Leadership

“The more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership must become.”

– Michael Fullan

The Critical Realities of Pioneers 

The men and women who settled the frontier faced many hardships that we could also call “realities”. Pioneering women often worked side by side with men in the hard work of taming the land, farming and raising a family. Both women and men worked together to bring in the harvest and use all the tools at their disposal.

Likewise, technology pioneers are both men and women, they work side-by-side and use the technology tools to engage their students and bring about successful learning experiences in their classrooms and schools. There may be only one technology pioneer in a school or their may be a group; however, the work to infuse technology into teaching and learning remains much the same. In addition, even though an individual, or group of individuals, want to support technological change efforts, these leaders struggle with some very challenging conditions. Many of these leaders work in isolation by necessity, often criticized or ignored by the rest of the staff. However, they carry on their work as pioneers struggling with locating technology and creating lessons hoping to gain the interest of colleagues.

Technology leaders must invent the future while dealing with the past

Wheatley (2002) tells us that new leaders do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past and that they want to work in new ways, but these new ways have yet been developed. Therefore, it is their work to invent them, and so they have to work twice as hard. This was true of pioneers of the past and the analogy holds true.

It is difficult to do new things in new ways

It is difficult to break free of the training, history, years of doing things in a particular order and fashion, and familiar practices of the prevailing culture Wheatley (2002). These technology leaders know that less bureaucracy is best, that “haves” and “have-nots” destroy innovation efforts, that top down technology efforts often fail. People have to be ready and convinced that the technology will work and not lead them to embarrassment. As leaders in educational technology we want teachers to use the tools to engage students in interesting and new ways, but often we quickly discover that our colleagues have adopted the new tools to do the same old things in new way. This is a critical reality.

There is no room for failure

As pioneers, it is impossible to get it right the first time (Wheatley, 2002). No one has yet drawn accurate maps for this technology pioneering trail and the technology explorers are learning as they go. The maps that these pioneers create are called “District Technology Plans”, “District Technology Reviews” and other such titles. School district spend money on private consultants to create these plans. Our present economic environment causes a critical focus on the cost of such reviews and disbelief in the fact that the plan would be implemented because there is no additional funding to make it happen. Our present culture is often no supportive of this kind of spending. Therefore, instead of finding the additional resources to fund this exploration and experimentation, we abandon these reports in them in favor of safer projects that continue with the “same old”.

My school district’s Technology Planning

• Building a Strong and Optimized IT Foundation for the 21st Century
• Wireless Networks in Nanaimo Ladysmith Public Schools

Pioneers face many challenges that are not easily overcome and at times it appears that the school culture does not want them to succeed. To acknowledge the successes brought about through educational technology initiatives means we they will have to change their practice and abandon the comfort of familiar beliefs and practices. People naturally flee from such changes and thus, even as the old ways fail, we hold onto them more fiercely and apply them more zealously (Wheatley, 2002).