Technology Leadership for School Improvement

Rosemary Papa

A practical and visionary look at creative educational leadership in today?s digital environment

Technology Leadership for School Improvement provides prospective and current K–12 educational leaders with practical coverage of the skills and knowledge necessary to manage and administrate technology in school settings. Designed to help educational leaders develop an understanding of multimedia teaching tools that optimize learning, as well as the leadership skills needed to support others, this one-of-a-kind book explores data-driven decision making and technology standards. Each chapter is written by a specialist in the field and follows a common format.

Features

• Critical questions at the beginning of each chapter help readers focus on key objectives.
• Case studies with discussion questions and activities provide opportunities for readers to analyze applied situations.
• End-of-chapter learning aids include Key Principles for Leaders to Know sections that summarize each chapter?s content and Web Resources that provide links to additional information.

An open-access Web site includes PowerPoint slides for each chapter, e-Flashcards, a variety of useful Web resources, and additional case studies.

PART I

Leadership Policy and Innovative Practice

Part I sets the stage for this book by providing the requisite background in leadership policy and practice for school improvement. Chapter 1: Entrepreneurial Leadership for Technology presents models to engage the reader in ideas for technology leadership. Chapter 2: Technology Leadership Standards provides the standards for technology that will guide schools and administrators for the foreseeable future. Chapter 3: Administration of Technology asks the readers to reflect on their leadership and management style in order to effectively face the challenges of technology in the school setting. Finally, Chapter 4: Designing and Using Academic Information Systems assists the emerging leader to make decisions supported by data.

Chapter 1

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP FOR TECHNOLOGY

An Opposable Mind¹

Theodore Creighton

Before we proceed in this chapter, we must decide if a specific leadership behavior is needed to effectively lead technology in our schools. More important, should we suggest that there is something about leadership in the broad sense that is uniquely different from leadership for such a specialized teaching and learning component as technology?

There is an abundance of empirical evidence that relates the leadership of the principal to a school’s effectiveness (Fullan, 2001; Fullan & Stiegelbaurer, 1991; Hallinger & Heck, 1996, 1998; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Louis, 1994). The most recent and most exhaustive literature review and empirical study related to school technology leadership is the seminal work of Anderson and Dexter (2005), who conclude all the literature on leadership and technology “acknowledges either explicitly or implicitly that school leaders should provide administrative oversight for educational technology” (p. 51). They admit, however, that most of the literature tends to be narrow in identifying specifically what the knowledge and skill sets are that define technology leadership. The obvious skills mentioned include (a) principals should learn how to operate technology and use it, (b) principals should ensure that other staff in the building receive learning opportunities, (c) principals should have a vision for the role of educational technology in school, and (d) principals should assess and evaluate the role of academic and administrative uses of technology and make decisions from those data.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2002) standards include perhaps the most recent set of suggestions in the literature about what school principals should do as leaders of technology in schools. The National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (ISTE, 2009) are integrated into the ISTE standards and are grouped into five specific areas:

1. Visionary Leadership

2. Digital Age Learning Culture

3. Excellence in Professional Practice

4. Systemic Improvement

5. Digital Citizenship

The following questions are addressed in this chapter:

• What are the key aspects of a technology plan leaders need to know to optimize high-quality student outcomes?

• How can leaders tie technology plans to institutional mission and priorities?

• What can leaders do to avoid excessive detail and technical jargon?

• Once change in the curriculum and instructional strategies are implemented, how can technology plans be realigned?

So, What’s the Problem?

Some (including this author) might argue that perhaps technology leadership as practiced by today’s principal is outdated unless it helps faculty and students address the great challenges presented by technology in our schools. Much of what we see happening in schools (along with the literature just presented) focuses on the management of technology. Our principal preparation programs, mine included, cover technology leadership lightly if at all and rarely extend beyond the most basic skills (i.e., word processing, spreadsheets, and database use). A theme of this chapter is that effective technology leadership has more to do with teaching pedagogy and human relations and much less to do with technology itself.

A principal’s mission must now include designing and implementing new strategies to help teachers and students recognize, understand, and integrate technology with teaching and learning in the classroom. The mere presence of hardware and software in the classroom does not ensure meaningful learning for students. We are beyond the point of deciding whether or not we will accept technology in our schools. The crucial task at hand is to decide how to implement this technology effectively into instruction.

As early as 2000, Avolio discussed the relationship between leadership and technology and suggested that leaders must play a more proactive role in implementing technology and, more specifically, interface the human and information technology components. Many point to the problem of overemphasis of the technological aspect at the exclusion of the human resource function. Avolio warned of the creation of “information junkyards” (p. 4). The essence of technology leadership is to produce a change in attitudes, feelings, thinking, behavior, and performance with individuals.

To carry out this improvement in technology leadership, principals must be willing to alter existing leadership practice, or professional activity, evidenced in most schools, and they must also be open to the probability of participating in a transformation of traditional leadership skills, knowledge, and habits of mind.

Today’s rapidly changing environment requires the technology leader to become involved in discovering, evaluating, installing, and operating new technologies of all kinds, while keeping teaching and student learning as the guide and driving force behind it all. Vaill (1998) issued an accompanying caution: “The technologies the organization employs entail learning time to exploit their productive and economic potential” (p. 45). If schools are constantly “upgrading” their technologies, they may never reach a productive flow of instruction, a flow on which effective teaching and learning are based.

Many schools have state-of-the-art hardware, computer labs, and other technology peripherals but are using them in ways that will do little to enhance student learning in rigorous and challenging ways. Technology leadership means much more than simply purchasing and implementing programs “stuffed” with fancy hardware and software. To really influence reform in schools, principals as technology leaders must stay focused on the individual needs of teachers and students, rather than race to adopt the “flavor of the month” program. Clearly, schools do not have a very good track record of sustaining significant change. The school technology leader is in the position to make sound instructional decisions regarding technology and program implementation. It is my hope this chapter will help answer the “how” associated with such a daunting task.

Entrepreneurial Leadership for Technology Defined

The term entrepreneurial leadership originated in the business world and can be simply defined as “translating ideas into actions.” More specifically, Gunther McGrath and McMillian (2000) help us focus in on the concept.

Entrepreneurial leaders pursue only the best opportunities and avoid exhausting themselves and their organizations by chasing after every option. They passionately seek new opportunities, always looking for the chance to profit from change and disruption. (p. 3)

This new breed of leader seems to always seek original ways of doing things with little concern for how difficult they may be or whether the resources are available. Such leaders are willing to “disrupt the status quo” (Grogan & Donaldson, 2007, p. 22) and have the ability to hold several opposing thoughts in their minds at once and then reach a synthesis that contains elements of each but improves on each (Martin, 2007).

Framing Leadership for Technology in a Historical Context

In the past 50 years, there have been as many as 65 different classifications developed to define the dimensions of leadership (Northouse, 2004). Within those classifications, there are several specific theoretical forms of leadership—situational leadership, which is the idea that there is a different form of leadership for each different situation; transformational leadership, in which attention is paid to the needs and desires of an organization’s members to achieve their highest potential; moral leadership; and others. I agree that leaders of technology have something to learn from the study of leadership, but I am reminded of a quote from a world-renowned statistician related to the many theories and models:

All models are wrong—but some are useful.

—George E. P. Box, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin

As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, all of the traditional forms of leadership are not especially useful and applicable in today’s turbulent and fast-paced world, especially in the area of technology leadership in our schools. Progressing through this brief historical context, I suggest we have a very current model before us (Martin, 2007) that is conceptual and viable and can help us frame entrepreneurial leadership for technology.

In the early 1800s, leadership characteristics or “traits” were studied to determine what made certain people great leaders. For example, if we could identify the traits possessed by Abraham Lincoln, we could perhaps duplicate them in others. The “trait approach” was based on the belief that leaders were born with certain characteristics that made them great leaders and that they were different from others who were more passive followers. These traits included intelligence, self-confidence, self-determination, integrity, and sociability.

In the middle of the 20th century, many researchers (e.g., Stogdill, 1948) argued that no identifiable set of traits separated effective leaders from ineffective leaders. Leadership began to emerge as a relationship between people and situations. This was actually the conceptual beginning of the theory we now call situational leadership.

Behavioral Leadership

Researchers, after realizing that trying to identify leadership traits or characteristics was not dependable, began to study behavioral leadership, or behaviors based on structure and consideration. In other words, they wanted to observe individuals as they were actually leading an organization or a group of people.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, two major research studies looked at the beh...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Brief Contents 
• Detailed Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Leadership Policy and Innovative Practice
• Part II: Leadership Teaching and Learning
• Part III: Leadership: Social, Cultural, and Legal
• Part IV: Leadership Digital Assessments and Evaluation
• Glossary
• Index
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors