Session Notes 2

What skills do kids need for the 21^st Cent?

How does leadership allow for these?

Grant Lichtman: What 60 

Some schools have the answers but we are not connected and sharing our ideas.

Suggests that educational change is not hard but is complicated.

The issue might be more change management. Are we all pushing in the same direction?

Ecosystem model: Schools are a range of adaptive connecting systems. They are not finished but are being created - living ecocystems. We as a school need to learn and know that we need to grow.

If schools grow - it happens at the fringes of an ecosystem. The edges of the ecosystem need the ability to make changes - leadership.

Industrial model: Kids all same age, same intervention, same outcomes. 

Spheres - land, ocean.... 5th sphere - cognitoshpere - system of knowledge creation and management.

Problems - anchors of time, space and subject, dams and silos. 

Solutions: 

1. Teach to kids future not our past - teach into the unknown (design learning arund a game?)

2. Self-evolving learners

3. Self-evolving organisations

Schools are not very good at finding spaces in which people are encouraged and enables to fail.

If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we are robbing our children of tomorrow. - John Dewey.


The Purpose of Education:
Gert Biesta's domains - three fuctions - we need to address all three..

Quailfication
 - gain knowledge to be able to do something

Socialisation
 - cultural integration, part of society

Subjectification
 - become more autonomous in thinking and acting

ITL Top skills for the future

• Collaboration
• Knowledge construction
• Self regulation
• Real world problems/innovation
• ICT for learning
• Skilled communication

Key Competencies

• Thinking
• Using language
• Managing self
• Relating to others
• Participating and contributing

To what extent do we model these Key Competencies as a teacher?
How do our strengths influence our leadership skills?
How do we develop these competencies?
 - mentoring
 - self assessment
 - peer assessment

 - work within a community of practice
 - wide professional reading - accross education and even business (Leadership theories)

These Key Competencies need to be expressed in form of outcomes, daily activities and forms of assessment. Rubrics for KC are an excellent tool for deveoping competencies.

Trumping Leadership: 
KC of leaders

Thinking:
- strategically
- outside the box

Collaboration:
- break down those walls, pool funding, shared PD, relational trust between school, students, community. Links and relations with other school e.g. local high school, networks.

Managing self:
- maintain balance so we are in an effective working flow. Away time from work.
- forming networks so there is communication with other colleagues

Micheal Fullen - Sustainability in Leadership (Great book to read)