I had the opportunity to attend the TCEA conference in San Antonio, TX this past week. It's been about 15 years since I attended my last TCEA conference in Austin, TX. As a very, very young and novice teacher, I attended and presented a session on using MS Office tools and a LAN to create a paperless (or close to it) classroom. At the middle school where I was teaching, we used donated computers from a local business and students created and wrote up their own experiments, we did our assessments on the computer, they researched and created visuals to illustrate their understanding (and then for fun we'd print onto iron on transfer paper and they would wear their understanding). Getting all these wheels in motion involved a lot of up front work, but with lots of trial and error and practice, we did some cool things. Although I was well versed in what I was doing in my classroom, my presentation delivery at the conference was less than stellar. I was incredibly nervous and rattled through my presentation in double time and may have sweated profusely. I do recall some email communication afterwards with a handful of folks who had some questions or were looking for resources, but I can assume that I was not a good influencer.
Why on earth share my failing as a presenter at a conference? Because learning from failing is still learning. Because it charted a course for eventually landing at the high school just down the street, teaching physics. When I was hired, there was an understanding that the team was utilizing a flipped classroom model. 5 years later, with many tweaks and changes to the model, I would say that we were not exclusively flipped, but were incorporating various blended learning options. We were still making flipped videos, but I reached a point where it didn't matter if my students were watching my video, someone else's video, reading the text, or googling to find out more information. My classroom became increasingly flexible. We were focused on doing and exploring in class, not just transferring information. The videos and text became resources if they were needed. I had the gamut of students: ones who watched each video multiple times, kids who watched once, kids who would pick and choose the videos they felt they needed and a handful of kids who never watched one at all. Each of my students deserved the opportunity to make their learning a personal experience, tailored to their needs. Turns out, my personal "why" has been taking shape over many years.
This year, I have moved into a different role in my district. My official title is Technology Instructional Specialist. One of the many, many things I learned at TCEA last week was that the same job title means different things in different places. And the same jobs have different titles in different places. In my district, the Instructional Technology team lives in the Learner Services department. The Technology Services Department is the hardware/software group, or your more traditional IT folks. Getting devices up and running, making sure software is approved and installed, answering help tickets when something doesn't work correctly, etc. The Instructional Technology team helps teachers purposefully use the hardware/software in their classes with their students. When a teacher has all these tools in front of them, but isn't sure what to do with them, that where we come in. In lots of districts, I noticed the "coach" term used quite often to define this role. Coaches or specialists...either way the role includes being an influencer with a focus on learning.
Going back a class or two, or more, I developed an innovation plan to introduce blended learning to our future teachers in the IPET CTE program at our school. Ultimately, during their time in the program, IPET students get to design and teach lessons in their mentor teachers' classrooms. My plan is for the IPET students to learn about and design blended learning experiences. Before this can happen though, the instructional technology team and the IPET teacher must purposefully build a blended environment for the IPET students, followed by modeling and co-teaching in that blended environment. Then everyone can work together to design blended experiences in the pilot teachers' classes. In order to maintain the use of blended learning in the pilot teachers' classes, we'll have to reach beyond just the semester or two with the IPET students and really look at influence strategies that will keep the pilot teachers on a blended trajectory.
Go influence someone. Sounds easy enough, right? Turns out there is a lot more to influence than meets the eye. Not only do we have no idea what actually influences us according to Jenni Cross, but once we figure out all the sources of influence, it takes a hefty combination of the sources to see major shifts in behavior. In fact, the magic combination is a minimum of 4 of the 6 strategies to increase your influence ten fold according to the 2009 video, All Washed Up! By combining motivation and ability in personal, social and structural contexts, behaviors will begin to change. We must be mindful to look for crucial moments when positive peer pressure can be applied. We should enlist the help of influential teacher leaders who experience success in spite of the challenges in front of them (the positive deviants) who can give other teachers ideas and options for how to handle obstacles. Promptly responding to concerns about the availability and reliability of devices/wifi will help keep negative energy from becoming an all consuming presence. Providing ongoing training, support, modeling, co-teaching and observation opportunities is vital, but not the sole influential practice. Recognize, share, and celebrate successes in a public way, while ensuring that our team understands their why. Don't "underwhelm overwhelming problems" by leveraging as many sources of influence as possible. An ignored source of influence could be the tipping point that leads to huge behavior shifts and positive forward momentum in an organization. I'm excited and anxious to see how my innovation plan continues to take shape and evolve as I learn more and more about how to influence change.
References:
Cross, J. (2013, March 20). Three myths of behavior change - What you think you know that you don't: Jeni Cross at TEDxCSU. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5d8GW6GdR0
Grenny, J., Maxfield, D., & Shimberg, A. (2013). How to 10X your influence. Vital Smarts, 1-13. Retrieved from https://www.vitalsmarts.com/resource/10x-your-influence/
Grenny, J., Patterson, K., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2013). Influencer: The new science of leading change: 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.
VitalSmarts Video. (2009, Sept. 21). All washed up!. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/osUwukXSd0k
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