Learning Community – Page 2

Tag: Learning Community (page 2 of 3)

Socratic Seminar & Essential Questions (Instructional Strategy)

We are completing a unit in my American Studies class on Reconstruction. The students are participating in a WebQuest called ReconstructionQuest. Besides the students playing their role from the WebQuest and giving a speech, they are participating in a Socratic Seminar on the unit’s essential questions.

Socratic Seminars usually center around students discussing their reading responses from the provided text, so I decided they would generate the text themselves. With four essential questions, the class formed four table teams where they spent 30 minutes discussing, answering, and recording their responses in a Word document. Each table was then assigned one specific question to review and prepare to share.

Depending on class size, We had one or two members from each table join the inner circle discussion. The assigned table team for question one has their response projected on the screen for everyone to read and react to. The other students sat in the outside circle, listening and raising their hands occasionally to join the inner circle discussion during breaks. Each table team sent a new student to the inner discussion circle as we moved through the questions.

It quickly became apparent that we would need a whole other class period as the students took the conversation in different directions, going deeper and deeper to build their understanding. It was incredibly gratifying to see students make connections in the learning to their lives, Morocco, and international current events. An excellent value added to this learning activity was the opportunity for students to model good listening skills while staying focused and on task.

Here are the essential questions we discussed:

•After conflict, how to find and keep the peace?

•How can conflict lead to change?

•How to bring about change…deliberately or quickly?

•What are the foundation components of a healthy society?

How Can We Help Teachers Take More Risks in their Teaching?

April 9, 2009 / David Carpenter / 3 Comments

John Mikton will join Jeff and me to talk about this question on the Shifting Our Schools podcast taking place tonight. To answer this question, the starting point is to work with teachers individually to ask them what needs to happen to help them try new ideas in their teaching and learning. Large workshops or sending folks to conferences are not the starting point to help build a culture of risk-taking. Large-scale PD efforts can provide models of shifted practices and get folks excited to try new things, but it still comes back to each teacher in their classroom trying new ideas in their teaching. It is helpful to talk to teachers a few weeks after returning from a conference to see how things are going in trying some of the practices they saw at the conference. They often need to act on their excitement of learning new approaches due to barriers in their schools.

We know the list of barriers often affecting teachers in many ways, not just in not taking risks (i.e., not enough time, too much to cover in the curriculum, assigned tasks that don’t support student learning, parent expectations, etc.). Experience tells me that by talking with individual teachers, finding practices they are confident in using in their classrooms, and then asking what they see as engaging in other classrooms or their professional reading, we, as learning specialists/coaches (instructional technologists, librarians, learning support, GATE facilitators, curriculum coordinators, etc.) can then help them take small first steps to try new things starting within their area of comfort.

One theme that runs through many of our podcasts about shifting practices and schools is leadership. While learning specialists can make a huge difference in supporting teachers and learning in the classroom, our administrators can help push the shift by modeling risk-taking by setting a tone for the school that trying new ideas is expected. By communicating to the larger community through various communication avenues (e.g., blogs, email, Twitter, various presentation tools in parent meetings, etc.), the administrator takes risks with new technology while inviting parents to understand and expect risk-taking as part of the school culture. Celebration of teachers and students taking risks should be central to the shift in culture. While much of the focus will be on successful risk-taking, we must highlight when the results didn’t quite work out and learning took place. 🙂

Let’s work with individuals while having the community assess the nature of our current school culture. In that case, we can gather the information needed to create an action plan to build a climate that supports risk-taking. While this process might take some time, if we start immediately by having our learning specialists/coaches work with teachers to share their opinions about barriers and needed actions for support while having our administrators lead by example, we can start helping educators take more risks in their teaching.

Learning & Leading Article Follow UP

December 12, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

The editors of Learning and Leading with Technology are publishing an article my wife and I authored in their current issue entitled “All Aboard! Integrating Technology Through Curriculum Review”. It draws upon work at the Hong Kong International School Upper Primary between 2001-2005 to create a systematic way to review curriculum while integrating information and communication literacies (ICL).

Several of my posts over the past few months offered questions for school leaders to consider as they develop their procedures for creating their curriculum review system.

We edited down the current L & L article from a procedure paper I wrote at the start of the process and added to it as we improved the system over the years. Here is a link to that original paper, which offers many “how to’s” and shares many of our takeaways from developing the procedures.

Curriculum Review Procedure Paper

Community and Progressive Education

October 13, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the eight values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning, & Taking Kids Seriously) encompassing being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to make the value a part of our culture at HIS.

How do we foster a sense of community when kids are at so many places academically?
How do 1:1 laptops help build and hurt the community at HIS?
Define communities first, as in school, parents, digital, etc.
How do we build community?
Morning Gatherings, Advisory – enough structure for the community?
How can we be more involved in Hsinchu and the great world community? Connection to goals for citizenship.
Role of competition
How do we incorporate progressive educational ideas into conservative and traditional communities?
How to further foster the connections between old students and younger as well as elementary students?

Validate New Educators

August 9, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

New educators to international schools worldwide are arriving at their new homes with excitement and trepidation as they go through the transition process. Questions will come to mind.

“What will it be like living in this new country?” “What adventures await me?” “Will I connect with my fellow teachers?” “Are they open to collaboration?” “Will my creativity be allowed to grow here?” “Will we have a strong learning community?”

With human resources staff working overtime to help new teachers set up their new homes and become familiar with their neighborhoods, we must help with the emotional transition within our schools. Setting up new teachers in their homes is just half the transition process.

The second half of the transition is the support of new educators to feel accepted, appreciated, and validated for what they bring to the learning community. This seems obvious, but think about how fast-paced the start of school can be and how quickly we often start rolling without building community and reaching out to new staff members for their opinions.

From day one, we need to ask our new partners in learning to share their backgrounds and to expand upon what they can bring to the collaboration table. What were some of their most successful lessons? What units of study at their previous school hit a home run for the students? What areas of professional learning are they most excited about?

Then, pull up the curriculum map for the coming year and share the first unit of study. What worked from last year? What do you want to improve? Does your new team member(s) have any ideas to help enhance the unit? Reach out and VALIDATE the new teachers. This effort helps improve your lessons and supports the second part of the transition process by helping our new staff members feel valued.

This process also helps break down any THWADI (That is how we have always done it.) that might be a part of your school culture. While customs and protocols support the school’s mission, we must be open to new ideas and new eyes looking at how we do things. 🙂

To go a step further for coming years, think about setting up a professional development wiki each spring in your virtual learning environment/classroom management tool where returning staff members and new hires for the coming school year can post what they would like at the start of the year professional development to be about and what they could share with the community. Start asking the new folks for their opinions and expertise before they arrive!

New eyes mean new perspectives offering opportunities to improve our schools. Work to make the most of them.

Student Exhibitions

June 7, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Hsinchu International School (HIS) follows the common principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). One of these principles is the “demonstration of mastery” via the Exhibition. The Exhibition is a public demonstration of student learning. Our 8th and 10th-grade students did their Exhibitions this past week before fellow students, faculty, and parents. Next year, we will have our first graduating class who will join the other two groups in Exhibition evenings as they move on from Institute I (grades 7 & 8 ) and Institute II (grades 9 & 10).

I was very impressed with our students, especially noting that most of them are ESL students who come to HIS with minimal experience presenting before an audience. They quickly have the opportunity to craft their presentation skills as HIS students routinely share their learning from their class Expeditions during our twice-weekly all-school gatherings.

The 8th graders focused their presentations on how they were making progress toward reaching our Five Student Learning Outcomes. They used examples from their classes using images, video, audio recordings, and text to document their learning. As one of the Learning Outcomes is “Effective Communicator,” I especially enjoyed how the students used good speaking skills, authentic images, and excellent design in their presentations.

The Design Process

April 23, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Jeffrey Sachs was a guest on the NPR “Science Friday” last week, where he continued the conversation on how he believes we can eliminate poverty worldwide. He focused on how technological advances will help us deal with economic growth and pollution. Sachs spoke about how we use research and design to develop programs to deal with problems worldwide. He shared his process for designing solutions to problems that he termed “RDDD,” which reminded me of instructional technologists’ design work.

www.amazon.com

On a side note, a terrific book that reviews studies of efforts to go into communities worldwide to bring about change by groups like the Peace Corps, UN agencies, etc., is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It was a textbook in one of my graduate courses that consistently reminded the reader just how difficult it is to bring about change and have it diffuse through a community. 🙂

As an instructional technologist working with teachers to design curriculum, I follow a model similar to Sachs’ that starts with Understanding. I work to understand the teacher’s and student’s needs and the specific learning outcomes the teacher aims for. The next step after gathering the needed information, which sometimes includes observation and working with the students by teaching the Information and Communication Literacy (ICL) curriculum, is to Analyze the information from an instructional and assessment viewpoint. Research comes into play by seeing what other teachers did with the lesson in the past and by checking my Web resources to see how lessons posted there could help design this one. I then Develop the lesson with the teacher or adapt what they already have in place. The teacher then implements the lesson, or we team teach it if ICL skills are involved and the teacher wants the support. We then Evaluate and Refine the lesson for future use. I remember this process, Understand-Analyze-Research-Develop-Implement-Evaluate-Refine (UARDIER), by appreciating my teaching partner with the phrase “You are dear!”.

Sach’s model, Research-Develop-Demonstrate-Diffusion (RDDD), adds the final “D” for Diffusion, which happens when classroom lessons are designed where the assessment data shows real student learning. Word gets out to fellow teachers, and the instructional and assessment strategies spread from one classroom to another.

Looking at the bigger picture of planning professional development programs, the key word is plan. This means getting instructional leaders on the PD development team who know how to design programs that originate from the needs of the teachers and students. As I have posted before, PD that works happens consistently weekly on one and in trim collaborative grade level or department teams once a learning community is created. The more we can individualize to personalize each teacher’s needs and desires, the better.

One-shot quarterly PD days, non-differentiated, for all the teachers at once, usually involving just direct instruction, can sometimes do more harm than good, especially when learning technology skills. Throwing various software and Web 2.0 tools scattershot at a weary group of teachers on a Friday afternoon can lead to their feeling confused and inadequate, which can move into frustration and potentially anger. Yikes!

Adult learners need to bring new learning into the context of their experiences while having the time to practice the new skills to gain comfort and to see if they have practical value. Dr. Sach’s model starts with “Research,” which means connecting to the users and getting to know their needs. While Dr. Sach’s acronym might be shorter than the one I follow, our two models have much in common.

What Does a Shifted School Look Like?

April 16, 2008 / David Carpenter / 1 Comment

We spend some time on the Shifting Our School podcast chatting about ” shift ” examples that usually apply to instructional and assessment strategies. Let’s look at what a shifted school might look like and what drives it.

An Example: Our Episode 8 podcast with Brent Loken about Hsinchu International School offered several examples of how a shifted school is structured and organized to help meet its goals. So what are those goals, and how are they shifted from the way many schools do business?

Comparing Non-Shifted to Shifted: Let’s start with the chart many people refer to when they compare the “normal” 20th-century practices to what many call 21st-century learning. The chart directly compares how schools and classrooms can shift at the 21st Century Schools site.

Focus on Thinking Skills and Being Independent Learners: When we talk about 21st Century Skills, we are referring to the skill set needed for our students as future workers and citizens who will, in many cases, make several geographical moves as well as multiple career changes in their lifetimes. We also understand that entire fields of study and occupations will be new as we advance scientifically and technologically. Thus, our school focus must be to teach skills that help our students become adaptable and flexible self-learners ready for continual learning.

Check out the 21st Century Skills site to learn more about these skills. A shifted school also works with Habits of Mind, character strengths, and life skills to move our students from the 20th-century dependent learner waiting on teachers for direction and information to the shifted version of an independent learner using critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, problem-solving, and creativity skills to make meaning, collaborate and share one’s own constructed ideas (as opposed to those of the teacher).

Focus on 21st Century Literacies: As we talk about the 21st Century Skills, we also include various literacies (i.e., information, cultural, visual, & media). To get more information on the literacies, see the 21st Century Literacies site. This list can be expanded as our learning communities talk more about understanding how we interact with and interpret information. We use musical literacy in making video projects, working to match the music to the message of the visuals, text, and spoken words. The National Educational Technology Standards for Students NETS also contains various thinking and communication skills and literacies, including choosing the right technology tool for the task and the product to be created.

Other Opinions: The blogosphere is rich with comments about what our schools should be doing. The term “shift” has gained traction as it refers to the movement from an educational system in the U.S. focused on 20th-century employment and citizenship needs to one now focused on our ever-changing, information-rich 21st-century world. We use the term “Learning 2.0” to cover what learning should look like in our shifted schools. Another term providing the same function is “School 2.0”. In both cases, the “2.0” denotes the second or subsequent generation, as you might have heard described in Web 2.0 for our current read/write version of the Web. One area where you can read and add to the discussion is a wiki entitled School 2.0, started by blogger Steve Hargadon. Take a look and add your thoughts about what a shifted school looks like.

How to Shift?

April 6, 2008 / David Carpenter / 1 Comment

This week, the Shifting Our School podcast will tackle the essential question of “How to shift?”. Our previous shows with other EQs delved into discussions that connected this overriding theme to our podcast. So, it is time to combine some thoughts from practical experience.

Brent Loken, the Director of Curriculum and Innovation at Hsinchu International School (HIS), will be our guest for the show. He will offer details about one approach to helping schools make the shift to focusing on the learning of 21st-century skills, constructivist learning instructional strategies, and the variety of interpretations of what School 2.0 can look like. Brent and the leadership team of Grant Ruskovich, Ken Willis, and Catherine Chen took a top-down leadership-driven approach, working with the school board, parents, students, and faculty to define what they wanted their school to be about. This “about” happens to be a significantly shifted school.

As an instructional technologist working under more “normal” conditions with pockets of shifted teachers and often non-committed Leadership towards shifting to School 2.0, I will share some of the practices that I found helpful to move a school I previously worked at to being more shifted. While I list these practices as helpful in guiding a school to Learning 2.0 outcomes, they are accepted strategies familiar to our schools. They can be standard practice in managing organizations.

Administrative Leadership: Despite numerous reasons, administrators can find it challenging to commit to all the change and transition that goes with shifting a school. We must have the administrators at the helm if we are to shift our schools. Our last SOS podcast for the school year in June will look into what barriers administrators face in bringing about change in their schools. As this is a massive topic on its own, I won’t comment further and ask that if anyone is reading this post, tune into our podcast with Brent Loken to hear one leader provide the vision and action steps that administrators can take to shift their schools.

Conversation-Listening-Designing-Action-ASSESSMENT: Deciding where a school community wants to go should start with conversations around the question, “What is learning?”. Additional questions are: What does it look like? What skills will our graduating students have? What will they need to be able to do to be global citizens in an unpredictable world? What is teaching? We can then use the UbD backward process to develop our program plan, action steps, and accountability protocols. This relates to a personal discussion with educators about their teaching philosophy.

Time, along with care and attentive listening, is needed as we grow our learning community and validate one another. Most of us as educators are at some point involved in strategic or other program-building plans. We worked with parents, teachers, administrators, and sometimes students to decide what our mission should be and what outcomes we want our students to attain from our schools. These development processes have documented procedures to find the “how to” steps quickly. I cannot value enough the importance of listening, real attentive listening, which can lead to proper understanding and help move the process along.

Planning comes into play, along with action steps to put all the hard work into action in our classrooms. The part of the process that I find left out for numerous reasons is accountability. This is another huge topic that deserves a great deal of attention. I will say here that if a school is to shift to whatever goals it sets, one needs to take all that energy from the start of the development process to the action and assessment stages. We must answer, “Are we reaching our goals?” and adapt accordingly. Accountability is key.

Defining, Discussing, and Understanding of School/Learning 2.0: This practice ties into the planning process of a school community’s programs. Plenty of charts, posts, and articles contrast what and how we teach with a 20th-century approach to the potential 21st-century version. The Framework for 21st Century Skills website lists the skills, and now, the Route 21 education section provides a terrific place to start the education and understanding effort with one’s school community. The next step is to define what Web 2.0 tools with their strange names do for the learning community without any expectations for learning or using them.

Work to take away the lack of understanding. As an instructional technology program develops around individual and team (i.e., elementary grade level teams, middle school teams & high school departments) needs, you can design a differentiated learning program based on those individual and group adult learning needs in your school’s learning network.

Time: This is usually a top-of-the-list issue at any organization. We often need to build in the time or the procedures to follow through on our plans, making the work that goes with shifting our schools an additional task added to overloaded teachers’ workloads. Time must be structured for the activities that go into the shifting process, taking away other items from teachers’ plates and giving them time during the school day to focus on the shifting. The shifting process needs a great deal of time, as in years, to go from the conversation to the designing to the implementation to the assessment phase.

Focus: I wrote about this in a recent post. We put in a lot of time writing our strategic plans, mission statements, etc., but then stray from them, leaving less time and energy to do what we say we will. My experience with international schools is that they sometimes need to focus on how to use their time after the planning stops. Check out the post, as this also connects to administrative Leadership.

Less is More, Especially with Depth: If we stay focused on what we say we want to do, there will be less on everyone’s plates; thus, we will have a better chance of reaching our goals—common sense. Don’t try to be everything to everyone as a school. Shifted schools live by the mantra, “How does any new program or initiative connect to our strategic plan and mission?” This gets back to administrative Leadership. “No” is not a four-letter word! Our leaders connected to our community learning networks gather lots of information and dialogue and then can make decisions that keep our plates less full and our lives more balanced. We will talk in a future SOS podcast about why such a common sense idea gets dropped by many schools.

Trained Change Agents & Designers: Today, library media specialists and instructional technologists receive particular coursework in designing new programs and implementing them. They also gain skill sets from their graduate programs that support their being able to be 21st-century learners just like we want our students to be. By staying on top of the latest research and continually learning from their PLNs, they have the knowledge and skills to be the on-the-ground leaders who help guide our schools through the change and transition process. Support and empower them to do what they are trained to do.

It might be uncomfortable for some schools to face. Still, old-style technology coordinators, focusing on hardware and networks, have been replaced with today’s instructional/educational technologists who are teachers first, grounded in instructional theory, working to bridge the technology to the teachers and students in the classrooms. We have technicians and network engineers to handle the hardware and repair issues.

With their training and skill sets, the library media specialists guide our teachers and students in the multiple literacies that our 21st-century learners (students, teachers, and administrators) must work with and master to be adaptable and flexible learners. They must be something other than the 20th-century librarian focused on reading literacy and building book collections. They must be leaders and partners in designing and implementing curriculum.

By working as partners with teachers and administrators in the curriculum development process, these two instructional leaders work to support the designing of curriculum to reach the learning goals for our 21st-century-focused schools. To see how the HKIS Upper Primary School teachers and specialists designed their curriculum review process, select the following hyperlink to download a copy of an article reviewing their work. HKIS Upper Primary Curriculum Review Model

Education, Communication, Ownership, and Celebration Procedures: Schools must use their communication channels with the community to share progress, build ownership, and celebrate everyone’s efforts as the school works towards its goals. Once schools start making the move to School 2.0, they need to use ongoing parent workshops, community coffees, student forums, newsletters, blogs, etc. to build out the community learning network with a focus on the shifting process. The school needs to be flexible and adaptable with two-way communication from the community. Along the way, celebrate the successes and shine the light on your risk-takers! So often, those willing to stick their necks out to try new things, offer differing opinions and make the shift are isolated and made to feel devalued. Put these leaders’ efforts on your school Web sites, write about them in newsletters, and get their ideas published in journals. These leaders will “own” the process and share their passion. Ownership means accountability and follow-through. Celebrate your early adopters, and they will stick around instead of looking for more shifted pastures. 🙂

Get the Right Crew Onboard: This is a biggie that can be one of the most significant storms to work your voyage through. Going back to the conversations that start the process, everyone will need to decide if they can commit to the shift once they fully understand it. Administrators will need to work with their Human Resource staff to plan over a few years to give folks the opportunity to seek employment at other schools. As uncomfortable as this can be, we must face that organizations change and that individuals should move on if they cannot support our school’s mission. As in baseball, start scouting early and building a wish list of shifted educators you hope to recruit to your school. Something tells me that this is what Fortune 500 companies do. 🙂

The Curriculum Development Process: Being systematic is central to bringing about change. We must build protocols that support a system that scaffolds our efforts to move toward our goals. Sadly, for so many schools, the curriculum review process can be a struggle and an unsupported effort that gets a bad name. A dynamic, well-managed system becomes a natural professional learning community that can drive how we do business in our schools. See the previous link to the HKIS Upper Primary model for more information.

Work with Your Successes: Students are already learning in our classrooms whether you are School 1.0 or 2.0. We, as teachers, use well-thought-out instructional and assessment strategies. Back to the conversations that start the shifting process, we need to assess what we are already doing well by asking questions like:

Which strategies are working really well? Which ones guide our students to our school-wide learning goals? Which ones can easily be enhanced using 2.0 strategies?

As Rick Pierce points out, we need to remind ourselves that change leads to a much more extended transition period that takes us to our goals. This transition is a continuum that we all move along at different rates of speed and comfort levels. So, create a collaborative team including your instructional technologist, library media specialist, administrators, curriculum coordinator, and other interested parties to design an ongoing adult learning program centered on personal learning networks that start within each individual’s comfort zone and experience. Then, take small steps along the continuum towards using shifted classroom instructional strategies and assessments that support your school’s shifted goals.

A quick example is that concept maps and other graphic organizers are used in classrooms worldwide. Teachers are comfortable using them. Students learn by making connections using HOTS as they map out their learning.

The next step for some might be a desktop digital tool like Inspiration or Cmap, while others might be ready to jump to 2.0 and the collaborative power of Mindmeister or Bubbl with 24/7 access to their work. As time passes, the next step is telecollaborative and blended work, where students and teachers make connections outside the school, still using concept maps but sharing them with learners in projects like The Flat Classroom. Remember to start with your current successes and honor the innovative work already getting results as you design each teacher’s shifting experience.

Another obvious point is to make your professional development program connect to your shifting school outcomes in an ongoing, structured learning community that periodically gives learning and connection time during the school day while avoiding the end of quarter one shot; one size fits PD days. Adult learners deserve and need differentiated to personalized instruction along with time to make meaning from their experiences and the opportunity to apply their new learning to give them half a chance for success. And look to work with the professionals within your school who have attended conferences, read leading educational books, and are on top of the edublogosphere to provide ongoing coaching who will be with you every day instead of a consultant’s couple-day visit.

You might go the extra step, adding the depth of an experienced consultant to partner with your teachers by having them stay for weeks or months. Both Hong Kong International School and Hsinchu International School are using this model.

Stick To Your Guns: Much of what I write here is accepted and practical knowledge. If a school community does all of these listed strategies and more, they can feel confident that they are inclusive, transparent, systematic, and focused in their shift. There will still be difficulties and uncomfortable feelings, but LEARNING is all about that. Taking risks is so important!

Everyone from the administrator at the helm to the crew and passengers working together to stay the course while showing the courage to stand by their planning and initial goals is central to the shifting process. This courage sometimes fails, especially when the dreaded “Well, the parents say …” and we as educators forget we are the professionals hired to teach the students and run the school. 🙁

Final Note: As stated at the start, my experience is from working at a non-shifted school without a school-wide initiative or committed Leadership to make the shift. We dug in and did our best as a group of educators working within the system. Brent Loken and Grant Ruskovich took a different tack with their work at HIS. Download the SOS podcast later in the week to hear about their efforts.

International Educational Leadership

March 20, 2008 / David Carpenter / 1 Comment

Rick Pierce supports Hsinchu International School in multiple ways as we grow and develop as a learning community. He recently started blogging, as I needed help finding many blogs to read on educational leadership. You must love it when someone sees a need and jumps in to try something new.

I responded to one of Rick’s posts as it applied to leadership in international schools. Here is a direct link to Rick’s excellent post, followed by my comment.

As Jeff and I continue our discussion on the SOS podcast about how to help schools make the shift, Rick hits the mark on what I think is the number one factor needed for shifting our schools- leadership with knowledge, skills, and vision to help us work together to become the schools we want to be.

My Comments:

Your points hit home, especially when institutional change does, at times, seem to devalue staff members and their feelings. Many international educators living away from home countries connect to the school community as part of their emotional support network. When the school leaders make decisions or act without the participation and consideration of these very connected community members, a wide array of emotions involving anger, loss, fear, etc., come into play.

As you point out so clearly, there are models and books to help our school leaders focus on the individuals in the community to involve them in the discussion, decision-making, and eventual transition period when changes do occur. This begs the question of what is happening internationally to support the professional development of our school leaders. All of our schools have PD programs for teachers. What is happening to the administrators?

Many school leaders will say one of the most significant barriers to this community-building and group decision-making process is the lack of time. I would counter that, especially in large, fast-paced international schools, the lack of time for thoughtful reflection and processing is due to poor leadership as schools try to do everything under the sun for their clients (i.e., students and parents) and barrel forward out of control without focus and direction.

Well-thought-out strategic plans, structured communication systems, and guiding mission statements, as well as learning outcomes that are genuinely supported, can alleviate many of the problems that come with the “lack of time” argument that is so often put forth to explain why problems occur in our schools. School leaders must have the courage and compassion to say “no” to us educators as we bring forth new ideas and proposals that do not fit into the structure of our school missions. We do need to be lean, loving (not mean) learning communities in our schools, using our time thoughtfully and carefully.

By knowing who we are and what we can and cannot do, international schools can improve how we use our time, especially when it comes to preparing for change and the needed thoughtful transition process that you so correctly point out in this post.

Thanks, Rick, for starting this discussion that will hopefully continue to a broader audience.

Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness