7.1 Discussion: Tech Leadership - Taking Action Part II

1.      Educate, educate, and educate yourself and your constituents.

2.      Find a balance between people's skills and the challenges associated with their work.

The first action I can implement in my daily routine at work is:  educate, educate, and educate yourself and your constituents.  I truly believe this action works for peers and students alike. In order to better myself in my role, it is important that I contribute to seek out new knowledge and new methods to share and implement technology. This is definitely a role in which one cannot become comfortable and relaxed, by doing, you begin to fall behind in all the latest information, techniques and methods. In regards to helping students, teachers and other staff must make it a priority to continue to push them and encourage the learning process.  As mentioned in our text by Kouzes & Posner, "People can't do what they don't know how to do."  In other words, people don't know what they do not know.  One of my previous managers used to tell me that all the time and made perfect sense then and continues to. Our staff and students do not know what they are missing out on if we do not present them with new ideas or activities in which they can push their own abilities.

This leads me to the second action that I can implement at my work site:  Find a balance between people's skills and the challenges associated with their work.  This one made an impact on me while reading because t is something we are already implementing.  For the month of March, our school decided to step away from the 3 or 4 weekly meetings for all staff and decided to used each of the 5 weeks to help individual grade levels. The meetings will take place in the following groups: K & 1st, 2nd & 3rd, 4th & 5th, 6th and finally 7th & 8th.  We feel that this will have more of an impact on the teachers on multiple levels. One level will focus on what they already know and how to continue that positive technology related behaviors.  Many of the teachers already know different skill and we did not want to put the advanced teachers through and entry level Google Classroom Training.  The second level will impact what they would like to know or what they would like to incorporate into their classroom/lesson plan.  By taking this approach, it allows the teachers to perform their own brainstorming and prevents the technology team from giving them a ready-made assignment.