Leadership EGO Vs MANA

Jacinda Ardern: ‘Very little of what I have done has been deliberate. It's intuitive’ 

In response to Christchurch tragedy

 

Leadership ..not all needs to be deliberate..too deliberate and perhaps people see through you.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/06/jacinda-ardern-intuitive-courage-new-zealand

Learner Agency, Fabulous Post for Core Education 2017

“Having agency as a learner is now becoming a default expectation”, to meet learning needs.  (21st Century Learning Reference Group [21st CLRG], 2014, p.36). 

What’s it about?

Learner agency is about having the power, combined with choices, to take meaningful action and see the results of your decisions. It can be thought of as a catalyst for change or transformation. Within a school context, Learner Agency is about shifting the ownership of learning from teachers to students, enabling students to have the understanding, ability, and opportunity to be part of the learning design and to take action to intervene in the learning process, to affect outcomes and become powerful lifelong learners.

What’s driving this?

Moral imperative — drivers for agency or agentic practices

Learner agency is not a new concept, but it is something that has come into the spotlight and quite rightly needs attention in our education system.

Agentic children turn into agentic adults. We have all heard the words “Successful people, act on their beliefs” and this is true in the light of agency. Therefore, the moral imperative lies not just in the social and emotional wellbeing — it is an innate characteristic that must be acknowledged and addressed.

As explored by Zhao (Zhao, 2015) the world is faced with two paradoxical crises: massive youth unemployment and equally massive talent shortage. These must not be allowed to continue — they are both dangerous. Massive youth unemployment leads to personal poverty, psychological trauma, plus social unrest. Inequality thrives as talent shortage drives up the incomes of highly talented workers, which in turn results in even bigger income gaps.

The traditional education model that prepared employment-minded job seekers does not address either of these paradoxical crises. In this fast-paced world of change, knowledge is now a central driving force, and agentic learners are critical for addressing talent shortages and massive youth unemployment.

Research shows that the more successful an educational system is in the traditional sense, the less likely it is to cultivate entrepreneurs. PISA scores, for example, have been found to be negatively correlated with nations’ entrepreneurial confidence and activities (Zhao, 2012). The new economy needs learners and entrepreneurs who have adaptive expertise to be innovative, flexible, and creative in a variety of contexts.

What examples of this can I see?

Embedding learner agency in school systems, curriculum

While it is innate for us to have agency, our current mental models of school systems often limit agentic practices. Developing agentic learners is more than offering a list of choices and seeking student voice. This is a tokenistic or watered down version of authentic agency.

To avoid tokenism and embed a culture of agency we must provide the conditions that shift the ownership of teaching and learning and place it in the hands of the learners themselves. This is also about involving students in the key aspects of decision making so they can fully experience the messiness of a real-world project, complete with the unexpected changes in direction, opportunities, and challenges that can arise.

It is an imperative that we move the level of engagement of learners from non-participation through tokenism to learner empowerment. Amplifying agentic practices gives permission to all learners, teachers, and students alike, to embrace new possibilities for learning and educational systems. If nothing else, children should leave school with a sense that if they act, and act strategically, they can accomplish their goals. Johnston (2004), pg. 29

A lead thinker in education noted that teachers do not create learning, learners create learning, and it is the teachers that create the conditions to promote learning (Wiliam, 2006). This is further empowered by parents and whānau who help to inspire and focus a sense of agency. As top rung of Arnstein’s ladder of participation states, agentic learners initiate agendas and are given responsibilities and power for the management of issues and to bring about change.

Technology enabling, enhancing, supporting these processes

Digital technologies have changed how teachers and students approach learning. Knowledge is no longer constrained by the physical boundaries of the traditional classroom. In today’s learning environments, access to limitless information rests at the fingertips of learners and their devices. Teachers can draw on these enabling technologies to move towards becoming a co-constructor of learning, who builds knowledge alongside their students. In this sense, everyone is a learner and has the power to act in the agentic classroom.

Digital technologies enable learners to connect with, interact with, and build on knowledge in ways otherwise not possible. When teachers scaffold, support, and guide students through their use of digital technologies, students are empowered to drive their own learning.

Learners can use digital technologies to:

• transform information and make something new
• recombine information to solve a problem
• link information to show relationships
• modify information for personal preferences
• connect with others locally and globally
• discover solutions collaboratively and independently
• track, share, and reflect on their learning, for example through e-portfolios.

Adapted from: Future-focused learning in connected communities, May 2014

How might we respond?

Some questions to act as a stimulus with your colleagues include:

1. How will you develop and deepen students’ engagement with and responsibility for their own learning?
2. How will your school connect young people with peers, teachers, and other adults? How will they use technology to connect with the wider world around them?
3. How can we support students to learn through authentic, relevant, real-world contexts, where their interests, skills, and the issues and opportunities within their own communities can form the basis for learning?
4. How can we involve students in the key aspects of decision making so they can fully experience the messiness of a real-world project, complete with the unexpected changes in direction, opportunities, and challenges that can arise?

The six domains of Resilence

Educational Leaders

Culture

A school’s culture consists of the customs, rituals, and stories that are evident and valued throughout the whole school. An effective school culture fosters success for all.

Leading cultural change

Leading cultural change involves an understanding of leadership skills and an appreciation of the development of cultures in a school setting.

Understanding school cultures

School cultures focus on learning, teaching, and gaining an understanding of 'what we value around here'.

Developing leaders

The principal has a key role in guiding and supporting others to step up as leaders. This is achieved by recognising and developing the leadership potential of teachers. Building leadership capacity in a school increases the opportunities for improving learning outcomes for all students.

Sharing leadership

Leadership based on shared vision, goals, and commitment to quality teaching and learning is essential in the complex contexts of New Zealand schools.

Leading staff

Effective principals actively lead staff by challenging and supporting staff.

Attitudes, values, and ethics

Effective leaders have a central belief system that is focussed on student learning and well-being. They set clear goals, and pursue them to ensure success for all.

• 03.27.19

Why you should stop avoiding conflict in the workplace

When organizations avoid conflict, they’re missing out on productivity and innovation.

[Photo: Noelle Otto/Unsplash]

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By Liane Davey4 minute Read

I was recently hired to help a group of doctors work through their issues and get their business back on a growth trajectory. They aren’t talking much. They’re barely making eye contact. After only a few hours, it’s clear to me what’s wrong. I share my diagnosis: “You need more conflict.”

It’s the last thing they expect me to say. They’re already in agony dealing with the smallest decisions. Each meeting is an excruciating cocktail of trepidation, anger, guilt, and frustration. How could they possibly need more conflict?
What they don’t realize is that they’re mired in all those negative emotions because they’re unwilling to work through them. As long as they avoid the topics that are creating anger, guilt, and frustration, they’re stuck with them. There are many topics that they haven’t discussed for years. They’ve tried every way to go around the contentious issues, but now they need to go through them.

The importance of conflict

The doctors are not the only ones who avoid conflict. Most of us have been raised to think of conflict as a bad thing. Conventional wisdom holds that conflict is bad for productivity and corrosive to trust and engagement. But that view is totally at odds with how an organization works.
Conflict isn’t bad for organizations: it’s fundamental to them. After all, you need to be able to work through opposing sides of an issue and come to a resolution in the best interest of customers, shareholders, and customers–whether you’re on the shop floor or the boardroom. Conflict is part of strategic planning, resource allocation, product design, talent management, and just about everything else that should happen in an organization.
Unfortunately, most humans don’t embrace conflicts. Rather, we avoid, postpone, evade, duck, dodge, and defer them. The result is conflict debt.

Conflict debt

Conflict debt is the sum of all the contentious issues that we need to address to move forward, but remain undiscussed and unresolved. It can be as simple as withholding the feedback that would allow your colleague to do a better job, and as profound as continually deferring a strategic decision while getting further and further behind the competition.

The doctors I worked with are in conflict debt. Each time they avoid the discussions, debates, and disagreements that they need to have to get their business growing again, they sink further in. Think of it like financial debt–when you use credit to buy things you otherwise can’t afford. You want something, maybe even need it, but you don’t have the cash at the time, so you use credit. You rationalize to yourself that you will pay it off as soon as you get your next paycheck, but if you’re like 65% of American credit card holders, you carry that balance over from month to month. The debt mounts, and over time, it gets harder and harder to get out just from under it.

Three unproductive ways people deal with conflict debt

As with financial debt, conflict debt starts innocently. An issue comes up that’s a little too hot to handle, so you defer it. You promise yourself that you’ll revisit it when things are less busy, or when cooler heads prevail. You buy yourself time and space. But days pass, and no spontaneous resolution materializes. Instead, the issue becomes more contentious. Suddenly, you’re in conflict debt. You’re feeling anxious, and you find yourself steering clear of your colleagues to avoid having to confront the issue. (Have you ever taken the long way around the office so you don’t run into a disgruntled coworker?) You’re feeling frustrated at the lack of progress, not to mention a little guilty for your role in the stalemate. Conflict debt weighs you down.
Avoiding the issue is only one path to conflict debt. Another is to avoid the opposition. In this case, you broach the topic but exclude people who might disagree or cause tension, surrounding yourself with those who agree with you. You focus on how friendly and productive the discussion is, deluding yourself that your solutions are going to fly with the people who you strategically disinvited. But pretending the opposition isn’t there won’t make it disappear. It will resurface when your opponents kill your plan or, worse, leave it to fail.
There’s a third way to get into conflict debt–avoid the friction. Even if you discuss the difficult subject, there’s still room to get yourself into trouble if you veer safely away from the distressing parts of the discussion. When you make it clear (either intentionally or inadvertently) that nothing antagonistic should taint your conversation, you start to rack up conflict debt. I see this all the time when, just as the discussion gets perilously close to the crux of the matter, someone suggests they “take it offline” to avoid having to deal with the conflict. Everyone smiles and pretends that they’ll actually come back to it at some point–when in reality, they’ve just stifled dissent.
Are you avoiding the conflicts that your organization requires you to work through? If so, you are setting your organization, your team, and yourself up for trouble. When you’re unwilling to work through uncomfortable situations, you stretching your resources thin, stifling innovation, and allowing risks to go unnoticed. On your team, the aversion to prickly conversations forces strong performers to compensate for weak ones and mature people to put up with immature ones. At an individual level, you’re probably burning out from the stress.
When your conflict debt gets too high, it becomes overwhelming. You’re exhausted by the thought of trying to pay it off. You’ve destroyed your credit rating with your boss and your coworkers by letting these issues go unresolved for so long. But don’t give up–there are many things you can do to get out from under your conflict debt. That starts with embracing, and not avoiding, conflict in the first place.

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This article is adapted from The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Based on Track. It is reprinted with permission from Page Two.

https://medium.com/advancing-k12-edtech/maslow-and-the-modern-learning-environment-8593968967cf

Maslow and the Modern Learning Environment

Erin Werra

Jul 6, 2018

Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published on eSchool News 6/19/18.

What can we learn from human psychology about designing learning environments geared for maximum motivation?

Let’s start by identifying core human motivations using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow studied human motivation as a whole, rather than the discrete pockets of motivation prior studies had identified. Maslow’s Hierarchy is depicted as a pyramid, with the base of the structure housing the most basic needs and more rigorous needs building on top of those. Maslow referred to the first four levels of the hierarchy as deficiency needs, which is to say each lower-level need should be met before proceeding to the next level. Should any lower-level need become deficient in the future, people will work to correct the deficiency before moving forward.

All this motivation builds toward the tip of the pyramid: self-actualization. This may seem like a stretch for students, given that most adults spend their lives striving toward this lofty goal. When we build a safe, motivating place for students to turn their focus inward, they’re free to pursue the beginning of self-actualization. How’s that for whole-child education?

So how exactly do school leaders create a learning environment geared toward nurturing and motivating the whole child? Let’s take a cue from Maslow and start at the base of the Hierarchy of Human Needs.

Physical Needs

The most fundamental human needs linked to bodily comfort and function make up the wide base of the pyramid. In a school setting, we can equate this to creating an accessible, functional environment for all students. A group effort is required to achieve this in schools and districts — enlist the help of the school business office and maintenance teams to correct deficiencies where you find them.

Sources of light in classrooms — whether natural, fluorescent, or some combination of alternative lighting — must be bright enough for students to complete their work. If possible, place SMART boards or other demonstration locations away from any glare from windows or lights.

Help students focus with appropriate sound levels during lessons. To change the acoustics (how sound travels) throughout the learning environment, place textiles and upholstered items strategically to minimize sound absorption near demonstration areas, and increase absorption near echoey cinderblock walls. Consider playing some light background music during group activities to help students focus on the voices nearest to them. For some students, acoustics of a classroom are the difference between receiving a high-quality education and straining to catch snippets of instruction all day.

Accessibility isn’t a trend in learning environments — it’s the law. Follow the basic ADA checklist for existing facilities to ensure accessibility for all students.

Inspect and maintain HVAC systems to ensure a comfortable temperature for learning. Heating problems resulted in frigid temps and burst pipes in Baltimore Public Schools, ultimately shuttering the district over winter 2017.

Finally, movement is a key component of modern learning environments. One method of freeing up space in classrooms is the über-trendy flexible seating strategy. Contrary to popular belief, flex seating is a solution to large class sizes (desks take up tons of precious space!) and it doesn’t have to cost a lot to add a few great options. Sara Moser, head teacher at Benjamin Chambers Elementary in Pennsylvania, added Adirondack beach chairs she and her husband made for flexible seating in her third-grade classroom.

“They’re super big,” she says. “Kids can put their feet up, lay on it, sit on the floor and use it as a desk; it all depends on the kid.”

There are thousands of resources on this topic (like the Classroom Eye Candy series). The goal is to embrace movement as you break out of the cemetery rows. Promote seat rotation by requesting students choose a new place to sit every few days or weeks.

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Safety

Once students’ physical needs are met, turn your focus toward keeping people out of danger — in classrooms and well beyond. Physical safety is everyone’s responsibility every day at school. Challenge staff to look at your environment with fresh eyes every day to spot and speak up about risks before they become hazards.

Students’ digital safety is important in school as well. Data privacy laws, including FERPA, protect their personal information and school records. Digital safety extends beyond student records and information controlled in your main office. Does your district have a recovery plan in the event of a disaster or security breach? What will you do if your data is ransomed? The key component to a speedy recovery is having a proactive plan in place in the event of a data breach.

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Belonging

The next tier of motivation relates to the human need to feel an affiliation and be accepted by others. When students feel like they belong, they are able to show vulnerability, take risks, and try new things to stretch the boundaries of creativity. Igniting this deep feeling demands more than simply telling kids they belong — they have to feel they’re part of a close-knit group.

In Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code, he explores the characteristics of outstanding cultures in businesses and teams, including the presence of belonging cues. These cues send a powerful message to the subconscious brain, “Here is a safe place to give effort.”

Focus on cultivating a welcoming school culture. This takes patience, commitment, and time, but the effects are far-reaching — districts with a strong school culture become destinations for high-performing, dedicated employees, and the benefits snowball from there.

Research tells us incorporating visual representation of all types of students is important. Head teacher Sara Moser enlists her third graders’ help with decorating their classroom.

“I don’t put up a lot at the beginning of the year. Everything in the room is authentic,” she explains. “Either I created it, my husband built it, or the students have made it.”

Educating and motivating the whole child incorporates academic skills alongside life skills, including social-emotional learning. Modelling empathy at all levels of leadership in your district helps create a positive, encouraging, and energized culture geared toward growth.

Finally, as much as possible, create a learning environment built on equity for students and teachers. First, identify and remove obstacles holding subgroups of students back from reaching their full potential — a key concept of many states’ approved ESSA plans. Next, listen to students’ feedback on classroom topics. When appropriate, incorporate their thoughts into your lesson plans to increase ownership and motivation.

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Esteem

Once students’ physical needs are met, they are out of danger, and feel they belong, their next motivator is the need for esteem. This tier represents the need to achieve, be competent, and gain recognition or approval from peers and teachers.

Play-based activity for early learners sets the stage for esteem needs. In a drastic shift away from the “kindergarten is the new first grade” trend, schools are incorporating learning models used in preschools. Early learning educators are toning down the structure and encouraging developmentally appropriate student-led activities and choices. One kindergarten teacher told NPR she has noticed improvement in students’ oral-language development and critical thinking skills. Researchers are studying the far-reaching effects of this approach.

Encourage collaboration in learning environments by identifying specific space for whole group, small groups, pairs, and even for individual reflection (maybe tucked away in a corner). If your school is open to it, consider making use of the hallways fair game. Large scale science or math experiments, quiet pair work, or individual reflection can all take place in hallway collaboration space.

For older students, build esteem by incorporating project-based learning. High quality project-based learning not only prepares students for the highly innovative careers on the horizon, but also spikes motivation when projects align to their unique passions. Along similar lines, makerspaces geared toward self-directed STEM exploration also encourage design thinking, engineering, coding, and other creative learning. It’s possible to build a great makerspace on the cheap — most important is a safe, lightly supervised space where kids can test the boundaries of their best ideas to see if they can make them a reality using their own two hands. (And probably a lot of hot glue.)

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Self-Actualization

When learning environments fulfill students’ deficiency needs, they’re equipped to shift their motivation and focus inward, toward what Maslow called growth needs or the pursuit of self-actualization. This isn’t a destination, but rather a life-long journey to realize their own potential and become self-fulfilled, then identify ways they can help others along the way (Maslow called this self-transcendence).

At this very tip-top of the Hierarchy of Human Needs, motivation comes from within. Students respond to intrinsic motivation, giving effort to tasks at hand purely because it is gratifying to them. In a learning environment, this corresponds to student agency — shifting students’ mindsets, encouraging them to choose their learning paths, and sharing ownership of their education. This profile of the Chrome Squad, the student-led IT team at Royse City High School in Texas, tells the story of student agency in action and shares its results: students who gain accountability, problem solving, and service skills they’ll use and take pride in for the rest of their lives.

Creating a highly motivating learning environment takes real dedication and more than a little elbow grease. The payoff comes when teaching and learning takes off in ways that shape the whole child (and every child) for life. Take these cues from universal human needs to build a strong, safe foundation for students to take risks and get to know who they are, and who they’re becoming.