my version of transparent, collaborative leadership...with a Teamann twist

Final few days to score your FREE @TCEA membership!

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I’ve been a TCEA fan from way back in my teacher days, and they just keep expanding and adding more resources to their memberships to make it worth your while. Every so often they offer FREE yearly memberships and this week, they are again, until October 30th!

I’ve long preached the importance of having a community to be connected to, and @TCEA is a great one! It is so very important it is to have a variety of voices, in a variety of roles sharing perspectives and experiences.

Especially during a global pandemic, we need MORE educators sharing.

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We need our “edtech” voices in other spaces. Take advantage now for free and get your voice out there!

Conferences are offered regularly, support is at a variety of levels, and so there really is no reason not to take advantage of a FREE membership!

Your Benefits:

Educational, Easy to Access Webinars – Learn how to use Google Calendar to optimize your time, discover YouTube features and content that can enhance your classroom, or stay in-the-know about the latest trends like esports, STEM activities, and how to discuss digital citizenship with your students. They also have a PD library of all recordings going back three years!

Access to Experts and Peers on the TCEA Online Community – Wish you had a veteran colleague on hand to answer your tech questions? Or are you looking to share your own discoveries about how to enhance the classroom experience? The TCEA Online Community has over 30,000 of your peers ready to listen and help!

Professional Development – From the TCEA Annual Convention & Exposition to the Lunch and Learn Webinars, we empower educators by providing professional development opportunities tailored to your specific needs and learning styles.

Online Resources – Learn about the latest iOS and Android apps, evaluate recent discoveries on their TechNotes Blog, or explore fresh ideas for educators on their TCEA eBook Library.

Go here to join!

 

TCEA fanN,

Amber

Get the most out of your conference/professional development!

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How do you as an administrator (or teacher!) feel about conferences? Professional learning? Empowering your teachers?Here are the things we did to maximize sending our team of teachers to #TCEA! Make the most out of your next conference!

Often our budgets and #allthethings (subs! testing! schedules! teaching!), make it impossible to send every teacher we have to attend any conference. I am a very big believer in growing and empowering the team I have with me, so I allocate a substantial amount of money in my budget towards teacher development. We did an individualized book study as a campus, my kinder team is attending the SDE Kinder conference this month, and my first-grade literacy leaders went to see the guided reading guru Janet Richardson when she was close. We had the awesome opportunity to send a team of teachers to TCEA last week. In meeting with these risk takers, I wanted to make sure that we maximized their benefit, as well as our staff, to learn all that we could from the conference!

We had a PD today where each TCEA tripper will share something they learned. They’ve staggered their sessions throughout the day. For a couple of teachers, this was REALLY out of their comfort zone, so they are presenting the same tool/session three times. For some, they have three different things to share. As our Wolves attend sessions throughout the day, I’ve asked them to tweet out their gems of greatness with #wearewhitt. (GO check it out!!) We’ll pull that thread up in PLC on Wednesday and explore all that was shared. Ala George Couros, I didn’t go over the “how to’s” of twitter today, I just gave them their expectations and off they went! It was a GREAT day of learning!

Asking for those three tweets will help each teacher not only have “notes” for what was shared but also allow them to experience all of the sessions that were offered today. Many went over the 20 minutes allowed, which will just make your principal heart so happy! This also solidified for the teachers that went that there were expectations on their experience. Preparing and presenting will help keep what they learned in focus…everyone knows that tired head feeling after you’ve returned from a conference, the one where you are so overwhelmed you don’t know where to start? My people have a plan!

As a last attempt to ensure we could get everything possible out of the conference, I’ve asked teachers to implement ONE strategy, tip, trick, or tool that they learned about today into their lesson plans for next week. It didn’t have to be something that all 22 students had to be able to do, but maybe it could be used as an opportunity for those who need enrichment. (I shared the Discovery Education Spotlight on Strategies and was AMAZED that it was all new to them!!)

 

As an admittedly techie administrator, there aren’t a whole lot of “things” that I haven’t heard of or been exposed to in my 15+ years of teaching, techN, etc. BUT until ALL of my teachers are as comfortable and confident as I am…then I am not done learning either! My goal is to never walk away from any session and think I’ve learned nothing…even with a tool my district pays for, I was able to glean useful strategies to help build up my Wolves. 

Be that kinda administrator…the one who always wants their people to be better.

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#TCEA 2018, you’re all grown up! Links to presentations & epiphanies shared!

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I can still remember the year that Mitt Price, my principal, offered to send me to TCEA as a 4th-grade teacher, as a “reward” for all that I was doing on and for our campus, a Technology Magnet Center.

As a Technology Facilitator, I loved attending and presenting with some pretty awesome friends on a tech dream team.

I took several years off, once I became an administrator…thinking that I needed to delineate my “leadership” role.

Attending TCEA last year, for the first time in YEARS, and presenting multiple sessions this year, I realized how very important it is to have a variety of voices, sharing a variety of roles and perspectives. My title is just one piece of the story…and not even the most important one. Four packed rooms with ALL kinds of educators was a breath of fresh air. We need MORE leaders sharing. We need “EdTech” voices in other spaces.

Never limit yourself. By title, by experience, or opinion. 

Eliminate negative noise.

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Surround yourself with people who respect you, what you do, and who take the privilege of responsibility seriously.

 

Links to the presentations are below!

Transform Your Staff Meetings and Engage Your Faculty

Using Twitter to Bolster Instructional Leadership

Social Media From the Principal’s Office

 

 

#empower17, step out of your lane! Initiate conversations!

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I have the benefit of being at the annual ASCD conference, #EMPOWER17, this weekend, and as always, there are so many incredible things to learn and to see.

But the best thing that happened today? Completely random and happened because I just have no social fear. We were walking back and forth down one of the hallways deciding where we were going to next and noticed a passionate conversation that I finally just couldn’t help but just jump into. Like literally, stopped and said, “Hey, what are ya’ll talking about because it looks incredibly interesting.”

It was real talk, ya’ll. It was about impacting parents, impacting students…it was about changing the world when the target of change keeps moving. We talked about how very hard leadership is, no matter what your population looks like. We talked about the dangers of vulnerability, in evaluative settings. Of the inherent dangers of having a plan, sharing that plan…and the bravery it takes to make that plan happen. It was intense, and it was amazing. And all because I’m bouncey and random. 

Be brave, edufriends. If you’re at #empower17, step out of the comfort zone of the people who you know. If you’re at a conference, MAKE CONNECTIONS. Be willing to initiate conversations, regardless of the lane you find yourself in today. You never know when you might develop a relationship, learn a lesson, or get a burst of inspiration. Angela was so impressed (Do you know Angela? She is pretty darn amazing.) that she’s going to meet back up with Ms. Hairston this weekend and have her on her “Truth for Teachers” podcast.

I hope you’re following along the hashtag, #empower17, there is greatness being shared! And if you’re feeling brave? Share something too!

 

tweetingly,

Amber

 

Success shouldn’t be the goal.

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Sarah Lewis, the first keynote at ASCD this year, was simply incredible. She shared many, many stories that resonated with me on failure and why our perspectives needed to shift on this thought. The main one is the thought that there is a difference between success and mastery. She talked of archers…archers aren’t shooting for success. They don’t hit the target once and quit. They work until they are to a point of mastery…where they hit that target over and over again. We should strive for MASTERY with our students. Success one day on one test does nothing. But mastery…which would look like a love of learning, or a true understanding of a concept, THAT is what we should want to see from our students.

Mastery transcends grade levels and test scores. It is a LIFE trait.

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 I LOVED her point that the mountain climber that reaches the top of the mountain can look over and see another mountain to climb. His journey is never complete…you can’t climb ALL the mountains. She related it back to that the smartest people in the world KNOW how little they know. How mind blowing is that?

Fringe benefits of failure….you have a rock bottom to build on.

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This also connects to Angela Watson’s “Truth for Teachers” that I listed to too this week. She talks about the need to let go of searching for the elusive search for perfection. Be ok staying in beta. Put out the most viable product that can get the job done, instead of stressing yourself (or your family!) trying to be perfect in every way. Enjoy that you can always tweak or define as you go along, with support from yours students. Be ok staying in beta.

I ordered Sarah’s book, “The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery”after talking to her backstage. She was as down to earth and eloquent there as she was up in front of us all. She paused before she spoke, each word carefully constructed to articulate the exactness of what she was trying to convey. I know that I wanted MORE of what she was sharing. Her book is excellent.

My favorite passage is a story from Sara Blakely, the entrepreneur who developed Spanx, valued at one billion dollars in 2011. Each night at dinner when growing up her father would ask, “What did you fail at today?” Those conversations helped recondition what she thought and how she felt about failure. Failure became not the outcome, but the refused attempt.

Let’s encourage our peers, our teaches, our students to be deliberate amateurs. You never know what you will find out or be able to answer.

Failure pushN,

Amber