Admitting Our Fears

Heights.

Standardized test scores.

Spiders.

Parent-Teacher conferences.

The word "moist".

Failure.


In and out of the classroom teachers, administrators, students, and everyone else has some fears or insecurities, but facing those fears is where you separate leaders from the rest. Vicki Davis posted this on her Cool Cat Teacher Blog late last year:

"I think it is hard for many people to realize that fear is a natural part of being innovative. If you do ANYTHING at all, fear is often part of that. "

Fear can motivate us or it can hold us back from achieving amazing and innovative things. I started a blog this year - scary stuff. I started coaching soccer for the first time a few months ago - scary stuff. I started running professional development for other more experienced teachers and administrators this year - holy guacamole! Scary stuff. Now, I find myself looking forward to blogging, searching out materials to use in different blog posts, and sharing them with others in a new light. Now, I'm reading soccer coaching books and finding segues into teacher and learning that I had never been introduced to before. Now, I have realized a passion for teaching adults that I never knew existed. Fear is a good then when realized and used as a guide.

I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change…. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.  ~ Erica Jong

What fear is holding you back? Realize your fears and take the first step to overcome them. This might be talking with a colleague about the fears, this might be doing a little research and trying something new yourself before asking others to join you, or it might just be admitting you have a fear of something. Here's a challenge for you - pick something that you fear from the list below and do it; let your fear of it guide you instead of stopping you. Already conquered all these? Add your unlisted fear to the list by leaving a comment at the bottom - the first step to overcoming a fear is admitting it.

Try Blogging!
Here is a webinar called Fear Factor: Taking the Fear Out of Blogging and here are the great resources they mention for getting started with blogging that they mention,

Try a New Project with Your Students!
Infographics --> Here is a great post by Bill Ferriter on his blog The Tempered Radical

Common Craft Style Videos --> This is a great resource post by Paul Bogush.

Tackle the Topics of Bullying Once and For All!
Use one of these 4 Great Online Anti-Bullying Initiatives to get the ball rolling on an anti-bullying program unique to your school's or classroom's needs.

Need to start simplier yet? Have your staff read this NY Times article on how to define bullying to help everyone create a common language around this hot topic in education.

Participate in a MOOC and Learn Something New!
MOOCs? Pshh who cares about MOOCs? Take a minute to read Why MOOCs Matter by Keith Hamon, and you'll be itching to participate in a MOOC.

Find a MOOC of interst at A Master List of 700 Free Courses From Great Universities from Open Culture
and learn something new!

Try Out a New EdTech Tool!
Try out PosterOven to create a poster to get teachers excited about the next PD you are leading or to get students asking questions about the next topic in your class!

Use a QR code to get students using thier devices and interacting digitally with material and you! Here are two simple ways to use QR codes.



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Admitting Our Fears by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Leaders Must Be Curators

Wikipedia describes Digital curation as

...the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. The term curation in the past commonly referred to museum and library professionals. It has since been applied to interaction with social media including compiling digital images, web links and movie files.

Curation as a teacher is vital. Curation as a administrator is vital. Curation as a leader is vital. Curation as a life-long learner is vital. Curation helps us interact with the resources available; it helps us categorize, organize, and share resources with others. In curating resources we learn, grow, and contribute to our professional and personal learning networks in a hugely beneficial capacity that is only outmatched by the reciprocity it produces if done using social media like Diigo, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Will Richardson wrote a blog post last month titled Curators Rule the World where he highlighted a quote by Joe Coleman in his post Long Form Journalisms Ressurection, "We’re now at a point where curators rule the content world, by collectively deciding whether content gets amplified or lost." This is a great point that curation can help us with the vital 21st century skill of managing information in the information age by allowing the curation of resources to be a communal activity with the work load dispersed allowing for more learning and less searching.

For an example, below are seven (7) of the 20+ resources I bookmarked on Diigo this week and shared on Twitter with my followers, the #edchat and #edtech chats, and my fellow teachers via Twitter, email, or "come here and look at this":

Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership --> During my blog post last week How May I Help You? (Servant Leadership) I found the actual center responsible for holding the annual conference on servant leadership and maintaining the body of knowledge around it, I bookmarked it for future resource gathering in this area of leadership.

Online classes may worsen educational achievement gap, study shows --> I read this Seattle Times article and sent the link out to our district's technology and distance education coordinator to help in the ongoing discussion in our district of using out online classes as credit recovery opportunities.

50 Educator Twitter Accounts Worth Following --> I used this TeachThought blog post as an opportunity to grab a few new Twitter users to follow (like plugged-in superintendent Tom D'Amico and connect principal Lyn Hilt) and to share with my colleagues who are just starting out on Twitter.

6 Steps To A Flipped Classroom --> I used this TeachThought blog post (I like TeachThought quite a bit) to build my knowledge base about flipped classrooms, because I am interested in the idea but skeptical about best practices related to it as well.

Picking the Best Platform for Class Blogging --> I started a class blog and leadership blog this year, and next year I would like to start giving students individual blogs so I am gathering resources for that change next year and this FreeTech4Teachers resource was a great addition.

The Roman Empire on Google Maps --> I teach 6th grade social studies which focuses on ancient history and this resource will make a great resource next quarter when we study The Roman Empire more closely, I also shared it with the other teachers in my district for a great resource from the Google Maps Mania blog.

Could There Actually Be One "C" To Rule Them All?! --> I thought this was a great piece from the ConnectedPrincipals blog of the "C" discussion of Common Core and vital 21st century skills that I enjoyed reading and shared with my school.

Curation is not just about aggregation - curation is the deliberate act of collecting, organizing, annotating, and sharing resources that will benefit others and hopefully start or contribute to conversations that will help those involved learn and grow. It is about dipping into the rivers of resources like Twitter, Pinterest, or blogs and sifting out as many golden resources as we can. Curation is how we learn in the information age; it is an art, a passion, and a skill that all leaders need to have in their toolbox.


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Leaders Must Be Curators by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How May I Help You? (Servant Leadership)

Top notch teachers more often than not have a strong desire to help others, this is one of many traits that helps them to be empathetic - a key to meaningful teaching. In the same vein though, one of the common complaints of teachers pertaining to administrators is that they are disconnected from the classroom and therefore don't understand the struggles that a teacher goes through in the classroom. The idea is the same for the very best administrators that we hear about and read about; they have the ability to empathize with colleagues and they embrace the idea of servant leadership. I am not an administrator, but as a teacher I try to understand and follow the same ideas in the hopes the I will become a integral part of my school to my students, teachers, administrators, and the community as a whole.


George Couros is one of many leaders that I follow that seems to carry servant leadership as one of the many tools in his toolbox of administrative skills. Recently discussing an example of the practical application of servant leadership in a blog post titled Questions and Ownership Couros said:

I have said this before, that great leadership should model the same things that great teachers do.  If you are the leader or teacher with all of the answers, what happens when you leave?  What have you built within your school or classroom?  Even if your school moves forward because of the wisdom of one person, that is a culture of one, and that culture will die when you leave.  We have to figure out better ways for our staff and students to own the culture and learning, and follow up by doing what we can to empower them to be successful.

I gather two big ideas from this discussion on leadership: continuity and shared leadership. Now, built into these things are optimism, empowerment, trust, team-work, and many other key characteristics but when it comes down to it a school often needs to have continuity and shared leadership to survive. It is often said that the average time a principal will spend at a school is 2-3 years before moving on or up in their careers. Although this is unsettling, I think the best move for schools is to have a system in place that allows for this professional mobility without a loss of overall skills, knowledge, and leadership. Empowering teacher-leaders by allowing them to fulfill leadership roles at a school-wide level will not only diversify the leadership within a school it will unify the school and allow for the long standing stability and continuity needed for success.

The following list of critical skills for the servant leader is adapted from the work of the originator of the term "servant leadership" Robert Greenleaf:

1. Listening - Communication is always a valued trait of a leader and it is no different in servant leaders. Servant leaders seek to identify the will of their group and clarify any misunderstandings, by actively listening they also act as a medium for communication by listening and moderating communications.
2. Empathy - As mentioned above, servant leaders seek to understand and empathize with others, in both the positive and negative aspects of the teaching and learning profession.
   
3. Healing - Greenleaf wrote, "There is something subtle communicated to one who is being served and led if, implicit in the compact between the servant-leader and led is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something that they have."Understanding how to heal people's hearts and minds is a key to understanding how to be a true servant leader.
   
4. Awareness - This refers to a frame of mind that seeks self-awareness and general awareness of things like school culture and climate.
   
5. Persuasion - This is a key difference to most traditional models of leadership, where a leader seeks to persuade others rather than coerce compliance. Building consensus in this way often leads to stronger and more stable buy-in from stakeholders within a school setting.
   
6. Conceptualization - Servant-leaders must be able to conceptualize an optimistic future and see it in the day-to-day undertaking of a leader, teacher, or student
   
7. Foresight - Linked to the previous skill, foresight it is vital for leaders to conceptualize the future while understanding the past either explicitly or intuitively.
   
8. Stewardship - Robert Greenleaf's view of all institutions was one in which CEO's, staff, directors, and trustees all play significance roles in holding their institutions in trust for the great good of society.
   
9. Commitment to the Growth of People - Servant-leaders believe that people have an intrinsic value beyond their tangible contributions as workers. As such, servant-leaders are deeply committed to a personal, professional, and spiritual growth of each and every individual within the organization.
   
10. Building Community - Servant-leaders seek to identify a means for building community among those who work within a given institution. Creating a living learning community in a school can be one of the most powerful movements made by a servant leader.
    

To learn more about servant leadership you can explore the website devoted to Greenleaf's servant leadership or you can buy the 25th anniversary edition of the original book that still holds valuable information for leadership today. You can also watch this 10 minute YouTube video explaining some of the tenants of servant leadership.

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How Can I Help You? Servant Leadership by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Go Home! - How to Be a Better Teacher

When I told my students how much I missed being in a place with snow ever since I moved to teach in Saipan, they were instantly interested, and not just because I mentioned the mystical thing known as snow - I was talking about something that I was passionate about.

I quickly realized we needed some visual guides and pulled up some Google images as I talked about snowshoeing, ice fishing, snow mobiles, snowmen, snow ball fights, snow forts, and sledding. When I told them that I spent a night in an snow fort I made for a Polar Bear challenge with my dad when I was a kid they begged to hear more. I described how we made the fort so that we slept raised up on a platform (to let cold air sink below us) and then how we stayed warm (without melting the fort) using candles and the heat from our breath in a hardened-snow fort and why this was better than a solid ice fort.

This discussion had me thinking about a short interview I watched the other day of Gary Stager at a Maker Faire, which is "a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement." Stager made a few statements that help describe this spontaneous teaching moment I had about snow forts from my childhood and the most important is that "Knowledge is a consequence of experience." We need to show students that we are interesting people who lead a well-balanced life and don't simple live, eat, sleep, and breath our classrooms.

Stager goes on to discuss that the most influential teachers of our schooling are often the ones who share their "knowledge and their passion for acquiring more knowledge and it becomes infectious and transparent to their students." A great example of this is when I sat and ate lunch with a student one day and we talked about I really liked to read about Julius Caesar and his exploits, the very next day the student came in bursting with stories about Caesar being captured by pirates when he was a young man - another student successfully addicted to learning! :-)

 

 The idea here is simple - live a life full of experiences worth talking about, share them with your students, and in the process become a better teacher.

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Go Home! - How to Be a Better Teacher by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Risk is the Key to a Good Life

Every time I catch a video with International Space Station flight engineer Chris Hadfield I eagerly drop what I am doing and watch it. Hadfield is a powerful and captivating speaker who is a natural at explaining and articulating a huge variety of topics. Recently, I caught a video of Hadfield having a conversation with William Shatner about a variety of topics stemming from a Q&A session by Shatner. There is one particular question that when Shatner asks about Hadfield about the risks of a possible Mars mission; Hadfield casually responds, "you can't live a worthwhile life without risk."

In the classroom and in schools as a whole if there is not a safe and caring environment where teachers feel that they can take risks then there will be very little innovative thinking. Everyone must take risks at a school at one time or another for innovative thinking to occur at a school-wide level.

• Students must understand that mistakes and even failures are not end products but a means to a more successful end; a stepping stone of learning
• Teachers must feel the freedom and support of their administrators to try new teaching and learning strategies in an environment that fosters life-long learners
• Administrators must feel empowered within their role and in their ability to be able to pilot new programs and test new technology within their schools without out the confines of rigid accountability

The key to all of these is a high level of support and trust at a school, because there is always a possibility that a program will fail, won't produce higher student achievement, won't promote character education in a school, or won't hit any other mark it was intended to. At this point you make or break a school environment; if the told-you-so statements start flying or anything similar - innovation will die a painful death. On the other hand, in schools where failure, mistakes, and a little bit of stumbling are seen as profession growth, learning opportunities, and stepping stones to future excellence you will see all stakeholders work harder, appreciate failure, and seek excellence in all aspects.

Here is a YouTube for Chris Hadfield which comes up with eating in space, clipping finger nails,  and tons of other great things you never thought of that were different in space - try and watch one without having to watch another from sheer curiosity.

(Digital) Creative Spaces and Common Core

Image by ToGaWandering

Creativity. 

Collaboration. 

Critical Thinking. 

Communication.

These four C's of the Common Core Standards are of course important for success in and out of the classroom and the workplace. School systems have always been spaces where creative minds can come together to teach and learn with each other, but I think with the push for these 4 C's and the other vitally important skills we hope every child has throughout their school and life that its time to look to the digital creative spaces where these 4 C's can occur. Social media like Twitter, blogging, Pinterest, Facebook, and many other tools can take a classroom limited by the minds held within its walls and connect it to an almost infinite amount of people, places, ideas, and resources.

Steven Johnson talks about this in his book Where Great Ideas Come From. Johnson discusses that "good ideas normally come from the collision of smaller hunches, so that they form something bigger than themselves" but historically the most important and recurring theme around these collisions of hunches, he says, is a creative space. Johnson takes a look at the advent of coffee houses during the Age of Enlightenment, the frequenting of Parisian Cafes, and we already know that schools and universities are creative spaces for minds to meet, but digital creative spaces are too often overlooked.

Social media created these digital creative spaces that we need for education as well as all other aspects of our lives. Only three of my students are connected on Twitter for various reasons, but since the four of us follow each other I caught a conversation they had the other day in which one girl asked another about a science fair idea at which point a high-school student in Oregon who follows this student told her a great idea for a science fair in which they could work together to do a comparison based on the experiment done in different locations and they will facilitate all their updates as to their experiment on Twitter - brilliant! These students were communicating their own creative ideas for the science fair and came up with a unique way to collaborate together to create this science project.

A second example was with the digital tool Skype. Skype Education has a project called Mystery Skype, where classes around the world voluntarily sign up to have a Skype call with each other and guess the class' location. (For more information on this check Pernille Ripp's blog post here) In it's most simple form though Mystery Skype has students using digital or non-digital resources from globes and maps to Google Maps and search engines. The students collaborate together to decipher clues, use critical thinking skills, and all the while they are communicating with each other and students in classrooms around the world.

Digital media can provide endless creative spaces that allow for anyone to build ideas and collaborate until ideas become reality. We can't ignore these tools anymore, as Steven Johnson says, "Chance favors the connected mind."

See below for a short RSA-style preview of Johnson's book:

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(Digital) Creative Spaces and Common Core by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Being (not) Anonymous

I recently read Growing Up in a World of Anonymous, an article by Peter DeWitt. In his article he focused on two main points:
(1) Anger infused comments
(2) The effect on students of not being a role model in voicing your opinion online or anywhere else and proudly displaying your name. DeWitt explains in detail that most anonymous posts come from people that
"will post comments of negativity as though they have nothing better to do than find the worst things they can say about the writer, the topic or society in general." He also brings up the negative effect this will have on children, and students. They see their role models (parents, teachers, etc.) pseudo-participating in a topic they are interested in and assume it is the best way to participate. In this sense Dewitt describes it as "a pack mentality where one person inspires the next to write something more awful"

I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. DeWitt that we need to set better examples so I want to expand his argument and relate it to my own experiences. I currently lead a five (5) course Educational Technology Endorsement for teachers in my district which includes twenty-five (25) teachers and about (10) principals and five (5) central office administrators. The first course was advanced computer applications and introduced blogging for the first time to all but one participant who had been maintaining a class blog for two (2) years. When I did a survey on the course after, I only received three (3) choices out of four (4) as follows:

• Loved it, I can see blogging as a valuable tool for my students and myself! (0%)
•  Neutral (35%)
• I will more than likely not use this is the future. (40%)
• I see no purpose to blogging in my professional or personal. (25%)

Additionally on the optional "What part of this course would you change?" I had six people (17%) recommend removing the blogging portion. Additionally out of 35 participants, only eleven made their blogs public. These were, to say the least, very disappointing results.

In response to my request that for everyone's professional growth (optional) they should make their blogs public,  I received the following comments from first year teachers to 26 year veterans:

"I don't feel comfortable letting the whole world read my blog, what if I say the wrong thing?"

"I'm new to this whole blogging thing, I don't want to embarrass myself"

I attempted to explain that many blog posts come up as blunders and many more come up successfully helping the blogger to articulate something about their passions in such a way that they grow professionally and/or personally.

In response though, I decided to not push or require any more than 2 or 3 blogs a course, but I will not remove them because I see huge opportunists to help facilitate a great tool to help teachers reflect, when most are not reflecting more than is required on lesson plan templates.

Additionally, although open for change, our Commissioner of Education takes a pragmatic view of blogging when I requested to do a PD on it at a state-wide meeting.

"I just don't want individuals to use it as a place to share their pet peeve but rather as a professional forum to improve the quality of education." - Dr. Sablan, COE.

A prudent contention for blogging, but if we don't try we will never know. Additionally if we set up a system as mentioned in Dean Shareski's Huffinton Post article How to Make Better Teachers it will provide a safe forum that also holds teacher's accountable for overly negative comments:

""Hire a teacher, give them a blog. Get them to subscribe to at least five other teachers in the district as well as five other great teachers from around the globe. Have their principal and a few central office people to subscribe to the blog and five other teachers as well. Require them to write at least once a week on their practice. Get conversations going right from the get go. Watch teachers get better."

Even thought this system might not actually happen for a few years in my district and a lot of trial and error by me and the participants of the endorsement classes. I will keep blogging and have other blog in the remaining courses and tweeting directly to our hash-tag #psstech, especially with posts where leaders bear some of tough moments such as when Dr. Cook blogged about Where is My Leadership Mojo and How Will I Get it Back?. To show that errors, mistakes, and fears are just good to get out in a reflective way to grow and learn from as are successes.

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Being (not) Anonymous by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Kids Need Structure

I recently watched Colin Powell's TED talk, and while I don't agree with everything he said, I do agree that "Kids Need Structure," as his talk was so aptly titled.

"I spend a lot of time with youth groups, and I say to people, 'When does the education process begin?' We're always talking about, 'Let's fix the schools. Let's do more for our teachers. Let's put more computers in our schools. Let's get it all online.' That isn't the whole answer. It's part of the answer. But the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child's heart and soul to begin with."

There is a post by Justin Tarte called Technology is not the answer... in which he discusses a metaphor for education as a house. Tarte says technology is the house, but without a solid foundation the house won't last. Structure is the foundation in education, students have to be able to adapt to different structures to help prepare for the real world, to build their homes. I think public schools with different teachers, buildings, campuses, etc. provide this exposure to structure that students need.

"And I also had this extended network. Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community."

Schools provide this social network, this need, that General Powell discussed in his talk. I teach online, I take courses online, I am months away from a Master's degree in educational technology, but I still know the social value of deep interpersonal networks that very few institutions other than face-to-face schools can provide. The structure and routines of schools can help reduce learning anxiety in students to manageable levels, and allow them to explore learning and personal growth in a safe environment.

As General Powell says, "every child ought to have a good start in life," and schools are the best way to do this.
 

Kids Need Structure by Tony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Intrinsic Blog-ivation

I have never blogged for more than a few months at a time before (only as long as a course required me to sadly), so this will be my first attempt at maintaining a blog consistently and more importantly for the right reasons. During a lesson last week in my college success class at a local college we brainstormed intrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (external) motivators for the things we do in life.

The students' list was pretty standard with extrinsic being connected to money, power, grades (or a degree), belief in luck, chance, or fate, and overall a results-based mindset. On the other hand, intrinsic led us to discuss motivators such as enjoyment, personal or professional growth, belief in self-control and hard work, and overall process-based mindset.

As we discussed some activities that provide the different motivators I realized that I had blogged before only for extrinsic reasons. These reasons were often thinly veiled, such as an assignment for a course, but I realized that I wanted (and needed) to find the intrinsic motivation that so many other professionals had found in blogging as a reflective and collaborative tool. When I decided a few days ago to start a new blog I began researching what some of the most important connections in my professional learning network were saying about their own blogging experiences.

One of the most hard-hitting bloggers in education that I know is Joe Bower from Alberta, Canada. Joe has inspired me to fight against the mediocre status quo that has gripped so many schools today. Joe Bower wrote a reflective post titled My Three Years of Blogging and Tweeting where he said "I have developed a network of people that I trust and respect. These connections fuel my learning." This is the biggest reason I need to maintain a blog. I have gone almost two years learning and growing by reading the blogs of Joe Bower and many others; it is time to step out of my circle of comfort, reflect on my teaching and learning, and grow exponentially as an educator and learner. You can read Joe's blog at For the Love of Learning and follow him on twitter here.

Another professional I follow on blogger and twitter is Dean Shareski. In a Huffington Post blog post titled How to Make Better Teachers Dean summed it up in one word - blogging. Dean discusses the benefits of blogging, both financially (free!) and more importantly from a professional growth standpoint. He terms it as being a "Reflective Practitioner" - which I agree with. A lot of teachers, including myself, could strive a lot harder to be more reflective. You can read Dean's blog at Ideas and Thoughts: Learning Stuff Since 1964 and I highly recommend you follow him on twitter here.

I think the biggest obstacle in my mind, second to the fear of reflecting publicly, is the amount of time it takes to reflect and blog substantively. George Couros, a Division Principal of Innovative Teaching and Learning for Parkland School Division, recently wrote a post titled Another Reason to Blog; Proactive through Reflection where he responded to the notion of not having enough time.

"My response has been that reflection is part of your work. It is important that you make it part of your day, as it should be a part of your student’s day.  We cannot just continue to dump information into our (and our student’s) brains without giving or making time to reflect.  It is essential that there is creation and connection along with consumption."

You can read more of George's posts at his blog Principal of Change and follow his twitter posts here.

The first educational blogger I ever read was Steve Wheeler at his blog titled Learning with 'e's, and I have been a devoted reader ever since. On his post, Seven Reasons Teachers Should Blog, Steve sums up many of my motivators as a life-long learner looking to start blogging more; these reasons are: reflection, crystallizing your thinking, interaction with new audiences, creating personal momentum, generating valuable feedback, using creativity, and raising your game as a professional. Steve writes often and truthfully, baring his thoughts and thought processes openly for examination and conversation, he has inspired me since I read his blog the first time. In addition to reading his blog, Steve's Twitter account is a wealth of good conversation about nearly any topic related to education, follow him here (yes - his Twitter name is @timbuckteeth).

Finally, there are two principals I have just recently discovered and begun to follow and I am almost distraught that I didn't find these two leaders earlier on - thank goodness for blog archives. Justin Tarte, a principal in Union R-XI School District, wrote a post called 10 Reasons to Get Educators Blogging on his blog Life of an Educator which is actually five reasons to read blogs and five reasons to create a blog. This post was one of the many I have read that helped give me the push to start a blog for the right reasons and hopefully stick with it. Follow Justin on twitter here.

The other principal, Eric Sheninger at Milford High School in New Jersey, writes his blog at A Principal's Reflections. During my search for blogger's reflections on blogging I found Time Well Spent on Eric's blog and in this post his open reasoning and links to both pro-bloggers and those against blogging shows how committed he is to provided a balanced argument for blogging and social media as a whole in his life, his school, and for others in education. Follow Eric on Twitter here.

These are but a few of the many, many people I learn from on Twitter and through blogs. One of the most exciting things about these social media outlets is that anytime I am ready to learn more and to grow as an individual and a professional all I have to do is commit a few minutes of my time to read and reflect on content put out (for free!) by some of the most inspirational leaders in education today.

This blog will be my attempt to show the world that I am ready to grow as an educator and a leader. I hope that others can learn along with me in my journey of Learning to Be a Leader.

Please comment and subscribe to this blog so that I reach the fullest potential of this tool. Follow me on Twitter here.

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