learning outcomes. 

When people make poor tool-centric choices—trying to use Skype to collaborate with classes too many time zones away, trying to use blogs for ongoing collaborative conversations between kids—their projects are disasters. 

Her ideas are extended on slide five by Dan Greenberg—a PD provider in Houston—who goes as far as to argue that conversations about new tools might just be hindering our efforts to rethink teaching and learning in our classrooms when he writes, “Are the tools not allowing us to have conversations about effective teaching?”

Great points, aren’t they?  And important reminders for anyone wanting to be digital change agents in their buildings.

So often,  we forget that tools and technology haven't changed the fundamental skills and behaviors that help a teacher to be successful.  Why hasn't that message gotten across to more people?  Why do you think tools remain at the center of so many conversations about teaching for tomorrow?

The strand of the day, however, was started on slide seven by my TLN hero Renee Moore—a remarkably passionate educator who has spent her entire career working in the high needs schools of the Mississippi Delta—who wondered whether our principals had the kinds of specific skills and training to effectively spot good teaching in the 21st Century when she wrote:

Highly engaged student learning activities do look messy, and sometimes the evaluator has to be de-briefed by the teacher to really understand what s/he just saw!

Unfortunately, not all teachers get that opportunity, and some have been unfairly chastised, even punished which then intimidates others from even trying. Is better or more specific training of administrators the answer?

Her thoughts were echoed on slide eight by Mr. Monkey, who wrote:

I find myself constantly feeling pressure to abandon attempts to reinforce "21st century skills" (even though many of them have been critical for decades) because my effectiveness is measured by a different yardstick. 

How do we motivate teachers to teach in this new way without new assessments?

Great points, huh?  And points that really have me worried.  There’s such dissonance between what we’re SAYING we want students to know and be able to do and what we’re EXPECTING kids to know and be able to do at the end of the school year.

Has anyone had any luck in bridging this saying/expecting gap in your schools, districts or states?  What actions can we take in our own little worlds to push for more responsible evaluation of both teachers and students?

If you haven't stopped by our conversation yet, you should!  Here's the direct link.  I guarantee that you'll learn something.

If you have stopped by already, here's your day three challenge:  Rather than posting something new to the conversation today, go in and find a comment made by another participant to respond to.  It could be something that made you think.  It could be something you completely disagree with.  It could be something that you want to know more about.

Make tomorrow a day of interaction by interacting with an existing participant.  After all, that's what good collaborative dialogue looks like in action, right?