Week 7 - Leadership - Online and Distributed Leadership
(My notes and reflections)
Use Twitter
- Encourages brevity
- Identifies the tweeter
- Allows replies and hashtags
- Integrates with other tools (e.g. Tweetdeck, Tagboard, Pocket, Buffer, Feedly)
- Supports weblinks
- Mobile App available
- Can be linked to from blogs etc.
Twitter Terminology Basics
- Tweet
- Reply
- Retweet (RT)
- Direct Message (DM)
- Hashtag (#) (precedes a topic)
- @ (precedes a Twitter user name you are referring to)
- Following / Followers
- Modified Tweet (MT) (summarising for sharing)
- Hat Tip (HT) (citing your sources in Twitter!)
Mind Lab Twitter
Handle: @NZMindLab
Hashtag: #MindLabPG
Hashtag: #MindLabPG
Some Twitter Tweeters and NZ education hashtags
@EducationGovtNZ @netsafeNZ
#edchatNZ (See: http://www.edchatnz.com/getting-started) #kidsedchatNZ #engchatNZ #mathschatNZ #scichatNZ #hackyrclass
Twitter Tips for Teachers
Education Review (2013) suggests ten ways that New Zealand teachers can get more out of the Twitterverse. We think these 6 are the most useful.
- Use TweetDeck to manage your Twitter feeds.
- Choose hashtags carefully and check for duplicates already being used
- Join the #edchatNZ club. Teachers and anyone interested can jump onto Twitter and join the discussions at #edchatNZ
- Make use of lists to group people based on any criteria you want for the purposes of reading their tweets
- Saving tweets for a rainy day. There are several tools for saving your favourite tweets, such as Diigo.com, Getpocket.com and Evernote (using @myEN)
- Teaching with Twitter, for example microblogging for ‘summing up’, following the tweets of a famous person(s) during a significant event, such as politicians in the build-up to an election, ‘time tweeting’, where students choose a famous historical figure and create a twitter account from them, writing regular tweets in the appropriate vocabulary, or progressive collaborative writing, where students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.
Leading Online Discussions (MindEdge Learning Workshop, 2014).
- Set guidelines
- Make connections
- Challenge students to think critically
- Encourage participation
- Praise discussion posts
- Guide conversations back to the question at hand
- Use real world experiences
- Hesitate before interjecting
We will ask you to try to apply these suggestions during our Twitter discussion sessions.
Distributed Leadership
Leadership that is shared within schools and across schools.
Students need to be part of effective distributed leadership and we need to work on developing their leadership capabilities as well as our own.
What does distributed leadership looks and feels like in your schools and CoLs?
Distributed leadership should lead to more opportunities, and more financial gain.
Distributed leadership acknowledges that the work of leading and managing schools involves multiple individuals – not just those with formally designated leadership and management positions but also individuals without such roles. It is primarily concerned with the practice of leadership rather than specific leadership roles or responsibilities. It equates with shared, collective and extended leadership practice that builds the capacity for change and improvement.
Distributed leadership means mobilising leadership in order to generate more opportunities for change and to build the capacity for improvement. It is ‘leadership by expertise’ rather than leadership by role or years of experience. Genuine distributed leadership requires high levels of trust, transparency and mutual respect.
Distributed leadership is about collective influence and is a contributor to school success and improved performance. It is not an accidental by-product of high performing organisations. Individuals are accountable and responsible for their leadership actions; collaborative teamwork is the modus operandi and inter-dependent working is a cultural norm. (Hargreaves, Boyle & Harris, 2014).
- Expertise not position
- Distributed accountability
- Distribution is non permanent
- Changing roles and responsibilities
- Leadership as practice
A strong correlation has been found between the building of leadership capacity for learning and teaching through distributed leadership and increased engagement in both learning and teaching. Because digital technology is multifaceted, it opens itself up to involvement from a variety of people and groups with different roles and responsibilities causing distributed leadership across time. Collaboration in a digital technology setting is the purposeful joining of people in an online environment that enables relevant problems to be tested and validated through constructed knowledge.
Jones (n.d.) defines distributed leadership as action by many people working collectively across the institution to build leadership capacity in learning and teaching. It differs from other, more traditional, approaches to building leadership capacity in which the traits, skills and behaviours of individual leaders are emphasised.
Wicked Problems
A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. They are highly complex, uncertain and often value laden. The use of term "wicked" here has come to denote resistance to resolution, rather than evil. (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Bolstad et al. (2012) argue that learners and teachers, families and communities need support to develop the skills needed to engage in solving the wicked problems of the 21st Century.
Is teaching a wicked problem?
The original TPACK paper argued that teaching was a wicked problem, referring to the following factors (Mishra & Koehler, 2008, p. 2).
- Requirements that are incomplete, contradictory and changing
- Uniqueness, in that no two wicked problems are alike
- Occurring in complex and unique social contexts
- Solutions that are difficult to realize and recognize because of complex interdependencies and contexts
- Solutions that are not right or wrong, simply “better,” “worse,” “good enough,” or “not good enough”.
- Solutions that have no stopping rule, the best we can hope for is “satisficing".
The 2016 Horizon Report (Adams Becker et al., 2016) divided educational challenges into solvable, difficult and wicked, suggesting that achievement gaps and personalised learning were wicked problems.
Mess Mapping
Mess Mapping is a process for collecting, sharing, organizing and evaluating information regarding a Wicked Problems. A Mess Map diagram or mural represents a model of the problem at hand that shows the important “chunks” of information and their relationships with other “chunks.” (Horn & Weber, 2007)
Education is complex. Wicked problems don't have a single answer, but through the use of online tools and digital media, independent people are able to work together to find ideas and concepts to explore wicked problems. Distributed leadership allows many people to work together to tackle these wicked problems. Refining traditional roles for students and teachers allows distributed leadership to occur.
Wisdom of Crowds
Surowiecki (2004) explored a deceptively simple idea. Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart.
As our own wisdom of crowns experiment guess how many Jellybeans are in the jar.
Add your answer to the Google form. Do this individually (do not discuss your answer with anyone else). We will share the results in the next session.
Diversity of Leadership Practice
Since Surowiecki (2004) argued that “diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent”, Harris (2013) suggested that “the potential for imaginative and creative solutions to problems is more likely to occur where there is diversity of leadership practice that fits the contours or the needs of the organization or system.”
After Class Task - Applying the Assignment 1 Rubric
You will find it helpful to apply the Assignment 1 rubric to the following example
Note that this is NOT meant to be an exemplar. It has various strengths and weaknesses. It is deliberately shorter than a real assignment so it can be easily assessed in class.
Using the Leadership 1 rubric, what grade would you give it? What feedback/feedforward would you give the author?
Please fill in the following form with your assessment of which columns of the rubric the example falls into:
References
Adams Becker, S., Freeman, A., Giesinger Hall, C., Cummins, M. & Yuhnke, B. (2016). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2016 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2016-nmc-cosn-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf
Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-orientated learning and teaching - a New Zealand perspective. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
Education Review. (2013). 10 Twitter Tips for Teachers. Retrieved from http://www.educationreview.co.nz/magazine/november-2013/10-twitter-tips-for-teachers
Hargreaves, A., Boyle, A., & Harris, A. (2014). Uplifting leadership: How organizations, teams, and communities raise performance. John Wiley & Sons.
Harris, A. (2013) Distributed Leadership Matters : Perspectives, Practicalities, and Potential, SAGE Publications.ProQuest Ebook Central. (Check this out)
Horn, R. E., & Weber, R. P. (2007). New tools for resolving wicked problems: Mess mapping and resolution mapping processes. Watertown, MA: Strategy Kinetics LLC.
Jones, S. (n.d.). Distributed Leadership. Retrieved April 15, 2016, from http://www.distributedleadership.com.au/
MindEdge Learning Workshop. (2014, April 30). Leading Online Discussions. Retrieved April 15, 2016, from http://learningworkshop.mindedge.com/2014/04/30/leading-online-discussions/
Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. (2008). Introducing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York City, March 24–28, 2008.
Rittel. H. & Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169.
Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York, NY: Doubleday, Anchor.
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