Leadership and Planning (565) - Week 1

My current position as Technology Specialist requires many opportunities for leadership.  I provide technology staff development for all staff K-12 and in most cases I am asking people to think about change.  In my leadership role I try and provide them with resources and current research to support the changes and I model some of the educational strategies to encourage a new way of thinking. 

Another major part of my job is writing and supporting the Information and Technology Literacy Benchmarks.  This has put me in a leadership role as well because I have had to organize and facilitate curriculum writing groups and then implement the benchmarks and yearly changes.    Until recently I’ve been working under a teacher contract with my colleagues and I’ve had to earn their respect as a teacher leader. 

Most recently I had to write our Information and Technology Plan.  During this 2-3 year process I had to collect data and work with other teachers and administrators to analyze our previous goals and write new goal and objectives.  At times I had to ask all staff to complete surveys and complete tasks and sometimes that was difficult to do when some of these people were my “superiors”.

The leadership assessments this week really made me think about the kind of leader I currently am and the areas that I will need to improve on.  My “adaptive assertive” style of leadership has helped me stay focused on some major initiatives and I think my colleagues do respect me and complete tasks that I’ve requested them to do because they trust me and believe that I am looking out for the district and our students. 

I also found Patrick Awuah's very encouraging and I loved his comment that "We can not achieve perfection but if we reach for it then we can achieve excellence.”  I need to encourage our teachers to think in this way and they can pass this on to their students.  I also want to take his advice to ask the right questions and confront the problems that we face in education.