Blending Leadership

Six Simple Beliefs for Leading Online and Off

Stephen J. Valentine, Dr. Reshan Richards

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119222057
• eBook ISBN: 9781119222224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

An organizational approach to more effective school leadership, online and off

"Leadership, especially in a school setting, is too important to be merely intuitive. In this generous book, Steve and Reshan outline a new way of thinking for a new kind of leader. Recommended."

Seth Godin, author of What to Do When it's Your Turn (and it's Always Your Turn)

"If you're a school leader, Blending Leadership is the book you need to guide your thinking in today's increasingly networked educational environment. Your students and staff may have varying degrees of comfort with technology, but this book will give you solid guidance on how to lead them both online and offline and chart a path to the future."

Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive

Blending Leadership provides all school leaders with a unique approach to utilizing technology for more effective learning and leadership. As the online aspects of schools become just as important as their brick-and-mortar counterparts, leaders must be as effective screen-to-screen as they are face-to-face. Drawing from research, experience, and real-world examples, this book explores and unpacks six core beliefs necessary for the blended leader to succeed.

Between email, websites, apps, updates, tweets, attachments, infographics, YouTube, and unceasing notifications, most people are inundated with digital detritus, and they either grow to ignore it or get swept under it. Effective blended leaders see these distractions as spurs to action, models, test cases, remixable commodities, and learning opportunities. Blending Leadership gives you the perspective you need to excel and the knowledge to leverage the tools at your disposal.

BELIEF #1
BLENDED LEADERS ENGAGE WITH THOUGHT LEADERS AND ENGAGE AS THOUGHT LEADERS

Photo by Daniel Bowman

CROTTY'S WRESTLING

We begin unfolding our beliefs by calling to mind a near-empty school building in the middle of the summer of 2014. A few maintenance professionals are working with light fixtures and air vents; a few more wander through empty hallways slopping paintbrushes into paint. The scheduler processes schedules, the registrar processes grades, and construction on a new building grinds on and then off in a rhythm dictated by a man with a gruff voice. Steve, meanwhile, is fiddling with a pen and pad at his desk, tweaking an agenda for an upcoming leadership retreat. He is stuck—and the building that usually inspires and energizes him, that usually fans his ideas, is failing him. He has no colleagues to bump into, no students to ask him questions, no classroom discussions to shake up his thinking—nothing to break the logjam in his mind.

Steve, like many people in education at that time, had been thinking about grit. He felt it was important for leaders in his school to be aware of the topic, to understand how it might fit into their work with other teachers and with students. He added the topic to his agenda along with a framing question, feeling unsettled about both. Something was missing; he wasn't seeing all the angles; and the books and articles he had read on the subject hadn't helped him to feel settled. Normally when stuck, he would just walk to the office of one of his trusted colleagues … or even talk to one of his brightest students. Normally, when school was in full swing, the energy of the place was enough to help him think.

Steve found the support, and the scratch for his itch, on To Keep Things Whole, a blog published at regular intervals by Mark Crotty, head of St. John's Episcopal School in Texas. Steve regularly checks in with this blog because Crotty possesses two key characteristics of an effective digital thought leader: a useful, wide-ranging antenna and a quick trigger finger. He picks up important currents in the educational world and then has the discipline and confidence to project his own opinions, his own thinking, into the fray. It was no surprise that Crotty had written about grit at almost the exact moment when Steve was thinking about it.

And it was no surprise that Crotty's thinking was helpful as Steve attempted to plan his team's retreat. The seed of grit—failure—seemed so easy to talk about, but much less easy to accept, much less easy to promote. That was the problem Steve was having with it. Crotty helped Steve make sense of his misgivings when he wrote the following:

So much of the educational conversation these days focuses on failure and the need for it. Yet one thought keeps nagging at me: Do we really want children to experience failure very often? Part of my concern comes from the word failure. It's a loaded, powerful word, full of psychological barbs. Some argue that we need to soften the word, and that strikes me as a rather quixotic notion. Plus I believe we should keep the word for true failures that deserve it. I keep coming back to Vygotsky's notion of the Zone of Proximal Development, which allows students to work at levels which allow them to experience the right degree of success but also struggle until an adult intercedes at the right moment. It strikes me that's what we want. For students to stumble, trip, fall, then get back up. When this happens while a toddler is learning to walk, we don't call it a failure. I'm not sure why we would with any form of learning. (Crotty, 2013)

Crotty's wrestling with the topic of failure was as good as anything Steve had read about the subject. In fact, it was better because Crotty had seemingly digested the same readings Steve had, and here he was clearing his own thinking, his own reactions, as a thoughtful school leader. Facing a near-empty summertime building, Steve wasn't likely to find a colleague with whom to debate the merits of what he wanted to bring to his retreat. And a phone call to a colleague, most likely at the beach or whiling away the summer with family, didn't seem appropriate. Steve turned to Crotty because, for one, he could access Crotty's thoughts without disturbing him. Also, Crotty had always been a blogger who was willing to embrace, challenge, and frame educational trends.

Reading a blog, in itself, is hardly worth reporting. But reading a blog that you've read before, while carrying in your mind a certain (local) problem you are trying to solve, is a way of working made possible by blending practice. We're emphasizing Steve's interaction with Crotty's blog because it represents a critical habit for school leaders today. They must find ways, and make time, to wade into streams of voices that exist outside the ones they hear in their own, familiar school contexts. These outside voices are valuable in that they exist beyond the constraints established by context (time and place in particular). Steve's time and place couldn't help him; at the same time, his disciplined approach to reading certain blogs, along with knowing how to make use of what he found there, could help him at a crucial time in his summer planning.

There are different names for such practices, which are recognized by researchers as being effective in generating creativity and in aiding effective problem solving. Creativity expert Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, might describe Steve's practice, the one that helped him frame grit and resilience for a leadership team, as an “openness to experience.” In his book, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013), Kaufman asserts that openness to experience, in the right amount, is critical to creativity; it can help a person approach a new situation or piece of information without immediately relegating it to a particular category. It also allows us to avoid the immediate conclusion that something is irrelevant. Blogs and other digital scrimshaw are less polished than journals or magazines or books, which frequently employ editors to corral content and proofreaders to reduce language to a single meaning. That doesn't mean blogs are irrelevant or even less relevant, though many people avoid them as sources of knowledge because they want access to knowledge that at least gives off the impression of being “approved.” Openness to experience, on the contrary, allows one to learn in places and ways that some people will not.

What becomes critical, then, if you want to take at least some of your cues from blogs, is something that social scientists call “individual absorptive capacity,” which, according to researchers Salvatore Parise, Eoin Whelen, and Steve Todd, is “the ability of employees to identify, assimilate and exploit new ideas” (Parise, Whelen, & Todd, 2015). Paired with openness to experience, it becomes a vital tool for activating knowledge that comes from channels outside the mainstream, or outside the range of voices that you hear on a regular basis. Listening to the same voices creates filter bubbles and redundancy; they tend to reinforce one another's perceptions. Listening to a wide array of voices, some from outside your regular context, and translating them into the community and context in which you work, allows new ideas to enter your closed systems.

Both the givers and the receivers of thought leadership understand that blending leadership can advance their schools. Steve's presentation of grit and resilience, tempered by Crotty's thoughts, achieved its purpose. The leadership team absorbed the trend without becoming fanatical about it; they knew it had some flaws, and they kept this in mind as they worked it into their own daily practices with colleagues and students.

BROADER ENTANGLEMENTS

So some leaders publish and read blogs, and some leaders go a step further, building and sharpening their leadership positions through more active entanglements in the online world. They not only follow thought leaders, but also engage actively with them, building off their work, their thinking, as if it were a platform.

Recently, Reshan followed a tweet by Scott McLeod to a blog post by Larry Cuban. As someone who cares deeply about the place of iPads in education, Reshan was first interested in the conversation because of his respect for the participants. Like Steve, he wanted to see what some of the brightest minds in the field were saying; he wanted to learn from these thinkers and doers.

Clicking the blog, he found that Cuban had used his platform to comment on the Los Angeles Unified School District's deal with Apple. iPads would be distributed to all 650,000 students in the district. Reviewing the deal, Cuban questioned the depth of research that had informed the decision. Additionally, he threw in a dollop of skepticism about the way in which the district had outlined its steps for measuring the success of the initiative as well as the accounting figures.

In the same way that Crotty helped Steve make sense of his own thoughts, Cuban helped Reshan. But as Reshan witnessed the blog's comment tail unfurling, he grew increasingly concerned about some of the oppositions to Cuban's post. He jumped into the fray, extending Cuban's argument:

I would suggest that people are looking for or relying on the wrong kind of research, considering how complex educational environments are. I agree with you that the traditional paradigm moves too slowly, so it is up to educational technology researchers to shift the conversation away from the tools themselves and towards learning, pedagogy and assessment. When those things are at the forefront, the constantly evolving technology is much easier to slide into the conversation. Right now it seems that the development and emergence of the tools are driving the learning and pedagogy choices, when it should be the other way around. (Richards, 2013)

Reshan, as an educational technology researcher and leader, has a stake in any ed tech conversation that garners dozens of comments, as Cuban's blog post did. What's more, his perspective is a valuable one for schools to embrace. Pedagogy should always precede partnerships.

Blended leaders, as depicted in Steve's example, pull in content continually; those same leaders, as depicted in Reshan's example, push back when they need to, just like a leader would push back against a policy in his or her school if that policy seemed poorly reasoned, or worse, antithetical to the relationships educators seek to build with the students in their care. By leveling the proverbial playing field, interconnected computers also extend that playing field. Leaders can “overhear” much more than they used to; they then have to decide whether they want to act on what they hear or ignore it.

Acting helps the thinker with whom you are aligning; at the same time, it leads to co-creative possibilities, enhancing the thinking itself. Reshan's engagement in Cuban's online forum parallels countless other cases in which online collaboration has led to a productive proliferation of information and learning. Rainie and Wellman spend much time in their 2012 book Networked profiling individuals from a diverse array of professional and nonprofessional fields who have benefited from the collaborative aspect of online creation. A telling example was the story of Willowaye (a username), a Wikipedia editor. Wikipedia, the ubiquitous online encyclopedia, is well known for being edited and maintained primarily by over 2.8 million nonprofessional users. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Willowaye found himself in a maelstrom of editors making changes to newly relevant, and oftentimes charged, political pages. Rainie and Wellman observed that

the interactions that Willowaye experienced whil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors & the Artist
• Introduction
• Belief #1: Blended Leaders Engage with Thought Leaders and Engage as Thought Leaders
• Belief #2: Blended Leaders Design Spaces and Care for Spaces
• Belief #3: Blended Leaders Reject Insularity and Embrace Sharing
• Belief #4: Blended Leaders Challenge Meeting Structures and Change Meeting Structures
• Belief #5: Blended Leaders Articulate a Mission and Advance a Mission
• Belief #6: Blended Leaders Keep the Off-ramp Open and Use It Frequently
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement