Success At the Core

Reading!Writing!Thinking and Digesting all these new ideas and train of thought (sigh).  That seems to be the cycle that I have been finding myself in now.  Recently found a new website that is blowing my mind away called Success At the Core. (http://www.successatthecore.com)  Basically it is a set of free modules that engage leadership development around school improvement.  The combination of readings, videos, and reflective activities develop knowledge about issues student outcomes and build team members’ skills to  work on those challenges together.  It's totally free!!!!!

Dennis Sparks, stated"School will improve by developing teamwork, real-time professional learning, and system and school cultures that allow new ideas and practices to grow and flourish." The kind of teamwork based real-time professional learning he is advocating for leaders is very different from the "sit and get  sessions still commonly experienced by most school and district administrators.  Such  activities--- which  sometimes are little more than a series of speaker who offer their view on a variety of subject--are often markedly separate from leaders core day to day responsibilities, seldom build on one another to develop complex understandings and skills, do little  to promote teamwork withing the school system and reinforce the mistaken not that good staff development is a series of  "presenters" who convey ideas and research to relatively passive recipients. (Spark,2009)

As advocated by Gardner the five kinds of minds can and should work synergistically.  If  all that is being written in the current literature concerning leadership, teamwork, relevant professional learning and change is driving us to what LEADERSHIP can and should be--- I believe that we must make a paradigm shift of how we train, induct and retain our leaders and teachers.  Rethink what constitutes achievement and success and THEN STAND OUR GROUND !!!!------ against the powers that be-------radical thinking!!!!!

Out of The Box Thinking

This past week was whir wind of activities for me!!!!  Between school, home and studies I'm trying to figure where the week went.  As I research and read for my Literature Review, I am being drawn to the same common themes and  issues of  leadership.Specifically the three that have run through all of my readings, which consist of the idea of shared leadership (distributed leadership), analysis of practice, and teacher and principal perception.

 In an  article entitled Managing to Lead: Reframing School Leadership and Management,Spillane stated, " Leadership and management make a a difference in increasing school productivity and turning around struggling schools.  But common ways of thinking about leadership and managing limit how we think about the work.  Too often we place the burden for saving a failing school on the principal, perpetuating a view of successful school leaders as heroes and less successful ones as failures. 

As I consider Gardner's Five  Minds For the Future and current challenges and problems we are currently facing in education, consideration must be given to how we think and approach these issues.  "If we are to address  the many issues that are currently in need of  much solving  we will have to go beyond  existing knowledge and synthesis to pose  new questions , offer new solutions, fashion works that stretch existing genres or configure new ones; creation builds on one or more established disciplines and requires an informed field to make judgments of quality acceptability." (Gardner, 2000).  "School leaders and policy makers can change this state of affairs by becoming  savvy--  more discriminating, more creative and true out of the box thinker. " (Spillane, 2009)