Too often teachers experience isolation and a lack of opportunity to collaborate with colleagues in taking on the difficult work of improving student learning. Ingersoll (2001) cited this as a major factor in the alarming “drop out” rate of early career teachers.
Schools have tended to embrace the traditional stratified view of leadership, which assumes that there is a fundamental divide between the service delivery role of teachers and the leadership role of administrators.
not only will shared leadership enhance the prospects for improving student achievement, but it will also provide important opportunities for individual teachers to experience fulfillment while freeing principals from the sole responsibility for improving student achievement.
Too often teachers are frustrated when their training as leaders is not acknowledged and they are not given opportunities to exert leadership.
today’s schools principals are faced with three options: “Do everything themselves or with a few chosen teachers, sit back and let leadership occur in a chaotic manner, or intentionally plan and facilitate the process of collaborative leadership”
A principal’s disposition to share leadership with teachers (or others) appears related to personal security. Many of us have observed that the weaker the principal is personally, the less the principal is likely to share leadership. Stronger, more secure principals are more likely to share leadership. It makes sense.
Effective principals promote collaboration and shared decision-making through the development of professional learning communities supported by encouraging staff
principals should provide opportunities to lead, listen carefully to the teacher leader and nurture development of authentic professional learning communities.
“One of the most promising strategies a principal can use to support teacher leadership is to build an infrastructure that systematically provides opportunities, space for teacher leaders to emerge.”
Principals felt that it was important to create a climate of trust and confidence in the leadership of others, to promote ownership of vision and goals, and identify potential leaders and get them involved. One principal suggested that empowering principals must “Set the stage for leadership to be shared.”
“Developing a positive/trusting relationship in the building is a must before teachers will risk a leadership role. It’s the adage-- Go slow to go fast.”
“Identify all the ways teachers can demonstrate leadership within a building. Try to break through the ‘scarcity’ mentality and show that all should be leaders in various situations.” Another teacher leader advised principals to “abdicate responsibility for certain areas requiring leadership and increase teachers’ capacity by offering scaffold opportunities for leadership. Letting go and supporting.”
Principals were consistent in citing time, peer pressure, and union issues as the strongest barriers encountered by teachers assuming leadership roles. A practicing principal identified, “A sense of separation from teaching colleagues, perception by their peers of being arrogant or seeming superior, perception by peers as being part of the ‘inner circle’ of administration, and favoritism” as barriers. Another principal cited, “The union, the ‘old guard,’ fear of reprisal, and jealousy” as the mitigating barriers to teachers assuming leadership roles.
The notion that leadership stems from personally-based, rather than organizationally-based power is a critical point of learning from this study. For many practicing principals and emerging teacher leaders, this represents a reconceptualization from traditional leadership paradigms.
While transactional behaviors are needed to operate any school, in terms of empowerment development, transformational actions emerged as a critical theme.
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
This is one of those moments that reminds me many a time in my youth when I watched the video above. Of course, it's not really a valid comparison...but it's fun to make the connection.
Wednesday morning, the call came in regarding the TCEA Area 20 Election Results. The news? Jennifer Faulkner, the current Area 20 Director, will continue to serve as Director for another two years. I immediately sent her a congratulatory note. Although my initial reaction was relief, I have to admit to disappointment. Both feelings--contradictory as they are--are ones I can reconcile (don't forget, I'm a Libra striving for balance (smile)).
Thanks to all of you who voted for me in the TCEA Area 20 election!
This past weekend, I was reflecting what I'd like to see happen in Area 20. While I've explored that in some detail in previous blog entries, I'd like to quickly touch on these items and expand a bit:
To increase transparency in Area decisions, we really do need a blog that shares what is going on, what activities, etc. While I've certainly seen more activity in the last few months via email from TCEA Area 20, it would be great to see these emails appear via blog post with automatic feed into Twitter and Facebook. Using a tool like Friendfeed would make that process a one click operation.
Setup a monthly podcast that features best practices in TCEA Area 20 to start with, and then moves on from there to other topics and issues. Sharing what is happening in TCEA Area 20 is the important thing.
As I shared before, TCEA Area 9 employs an area council. The area council in TCEA Area 20 would maintain an Area President, a Vice-President, a Secretary, and Treasurer. These positions are voted on through the TCEA Area 9 membership...no reason why they couldn't be for Area 20.
Scholarships for Area students. One of the wealthiest Areas, Area 20 should consider what Area 9 does...using funding, generate $750 scholarships to area graduating seniors related to a TCEA member to apply. Also, offer a $1000 mini-grant to an area TCEA member who is a teacher.
The TCEA Area 9 folks organize their officers in this way...
Area 9 TCEA would be directed under a council consisting of the following seats:
Area Director
President
Vice-President
Treasurer/Secretary
Communications Director
One Member-At-Large from each steering committee
All functions of the association would be presented to and approved by this council.
Council seats would be elected every 2 years on a rotational basis of: Area Director/Vice-President/Communications Director and President/Treasurer/Secretary on alternating years. Members-at-large would be selected by respective committees each year.
Steering committees would include the following:
Education – Chaired by the President
Charged with planning and implementing educational events and activities for students and educators in Region 9.
Area Conference – Chaired by the Vice-President
Charged with coordinating Area 9/ Region 9 ESC Technology and Media Conference
Contest – Chaired by the Secretary/Treasurer
Charged with planning and coordination of area and state contests
Membership – Chaired by the Communications Director
Charged with coordination of member recruitment, membership correspondence including the Area 9 website.
The Area Director would serve as a liaison member on all committees. The President would serve as the liaison when the Area Director is not able to attend.
Of course, those are just suggestions! I wish Jennifer a great term and can only hope that TCEA will continue to evolve.
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
An email came out today to Moodle admins...I've put in bold the areas I found fascinating. The Moodle security issue aside, the bold section raises the question as to whether any organization has a reasonable expectation that exploits will be kept private until they can fix them and announce the problem and solution. Is this really realistic?
One of my expectations--perhaps incorrect, and therefore worthy of being challenged--of free open source software is that software is MORE secure because the code is freely available. And, as a result, all programmers--foe or friend--can study it and identify exploits that they can share back with the community. In fact, when discussing the issue with a "Microsoft shop" technology administrator, it was exactly this reason that made free, open source software so undesirable for a business.
What arguments would you offer in support of Moodle? Are these security exploits just ones that happen and we just deal with it as best we can? Can such exploits really hurt Moodle deployments?
Hi Moodle admins,
You're getting this email because you chose to receive important news
by email when you registered your Moodle site with moodle.org.
I'm writing to tell you about an exploit that was recently published
on the internet (intentionally bypassing our official security policy
of responsible disclosure published at http://moodle.org/security and
so increasing the vulnerability of many Moodle sites). The exploit
demonstrates how a Moodle teacher could potentially gain administrator
access to their own site.
In Moodle 1.9.6 and earlier, backups saved with the option of "user
data" would contain accounts of all the users enrolled in that course,
to promote data consistency if the backup was restored on another
Moodle system.
This included the md5 one-way hash calculated from the user's password
(eg e4d909c290d0fb1ca068ffaddf22cbd0). These can't be directly
decrypted to reveal the password, so they used to be seen as
reasonably safe to distribute. However, with the advent in recent
times of large databases of md5 reverse lookups on the internet, many
simpler passwords can now be determined quite quickly by searching for
their md5 hash (reverse mapping).
The demonstrated exploit basically involved a trusted teacher account
enrolling an administrator into their own course, then making a backup
of the course including user data, extracting the md5 hash of the
password from the backup file and then reverse mapping the hash to
discover the password.
Note that the exploit requires that (a) the user is a trusted teacher
on the site, and (b) that the admin is using a fairly weak password.
Moodle development policy has always generally been "we trust
teachers". However, we know that YOU may not trust them all and will
want to lock down your sites as much as possible.
NEW RELEASES ARE COMING SOON
The core dev team is working hard on Moodle 1.9.7 and Moodle 1.8.11
right now. Among other things, there are fixes to 11 known issues
that are related to backups and user data. We will let you know when
these releases are ready, via this mailing list. It should be within
a week.
WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
Your site may be vulnerable if you have any users with full backup
rights on your site that might have a reason to try and crack your
admin account, if they saw the published exploit. Here are some
things you can do to improve security on your site right now:
1. Disable backup functionality for teacher roles. You can re-enable
backups later with the new Moodle releases, because the permissions
for saving user data will be separate from the permission to create
backups.
HOW: Admin > Users > Permissions > Define roles: Edit the teacher
roles and change the capability for moodle/site:backup to "PROHIBIT".
2. Turn on site-wide password salting (in all versions of Moodle
since 1.6), this adds information to the md5 strings to make them
practically impossible to reverse (next time they log in or change
their password). Note that this will affect your ability to restore
backups containing user data on foreign Moodle sites - the admin of
the destination site needs to include your salt in their config.php
for user creation to work.
HOW: Add a line like this to your config.php (for the best security,
there is intentionally no way to set this in the Moodle interface)
$CFG->passwordsaltmain = 'some long random string here with lots of characters';
3. Turn on Password Policy for your site, this forces people to use
stronger passwords.
HOW: Admin > Security > Site policies > passwordpolicy
4. Change passwords for all admins. Now that you turned Password
Policy on you'll be forced to choose a stronger one. :) It also makes
any old backups useless for the purposes of the exploit.
HOW: Edit your user profile directly, for other admins you can edit
their profile and check this box: "Force password change". They'll
be forced to change it when they next log in.
Good luck, thanks for using Moodle and I'll talk to you again soon.
Cheers,
Martin (Moodle Lead Developer)
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
Thanks to Jane Hart coming up with a list of tools. There is a lot to like in the list but I can't help but ask, "How many of these tools are banned in public schools?" For example, here's the list of top 50 that includes tools that are banned in Texas school districts I'm familiar with...of course, not ALL school districts ban all products at the same time, although some districts sure try to! (smile)
Aside from how many of the tools are banned, what does the selection of these by voters mean? If many of these tools are banned, how many are accessible by mobile phone? How many are used after-hours?
Ah well, just playing with the list. What other questions would you ask?
Current ranking in 2009
2008
2007
TOOL
#
Votes
Name
Platform
Cost
1
11
43=
Twitter
BANNED in K-12 MOBILE PHONE
Microblogging tool
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
Ask me any day of the week what my best work experience has been, and I default to a golden age when I worked on a team that allowed me to be very creative in the situation I found myself. The context or culture of the organization did not limit the creativity, but rather, served as raw materials for that creativity...such experiences, I've found, are rare. They endure for a short time and then slip away...changes in leadership, staffing, the magic only lasts a short time.
Although I could work alone--and often did, since that's part of the education approach I grew up with in schools and became comfortable in--I found incidents of collaborative creativity to emerge over time as interests converged between my teammates and I. Today, few would argue that increasing collaboration within teams and team-to-team across the digital crescent is critical.
Yet, what tools do you use to facilitate that collaboration? Early last year, I introduced GoogleDocs to my team and we started working with that to solve problems. I found GoogleDocs to be great to throw stuff out there and work our way through various issues that arose. When I had to shut down GoogleDocs--it wasn't in line with the philosophy of our parent organization--for use in my team, it forced some reflection about what tools we could use in lieu of GoogleDocs...in the end, we found little that would equal what we had had.
When you've been working in the cloud, how do you "shrink yourself back down" to the ground, trying to fit into the old limits? Let me tell you, it's difficult.
Attending the Virtual School Symposium in Austin, I found the decision to use technologies like Skype and GoogleDocs--which are sometimes blocked or unauthorized in public school districts--to be increasing in popularity among education professionals who are not limited by their culture's philosophy. This was driven home by one presentation slide--all about webinar creation--such as the one shown (entitled Team Project Management Tools). I have to compliment these folks for the effort and detail they put into creating webinars. In fact, they inspired me to want to do more of this.
One of the tools RETA:NMSU embraced was Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro...check out Jonathan Finklestein Learning Times (they mentioned it). Some of the benefits this group shared in their presentation:
Multiple presentation file types,
audio, video, recording and archive, chat, application sharing, white board, polling, notes
So, instead of Skype, we'll be using Adobe Connect...but how to replace GoogleDocs? More importantly, how can we model technologies that are collaborative AFTER they are banned? How does lack of access to collaborative tools limit what we can accomplish in schools?
Will the that even make a difference at all in public schools today caught up in top-down, assessment-focused activities? Or could it mean the difference between success and failure for America vs the world?
Does it even matter? Maybe everyone is getting too excited. This afternoon, a man sat next to me with a pad of paper, futilely taking notes just as I managed to type a few words. His only audience was himself, while my audience was everyone who reads my tweets and access my notes for the event.
In the end, the difference meant nothing to him, but everything to me. . .was the difference significant? How does YOUR team collaborate, and what have you been able to accomplish that you wouldn't have been able to before through the use of tech tools?
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
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