Do We Really Have Time for Digital Citizenship?

We've started a series of weekly discussions in our building about life in our increasingly digital world. I guess you could call it Digital Citizenship. I prefer to call it Digital Leadership. We have a half-hour academic support time built into our schedule four days a week. This past Thursday during that time we had our first lesson. We provided teachers with a couple of choices for activities that were pretty easy to implement. We showed a video of interview clips with our own students sharing some thoughts about how their digital life impacts their overall life. And then we discussed the upsides and downsides to technology, for us personally, for our relationships, and even for our nation. 

In my visits to classrooms, there were lively discussions during this time. These are relevant issues that kids really want to discuss. They want to hear different ideas, share their experience, and wrestle with how to successfully navigate this complex world. 

But there were also some challenges to making this happen. Our teachers and students are accustomed to having this academic support time for tutoring, making up missed work, and other important tasks. There were some legitimate concerns where the loss of the time was going to impact the academics of students. They really needed to retake that quiz or there was a study session for a test the next day. And so, I let the teachers decide. If you feel the academic need is pressing, then skip the Digital Leadership lesson this time.

Even my daughter, Maddie, was disappointed she wasn't able to use that time for academics. She is playing tennis and has missed a ton of school for matches and tournaments. She's working hard to get caught up and values Liberator Time to get stuff done. She was concerned about the loss of that time.

As I've thought about how this has all played out, my biggest question concerns our priorities. Are we really paying attention to our students' needs? There is no question that preparing students academically is important. But if we aren't preparing students for life in a world that is rapidly changing, will the academic knowledge really be that helpful?

Each year, I hear stories from heartbroken parents and see shattered lives because of decisions that were made online. I see the impact of all sorts of digital miscues, small and large. Besides the tragic circumstances that arise, there are also less obvious consequences of failure to navigate a digital world successfully. Who is helping kids figure this stuff out? 

One teacher commented that parents should be doing more to monitor and support their own children. I don't disagree with this. I think parents can do more to be aware and help meet these challenges. That's why we've hosted parent workshops and provided information in our newsletters to help parents in this area.

But what I don't agree with is the idea that it's completely the parents job to address these issues. Our school does not exist in a vacuum. We MUST address the relevant issues of our time and partner with parents to help students be successful. Our school motto is, "Learning for Life." That points to the need for learning that really matters, that will help students be successful, not just on a test, but in living a healthy, balanced, fulfilling life.

In our school, every student must have a device for learning. They can use a school issued Chromebook or they can bring their own device. But using a device is not optional. I think this ups the ante for us in our level of responsibility on these issues. It's important no matter what. But when our school is so digitally infused, we must work to educate our students about the challenges they will face. And we must educate them about the opportunities that digital can provide, too.

We are so focused on our curriculum and meeting standards I think we can forget to pay attention to our students and their needs. We aren't thinking deeply about what is most useful to them now and in the future. We see them as just students. It's all about academics. We are completely focused on making sure they are learning science, history, math, literature, etc. Are they college and career ready? Did they pass the state assessment? 

And the one overarching question, the elephant in the room—are you teaching content or are you teaching kids? Cause there's a difference. The best teachers are always ready to teach the life-changing lesson. They understand that's the stuff that really makes a lasting impact. Students will forget the foreign language they took in HS, they probably won't ever use the quadratic formula in real life, and reading Victorian literature isn't likely to spark a passion. 

I hope you get my point.

We can't afford to not make time for Digital Citizenship, or just plain citizenship. 

Question: How is your school addressing the relevant issues of our time? I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below or respond on or .

How to Have Unshakable Confidence in the Classroom

Sometimes it's really tough to be confident in the classroom. 

Especially if you're a brand new teacher? You've never done this before. You don't have a history of successes to prove to yourself that you can be good at this.

Or what if you're not a new teacher, but you have that class. You know the one. Every second feels like a struggle to maintain control. I remember having nightmares, literally, about one of my classes. It was 7th period during my second year teaching. Those students learned very little. Neither did I. I was just trying to survive. My confidence was shaken.

How can you be confident when a student, colleague, or even your principal makes a comment filled with doubt about your ability to teach? You feel completely inadequate and begin to question if you're even meant to do this.

And when it comes to confidence, it might seem like the rich get richer and poor get poorer. Success builds upon success, right? A lack of confidence results in all sorts of classroom practices that aren't helpful. You try to be the cool teacher. You fail to set boundaries. You lash out in anger. It even extends beyond the classroom. You're short tempered with your loved ones. You feel overwhelmed. You don't want to get out of bed in the morning. Lack of confidence tends to manifest itself in all sorts of harmful ways.

And then, when things go wrong as a result of your decisions, your confidence is shaken even further. You make even more poor decisions. And the cycle continues.

You need to be confident to be successful in the classroom. But you need success to help you feel confident in the classroom. It's a terrible Catch 22.

But let's look at this more carefully. Maybe it doesn't really work this way. Maybe our confidence doesn't have to be based on our success or lack of success.

The Truth About Confidence

1. Just because you have success in your classroom doesn't guarantee you will be confident. You probably know a teacher who all the kids love, who has amazing lessons, and who is respected by all her colleagues, and yet she still seems to lack confidence. And conversely, you've probably known teachers that weren't very successful and still seemed to be confident, even though they really didn't have much to be confident about. What the heck!?!

Could it be that confidence isn't determined by the external success you have as a teacher? Is it possible that confidence is actually more about our perception of ourselves regardless of any external results?

2. And since our confidence doesn't have to be dependent on any external reality, perhaps improving our external results won't guarantee an increase in confidence. Just because you have a better class, or get a compliment from your principal, or feel liked by your students, doesn't guarantee you'll be more confident.

You've probably experienced this before as an educator. You've received compliments, gotten recognition, or taught a killer lesson but still didn't feel more confident. If we don't have that internal confidence, we just write off our success to chance or give someone else the credit.

3. Confidence is a way of feeling. It seems we're all born with it. Ever see a toddler who wasn't confident? Somewhere along the way we start to lose it. It's based on our sense of self—how we see ourselves. For a teacher, confidence is the belief that you have everything you need to be successful with your students. It's the feeling that you are fully equipped to be successful now and in the future. A teacher without confidence feels that they lack the knowledge, skill, or personality, etc. to be successful in the classroom. It can drive all sorts of behaviors that are not helpful.

One solution is to just convince yourself that you have everything you need to be successful. You just tell yourself you lack nothing. If you say it enough times, maybe you'll start to believe it. 

While some positive self-talk can be useful, it's not helpful to just pretend we don't have weaknesses. In other words, acting confident can lead to increased confidence. Fake it till you make it. But it doesn't work to ignore areas where you need to improve. You have to honestly self-reflect to grow and reach your potential.

So what is the answer to find peace and confidence in the classroom? It's not to pretend you don't have any weaknesses. Or act like you have everything you need. The answer is to recognize what you lack, but to accept and be comfortable with the ways in which you don't measure up.

You may not have good classroom management...yet.

Your students may not be motivated or engaged...yet.

Your relationships with some of your students may not be great...yet.

You may not have great technology skills...yet.

You might not be very organized...yet.

But if you can be comfortable with who you are right now, in spite of what you lack, then you can continue to grow and press forward. That's what it means to embrace failure. It's not that we are happy to fail. We just see our failures as part of a process of growing. When we embrace our failures it allows us the freedom to take risks, to fully engage without fear, and to care about our students unconditionally. You don't have to worry about the judgment of others.

So lean in to your shortcomings. When you start to feel sad, alone, or insufficient because of a failure in the classroom, remind yourself of the opportunity to grow and learn. No one has it all figured out. To be confident, we have to believe the best about ourselves in the moment and use our failures to our advantage.

Question: How will you grow your confidence as an educator? I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below or respond on or .

One Simple Strategy to Overcome Resistance to Your Vision

One of the most important parts of leadership is communication. And no matter how much you try to communicate, it seems there is always room for improvement. But why is it that so many new ideas flame out before they really get established?

In Adam Grant's book Originals: How Non-Comformists Move the World, he writes about the exposure effect. People tend to gravitate to ideas or methods that are more familiar, while they tend to avoid things that are less familiar.

The mere exposure effect has been replicated many times—the more familiar a face, letter, number, sound, flavor, brand, or Chinese character becomes, the more we like it. It's true across different cultures and species; even baby chickens prefer the familiar. My favorite test was when people looked at photographs of themselves and their friends that were either regular or inverted, as if seen in a mirror. We prefer the regular photos of our friends, because that's how we're used to seeing them, but we like the inverted photos of ourselves, because that's how we see ourselves when we look in the mirror. "Familiarity doesn't breed contempt," says serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. "It breeds comfort."

The exposure effect might explain why teachers tend to teach as they were taught. And why parents can get a little anxious when their child's schooling deviates from what they experienced as a student. It might also explain why new ideas may not gain traction right away, even if they are great ideas that might be game-changers for student learning. People need time to warm-up to a new idea, and the research seems to prove it.

So if you want to move your vision forward, you have to help people become more comfortable with the vision. You have to overcommunicate the vision. But usually the opposite happens. Leaders often communicate far too little and too infrequently. Grant writes that leaders tend to assume everyone else is familiar with their ideas. They spend hours thinking about the vision from just about every angle. It seems easy to the person most familiar with it.

You know the lyrics and the melody of your idea by heart. By that point, it's no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that's listening to it for the first time.

It's easy to forget the perspective of the audience. But perhaps they aren't on Twitter all the time discussing the topic. They might not be constantly engaged in conversations with other forward-thinking educators. They may not have the opportunity to go to as many conferences or attend as many workshops. To them, the message seems foreign and difficult to understand. It's hard to take the message and fit it with their current thoughts and ideas. You possess a clarity they do not.

As I read this part of the book, I was reflecting on my own communication as a leader. I can actually think of lots of ways I've failed to consistently communicate our vision. It's easy to add just one more thing and make our goals too complex. Then the communication is just a muddled mess of one new idea after another. There isn't opportunity for people to really adopt an idea, get behind it, and see how it works in their world. The next new thing is just around the corner.

Just last year, our district admin team was reading Finding Your Leadership Focus by Doug Reeves. But in spite of the study of priorities, I don't think we eliminated a single initiative. We just continued spinning plates. You work on spinning a few over here, and then give attention to some others before they come crashing down. Because nearly everything seems to be a priority, in reality it means that nothing is a priority. We are killing any chance at a transforming vision by initiative fatigue.

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But I actually thought of one example that was a success. So let's focus on the positive, right? 

In the years leading up to our 1:1 initiative, we didn't have the budget to make it happen. We just didn't have the money. That provided plenty of time for staff to warm-up to the idea. They heard me tell stories of other schools who were going 1:1. I constantly was dreaming about how awesome it would be when all of our students had consistent access. I talked about it a lot. And other people talked about it too. I think all those years helped most everyone embrace the idea. Our budget woes may have been a blessing in disguise. The delay was probably helpful in setting the stage for the success of 1:1 at BHS.

In the fall of 2015, when 1:1 became a reality, we totally hit the ground running. I'm not saying it was perfect. But the buy-in was at a high level, and our digital transformation was off to a great start. For several years, our team was getting ready for this future reality. There was plenty of time to become familiar with the concept of 1:1, why it was important, and how it could be helpful in each classroom. We communicated the 'why' of 1:1 over and over again. 

As Grant suggested, "If we want people to accept our original ideas, we need to speak up about them, and then rinse and repeat."

So as your leadership team plans to move your vision forward, consider the importance of the exposure effect. Really listen to the feedback from your team to understand how the ideas are being received. And make sure you don't underestimate how much exposure your audience needs to understand your vision and embrace it.

When Harvard professor John Kotter studied change agents years ago, he found that they typically undercommunicated their visions by a factor of ten. On average, they spoke about the direction of change ten times less often than their stakeholders needed to hear it. In one three-month period, employees might be exposed to 2.3 million words and numbers. On average during that period, the vision for change was expressed in only 13,400 words and numbers: a 30-minute speech, an hour-long meeting, a briefing, and a memo. Since more than 99 percent of the communication that employees encounter during those three months does not concern the vision, how can they be expected to understand it, let along internalize it? The change agents don't realize this, because they're up to their ears in information about their vision. 

So as a result of Grant's ideas, I'm considering ways I can be more consistent, focused, and systematic in my communication. I need to refine the message and then use the "slow-drip method" to keep it in front our staff. And I want to listen to feedback and revise the vision as needed. Ultimately, the vision should belong to the team. It's really about giving an idea time to "percolate" so there is opportunity to process, evaluate, and ultimately act upon it.

An unfamiliar idea requires more effort to understand. The more we see, hear, and touch it, the more comfortable we become with it, and the less threatening it is.

Question: What are ways you are communicating a focused message to your team? I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below or respond on or .