Are you a student of students? Repositioning ourselves as learners

After the first few blog entries here, things got in the way of my writing and the regular writing that I had planned seemed to stall.  I was writing, but I worried it wasn’t blog worthy.  As time passed, guilt set in and the return to blogging seemed bigger than life.  Yet writing is a part of me.  It’s the way that I know myself and know what I know.  Words are important to me and communication is even more important in the work that I do as a principal.  Having spent time tweeting and following others’ blogs, I realize that blogging has to be free.  I have to freely write and freely explore and blog for me in hopes that the blogging will create “connector” opportunities – that others perhaps will want to eavesdrop in on my thinking.  So, here I am again committing to write weekly and to resist the temptation that it has to follow a formula or recipe.

My school is doing incredible work in the leadership realm.  We are teaching our youngest learners to be leaders and to practice habits that allow them to exercise leadership muscles as students.  As my faculty has embraced this, we recently met in a professional learning opportunity and the team of teachers leading the discussion asked us to think about ways that our students are currently demonstrating the seven habits as espoused by Steven Covey.  We went through the first few habits with great examples of student leadership and it hit me, “What were we as the adults in the school doing to demonstrate leadership?”  So I paused our discussion and asked teachers to turn the lenses upon themselves to ask the question of each other as adults in a school proclaiming leadership.  It was a moment, a moment to reflect on what we were doing and expecting us to lead the way.

It’s harder to teach something until you have experienced it.  Today, I read a tweet from Will Richardson that read, “How successful would pen and paper be for our students if they had teachers who couldn’t read or write? Same for computers.”  It’s a powerful statement that resonates with our struggle teaching leadership to students.  In order to teach leadership, we have to live the habits ourselves – choosing to change personally and professionally.  Kids read right through us and know if we believe what we say.  It also relates to our current efforts in Singapore Math.  One of our teachers claimed that she goes home and works out every problem that she assigns students before she even teaches the concept.  She was new to the grade level and wanted to make sure that she had “experienced” what she was teaching and what she was asking students to do.  It might make a difference what we ask of students if we commit to do what we ask our students to do before we ask them to do it.  I suspect we’d learn a whole lot.

So I’m writing to be a better a principal, to capture my preoccupations, to notice what I notice, and to create an audit trail of what is important.  We are all learners, right?  Let’s put ourselves in the position of student; it’ll make us better students of students and definitely better teachers and administrators.