One thing I’ve wanted to work on for the past couple of years is my ability to lead people who don’t think like me. It’s really easy to modify people who are on the same page with your, but pushing people to try new things and do things differently has always been a struggle for me. This week I took a new tactic with my department, and that is requiring change in small baby steps.
My department falls short in its adoption of technology of any kind. We have half of the department that does a very good job with technology and innovating in the class room, but we have another half that isn’t as innovative as our principal or our district is wanting out of us. In the past I would have allowed our campus technology person to present some technology and ask for people to try it out. This would lead to the tech-savvy people trying it out and reporting back to the group how it went, while the non-savvy people would get the pass on having to try something new. I want for everyone to get a taste of trying something with the possibility of failing, so I tried a new tactic.
This week I gave them a goal to be on Twitter for fifteen minutes over the course of the next two weeks (since we have Thanksgiving break next week. I based my number on an article I read extolling the virtues of Twitter as professional development and figured I would give my department a little more time than the article says. We each took a different educational hashtag to put into either Twubs or Tagboard and look for interesting articles. When we get back to school after the break, we’ll share our findings from Twitter and I’ll talk about using it consistently to innovate as an educator.