31 Days to Become a Better Ed Tech Leader -- Day 2: Delegate a Unit of Work

A task a day for 31 daysDesigning units of work is quite a labour-intensive task. Even if you’re using a set of ready-made units, you will probably still want to customise them  for your school or class. One way of reducing the burden on yourself, and at the same time injecting fresh ideas into your lessons, is to ask others to take responsibility for one or more units.

This is much easier to do, of course, if you lead a team of people than if you’re co-ordinating the efforts of people who are not answerable to you. Even there, however, you can often find a colleague who is mad keen on one particular aspect of educational technology, and who would not require too much persuasion to take on such a task.

For example, is there a teacher who enjoys making videos? Is there one who enjoys geocaching? Does another colleague love graphic design?

It’s crucial to delegate the responsibility, not merely the task. Nobody would thank you for being asked to be a glorified work experience assistant! It entails setting the main objectives, to ensure that overall the curriculum or scheme of work is being fully covered, and then leaving everything to them. And I mean everything:

• The lessons
• The lesson materials
• Preparing resources on the school’s VLE
• Booking computer equipment as required
• Organising permission slips if a school visit will be involved
• Running training sessions with the rest of the team.

You may find, as I did when I tried this out, that some colleagues are a little under-confident. In that case, by all means provide them with the lifeline of being able to have meetings with you to discuss their ideas and any practical matters arising.

The result, as I can testify, is a set of teaching units which contain ideas you’d never have thought of, devised by colleagues who feel a great deal of ownership of, and pride in, the scheme of work. Crucially, engaged and enthusiastic teachers generate engagement and enthusiasm in their students, making it more likely that they will make progress.

31 Days to Become a Better Ed Tech Leader -- Day 1: Carry Out a SWOT Analysis

A task a day for 31 daysWelcome to the 31 Days series. The aim of it is to provide challenges to help you become an even better educational technology leader than you already are. If you have only just found about the series, I suggest you read this article first.

In case you have already read this article through the preview sent to Computers in Classrooms subscribers, I've added more at the end.

Businesses do this all the time. The acronym ‘SWOT’ stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, and carrying out this kind of analysis is a good way to start looking at your circumstances in an honest and holistic way.

You can carry it out in a back-of-an-envelope kind of way, on your own, or use it in a team meeting. The advantage of the former is that you can very quickly generate ideas about what needs to be done, or at least what needs to be discussed.

In the illustration below, for example, you could take all of these points and turn them into an agenda of issues to discuss with your team.
Example of a SWOT analysis
The advantage of the latter approach as a starting point is that you get everyone else’s ideas too. If you’ve just joined the school as the ICT leader, the last thing you want to do really is go in like a bull in a china shop changing everything based on what could turn out to be mistaken assumptions.

This exercise is a good way of getting the lowdown on the situation, or at least your colleagues’ opinion of what the situation is, before devising a plan of action.

Variations on the theme

The whole point of carrying out a SWOT analysis is to get the big picture of the ICT provision in your school very quickly. Checklists have their place, because they help to ensure that you cover everything, but this kind of broad brush approach can lead to people identifying issues that they would probably never think of even putting on the checklist in the first place.

But you don't have to use the standard SWOT table as exemplified above. You could, for example, take the approach used to do assessment in many primary schools: three stars and a wish. So, you ask each of your colleagues to come up with three things they think are really good about the ICT in your school, and one thing they wish was in place.

An alternative is to ask them to suggest three things that are really good, two things which could be improved and one thing they'd really like to have.

Yet another variation, if you don't have a team as such or are feeling fairly brave, is to set up a survey for staff at the school (pupils too if you like, but I'll be dealing with them separately in this series). There are two problems with asking staff for their opinion:

The first is that it can become a bit depressing if people start throwing all their ICT-related problems at you in one fell swoop! However, this is an excellent exercise to carry out if you have only been at the school five minutes, because nobody could reasonably blame you for all that's perceived as being wrong.

Secondly, you would need to handle your request very carefully, not just because everyone is busy, but because it's easy to raise false expectations. Some things simply cannot be changed overnight, but not everyone understands that.

Of course, if few people are using technology in their lessons, or do so only sporadically, you will need to ask your colleagues for their opinions in order to find out why.

Getting back to the SWOT analysis carried out only within your team, there are variations in the way you go about it. For example, you might ask each person to carry out a back of the envelope exercise before coming to the next team meeting, so that you can all compare notes in the meeting itself. This saves time in the meeting, but does require you to ask busy colleagues to do yet one more thing.

Once at the meeting you could organise a 'snowball' activity, whereby colleagues go off in pairs and agree the list of strengths etc. Then the pairs get together and agree the list as a foursome. This approach is an effective way of getting to the key issues if you lead a fairly large team (four or more), or if you were doing it as a whole staff exercise.

An alternative approach is to ask one member of the team to come up with a list of three or four strengths, another to focus on the weaknesses, and so on.

Next steps

Once the issues have been teased out through the SWOT analysis, priorities for action will need to be established, followed by courses of action to be carried out by each person, and by when. In other words, the SWOT analysis helps to guide the team's future activity. The nice thing about working that out in this sort of way is that each member of the team will have had a say in the matter.

If you have any views about this idea, or can suggest a different way of obtaining a similar result, please leave a comment.

31 Days to Become a Better Ed Tech Leader: Information

A task a day for 31 daysThe first part of this series will be published at 8am this morning. The whole point of it is to suggest ideas, so have a notepad and pen ready (remember those?) and a mug of tea or coffee.

The things I'll be suggesting have worked, they're not just theories I came up with whilst lying in the bath. However, they may not all work for you in your particular circumstances. So be creative! Use the ideas as a starting point for your own thinking. I promise I won't be checking up on you!

I'd be interested to learn how you find the series, and how you've adapted some of the ideas.

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership 03: Frederick Herzberg

This is article 3 of a series of 3.

Frederick Herzberg was a psychologist in the USA who
developed the hygiene theory of people's
productivity at work. What is the theory, and how
can it help the ICT (educational technology) leader?

Herzberg can be placed in the Abraham
Maslow school of thought, in that he believed that
people's motivation could be explained in "human" terms
rather than "scientific" ones. He distinguished between two
kinds of factors: hygienic and motivational.

The hygienic ones are those which help to prevent job
dissatisfaction, but do not in themselves promote job
satisfaction. In other words, they are like good hygiene: it
does not in itself create good health, but its absence can
lead to ill-health.

Examples of such factors include, working conditions,
salary and working relationships.

Motivational factors are those which positively promote
job satisfaction, and include achievement, recognition and
responsibility.

So how can you, the ICT manager, make use of these insights?

Hygiene factors

As far as the hygiene factors are concerned, you consider
the following:

Working conditions
Staff should have access to the best equipment, not the
worst. In other words, if you find yourself being offered a
sum of money to spend on educational technology, ask
yourself how it might be used to make teachers' lives
easier.

Make sure that the environment is kept pleasant -- and
hygienic. For example, if you have a technical support team
ask them to implement a schedule of keyboard cleaning.

Working relationships
There is not much you can do if two people dislike each
other, but that is not the point. As a manager you need to
be seen to be above their differences, and to be completely
impartial. That means, for example, being prepared to give
everyone a chance to give their opinion in team meetings.
It also means not going out for dinner or other kinds of
socialising with just one or two people. Team means are
fine -- a good idea, in fact -- but anything else could be
seen as favouritism or at least a lack of impartiality.

What about motivational factors?

Clearly, you will probably not have the power to promote
people to a higher position -- but you can make sure that
members of your team are given opportunities to take
responsibilities that may help them gain promotion in the
future.

Also, giving them some degree of control and flexibility
over what they do is a very good way to motivate people,
and to harness their natural desire to do the best they
can. You may think that in these highly prescriptive times,
that kind of delegation is impossible. not so.

One of the things I used to do, for example, was to ask each team
member to take responsibility for a particular unit in the
scheme of work. That meant devising the lesson plans and
the resources for the rest of us to use, and making sure
that we had received training so that we knew what we doing
and how to do it. The only non-negotiable element in all
this was the set of objectives that had to be achieved. The
result was not only a well-motivated team, but also a much
richer set of lesson plans than I could have devised on my
own, or which could be found in a book.

Job enrichment
This article would not be complete without considering job
enrichment, which is an extension of Herzberg's hygiene-
motivation theory. It includes factors such as giving team
members more control, and using more of their abilities --
and extending the ones they have through training.

You will immediately recognise that the example I gave a
moment ago of team members taking responsibility for a
unity of work can be seen as an example of job enrichment.

But we can also learn something else from Herzberg's job
enrichment theory, although you probably know it already,
and that is the importance of professional development.

It is probably also crucial to extend what team members do
to areas that are slightly beyond their comfort zone:
everyone needs a challenge, if only to prevent boredom in
the long term. But this option can be fraught with
difficulties, and so will be covered in a separate article.

As you can see, it is possible to take the theories and
findings of a clinical psychologist and apply them to the
leadership and management of ICT.

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership 02: Jack Welch

This is article 2 of a series of 3.

In this series I am exploring what the educational ICT leader can learn from business leaders and thinkers when it comes to performing the educational technology leader's role.

So what can we learn from Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric? Although schools and GE are very different types of institution, you may be surprised to discover that school leaders could benefit from adopting some of Welch's strategies.

What Welch was about

There are a some basic principles that characterise Welch's approach and philosophy:

He was not prepared to suffer mediocrity. IF GE was not number one or number two in a particular field, he would close and sometimes sell off that section.

He adopted a similar attitude to his staff. He reduced the number of employees at GE by nearly 120,000 in the course of 5 years, because he preferred to have a lean, efficient operation to a bloated, inefficient one.

Still on the subject of staff, he divided them into the top 10%, a middle 70% and the lowest performing 20%. His aim was to develop the top 10%, help the 70% achieve what they wanted to, and minimise the time, energy and resources spent on the bottom 20%. In fact, if an employee didn't shape up, he got rid of them.

Having said that, he did not punish failure. If someone made a mistake, he thought it was important to help them regain their self-esteem. He was, you might say, big on motivation.

He was highly competitive on his company's behalf, and communicated his vision to his team. This manifested itself not only in a desire to be number one or number two in each field in which GE operated, but also in terms of a reputation for quality. Unlike many educational so-called visionaries, Welch had his feet firmly on the ground, so his vision could actually be put into practice.

What it means for you

So how might we translate all this into the context of a school? Clearly, the subject leader for educational ICT does not have the same powers of hire and fire, nor does she have the same ambitions in terms of profits and sales. Or at least, not expressed in those terms. Let's go through the above points.

There is a tendency and certainly a great deal of pressure for schools to adopt new courses and qualifications, or new approaches, before they have the resources in place to make a success of them.

Taking the example of a secondary school in England, are you able to deliver excellent results at Key Stage 3, GCSE, 14-19, and, in the longer term,the ICT Diploma, and possibly A Levels? You need to identify what you are good at delivering, and why, and what you cannot deliver well, and why not.

It may not be feasible for you to pull out of the "market" -- but then again, it might be. For example, is there a possibility of developing links with a neighbouring school or college, in order to each specialise in a particular are? Or perhaps once you have identified where your weaknesses lie, you could share resources.

Sometimes, it is possible to drop courses. In one of my jobs, I decided to discontinue a low-level course in graphics that was, actually, delivering good results. Why? Because I thought the course was so simple that (a) it didn't stretch the students in any sense; and (b), because of (a), I didn't think the qualification was worth the paper it was printed on. I dropped it in favour of a much more challenging course, which proved only slightly harder to achieve the same degree of success in, because students rose to the challenge.

Interestingly, this had a knock-on effect on some of the other issues listed above.

Firstly, the ICT department started to gain a reputation for quality, as it started to attract the hardest working students rather than the idle ones. That, in turn, led to better results which led to more "top" students choosing it in their options. In fact, in the course of two years, ICT went from being a "sink" subject to one for which their was more demand than places.

Secondly, it started to attract ICT experts to teach it. Whereas previously anybody could have taught the graphics course, the new course needed a subject expert. In fact, I managed to persuade the headteacher that the subject, and therefore the students, would be much better served by a tight team of 4 or 5 teachers, all experts in their fields, than double that number who knew just enough to get by -- and, being committed to teaching just one or two hours a week, had no obvious incentive to spend much time developing their knowledge and understanding.

This all raises another issue: how do you measure success? There are the obvious measures, such as examination results, but I decided to judge myself and my team by a harder set of criteria: how many students opted to do the subject once they were no longer obliged to; and, even more difficult, how early in their school career did they make that choice? By adopting a systematic approach, I was able to start seeing students decide to opt for my subjects a full two years before they needed to.

Developing staff is all-important. What professional development does your team enjoy? What responsibilities have you delegated to them?

Vision is important, and here are three questions for you to consider:

1. Do you have a vision for educational ICT in your school?
   
   
2. Does your team know what that vision is, and do they subscribe to it? Indeed, have they had a hand in shaping it?
   
   
3. Is the vision one which can conceivably be realised, or is it all "pie in the sky"?

Conclusion

Ultimately, although the energy industry and the education service are superficially very different, in terms of what motivates people to do well, and other forces which affect performance, they are not that different at all.

The next article in this series will be published at the same time tomorrow morning.

See also: 

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership: Abraham Maslow

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership: Abraham Maslow

This is article 1 of a series of 3.

A short while ago I posted a message in Twitter to the effect that anyone who quotes a statistic like "The number of geniuses in China outnumbers the total population of our own country" does not understand the nature of genius. I believe that genius has much in common with creativity, about which the psychologist Abraham Maslow had particular views.

He also had views about human needs. In this series I should like to explore what the educational ICT leader can learn from Maslow and others when it comes to performing the educational technology leader's role, especially that of encouraging other teachers to incorporate the use of educational technology into their curricula.

Maslow's views on creativity

What distinguishes you, me, and most of the people we know from someone like Shakespeare? In fact, writing is a good area to look at in this context, because lots of people love the idea of being a best-selling author -- yet the number of best-selling authors can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. How come?

Maslow drew a distinction between what he called primary creativity and secondary creativity. The former, which most of us enjoy, consists of having great ideas and moments of insight. But most people are lacking in secondary creativity which is the hard slog bit. That's the part where you try to hone the idea, and spend hours drafting a wonderful few pages -- only to discard them when you read them again the following morning.

Oscar Wilde was once asked to define a day's work. He replied:

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

Like most of Wilde's quotations, that seems like a throwaway comment at first glance, but has a much deeper aspect to it. What Wilde was describing, in effect, was Maslow's notion of secondary creativity as it manifested itself in practice in his own life.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Maslow stated that people's primary need was for the need for survival, followed by the need for safety and security. Other needs, in chronological order (ie each one can only be addressed once the preceding one has been met) are social needs, ie the need to be part of a group; ego needs, ie the need to be held in esteem by others and to have self-confidence; and the need for self-actualisation, ie the desire to express oneself fully.

Implications for the educational technology leader

Both of these sets of ideas have implications for the successful embedding of ICT in a school curriculum. For example:

• Given the reality that most people lack the time, energy or motivation to fully develop their technology skills, part of your role will be to help them achieve their aims without needing to put in the effort.
  
  For example, it may be that the geography teacher would use a spreadsheet to chart the rainfall in different areas, if only she didn't have to spend time actually creating the graph. She might be more amenable to the idea of using a spreadsheet if all she (and her students) had to do was input the data and then play around with different types of graph -- in other words, if the process of taking rows of numbers and turning them into a chart was not necessary for her to do.
  
  And if you think about it, why should she have to do it? As far as I know, being able to turn numbers into a chart is not a required geographical skill, whereas being able to interpret charts, and make decisions about the best type of chart to use in a particular situation, are.
  
  In other words, a geography teacher who does not wish to learn how to create a chart, and does not want to spend time in her lessons doing so, is probably taking a very rational and apposite view of the whole thing.
  
  
• There is no point in expecting anyone to use the educational technology facilities if they are scared of them going wrong. What do you do with a class of kids when the lesson you have spent hours planning has to be abandoned halfway through because something has gone wrong with the technology?You may have an answer, but that won't help a teacher overcome the fear of that sort of scenario.
  
  Therefore, you need to anticipate the fear and deal with it even if it doesn't explicit reveal itself. We'll discuss how in another article.
  
  
• Dealing with people's social needs does not have to be difficult, and you can kill two birds with one stone by addressing some of their lack of confidence in their own abilities at the same time. I mean, of course, setting up a room, or a surgery, or both, where staff can come along any time they like, away from the laughing eyes of their students, grab a cup of coffee and use the facilities in a warm, friendly, non-judgemental atmosphere.
  
  
• The need for ego-boosting can also be easily dealt with. You give the kids a fillip by putting their best work on the wall. How do you showcase the best work of teachers?
  
  One way is to ask them to help you deliver some training. For example, in one school I worked in, a science teacher developed expertise in using databases with her students, and taught the rest of her science teacher colleagues how to do so. It did not take a great leap of imagination for me to realise that she would be able to help other teachers too.
  
  And there is also another psychological benefit of that approach: like it or not, your co-workers see you as some sort of guru, which can be very intimidating for them. As soon as you step aside and let them be taught by someone who, in their eyes, is just like them, part of the psychological defence barrier comes down.

Maslow was primarily concerned with deep issues like the human condition, but it is testimony to the greatness of his insights that his theories can be applied in many contexts, including that of the drive to embed the use of educational technology in schools.

Further information on Maslow may be found here: http://www.answers.com/topic/abraham-maslow.

The next article in this series will be published at the same time tomorrow morning.

Being too overbearing simply does not work

I have recently stopped going to “my”gym, and started going to an unfamiliar one instead. The small increase in travelling time and the extra cost in terms of parking are more than compensated for by the peace and quiet I enjoy as a result of switching.

So what's all this about, and how does it relate to educational technology?

Let me deal with the second question first, because I wish to keep your attention. Many subject leaders of ICT in schools (and sometimes Local Authorities and other organisations) have a remit to encourage colleagues to use educational technology as well. To do so, one has to tell people, and demonstrate to people, the benefits. But there is a fine line between doing that, and being completely insensitive – and thereby disrespectful – to the other person.

Back to the gym. It's not the gym that's the problem, but the restaurant. If you order a cheese sandwich, you get a sort of roll call of every other type of sandwich you could have instead. A request for a coffee is answered by a list of all the health benefits of smoothies. Wondering aloud if you might try the fruit salad, you get a long-winded explanation of all the ingredients therein, why they are healthy and how the fruit was hand-picked from a local farm only hours earlier. You get what you want in the end, but not before having to waste time listening to someone you don't wish to listen to, and without feeling that you have to summon up reserves of assertiveness merely in order to enjoy the light refreshment of your choice. And in the shortest possible time.

Consequently, I have decided to vote with my feet.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this in the context of ICT:

Firstly, I can read. Therefore, I can read the menu. I don't need someone bending my ear about all the things I could have. Does your school have a menu of ICT services that colleagues could enjoy? If not, I think you should make that a priority: not only will it be informative to those colleagues who wish to be informed, it will save you from being an insufferable bore to those who don't.

Secondly, there's an implicit assumption that I am not well-informed enough to make a sensible choice by myself. At least, one could infer that. By the same token, to look at this in an educational technology context, if someone tells you they'd like to word-process their worksheets, do you respond by suggesting they may like to consider desktop publishing them instead? I did once, and was unable to understand the negative reaction I received. It's fairly safe to assume that someone who is intelligent and qualified enough to be a teacher is able to decide what they'd like to do with their own worksheets. And if you do harbour any doubts about that, you can always refer them to that menu I was talking about.

Thirdly and finally, I think it is generally acknowledged that there is nothing worse than an evangelist. As an ex-smoker, I suddenly lurch somewhere to the right of Attila The Hun when anyone inadvertently blows cigarette smoke in my face. Nobody is more tedious than the couple who have just discovered a new holiday resort and insist on showing you -- and describing in great detail -- every single one of the 400 photographs they took whilst on vacation.

Similarly, if you start to get the feeling that the staffroom starts to empty when you enter it, and bookings for equipment either dries up or starts to be done on teachers' behalf by trusted students, perhaps it's time to ask yourself if, perhaps, you've been coming on a little strong lately.