I walked in the door to our apartment ten minutes ago, primed to scan through Google Reader before closing my eyes for the night after a four-hour drive home from Minneapolis. I spent the weekend with aunts and uncles, my grandma, my parents, and my wife celebrating our annual Baseball Weekend, which includes a St. Paul Saints game, a grill-out lunch, a Twins game, and the celebration of my dad's and my shared birth date: July 12.I had taken time enough to check on my feeds this weekend to see a couple of posts stemming from Dr. Scott Mcleod's Leadership Day 2009. Before digging through the Twitter hashtag #leadershipday09
I'll be reading more thoroughly the four posts from Google Reader that I starred: Evan Abbey, Richard Byrne, Sylvia Martinez, and Kevin Jarret.
My Take
There are aspects of teaching where I consider myself a leader, and there are others where I am happy to be a follower. A year into my career as an educator, I know what I perceive to be my strengths and my weaknesses. I know I have much more to gain from others than I have to offer -- right now. I take as much pride in my ability to follow as my ability to lead.
Leadership is about goals and vision. What I respect about those I consider great leaders is their ability to be organizers of those two components. I don't expect my leaders to be the ones providing all the goals and all the vision. I expect them to pull from those who are following, combine with their own goals and their own vision, and create opportunity for students. In an educational setting, the leaders I gravitate toward are the ones who are student-focused.
This past Tuesday, two administrators, five teachers, and I gathered at Panera to discuss Literacy 2.0. This was the fourth of our 7:30 a.m. meetings. What started as a one-laptop affair a month ago, steadily grew to the point that we all had laptops on this fateful day. The administrators took the lead, deciding that "today is going to be the day" that we all figured out Diigo, Google Reader, and Google Docs. These administrators had never heard of any of those three web tools a month earlier, but, because of their goal for our teachers to become the 21st century learners we want our students to be, had taken on the vision of learning in a new way.
5 hours later, I left for an appointment. At 3:30 that afternoon (8 hours after their Tech Day at Panera began), I got an email from my principal saying that the last of them were finally packing up, that she had never eaten two meals at the same restaurant in one day, and that she was able to learn so much because of the mistakes she was able to make and the group of learners around her, making mistakes and learning from them together.
That is leadership.
