Your ARP Progress

I reset the publishing date on this post from 19 April to today just to push it to the top of your blog feed Adam. Just getting concerned about the timeline here Adam.

Below is a summary of your progress with Your ARP Adam. This is just intended as a handy guide for you, me and the course facilitators. Your ARP is located in Google Docs HERE

Please note that Stage 3, the data collecting, needs to be completed by May 1 and the ARP submitted two weeks later.

Your Big Question Iterations:

1. How do I become more effective in my change leadership?
2. Using your eConfidence self assessment survey results, and given the short timeline for this ARP something more specific would be more informative for you, I made a couple of suggestions Adam:
What knowledge, skills and understandings do I need to inspire my colleagues, students and parents to value the place of digital technologies in teaching and learning? or What knowledge, skills and understandings do I need to effectively communicate, explain and defend my vision to my school community?

Your final Big Question: What knowledge, skills and understandings do I need to inspire my colleagues, students and parents to value the place of digital technologies in teaching and learning?

STAGE	Stage Due Date	Current Progress	Comments
1*	27 March	Complete (20/4)
2	27 March	Complete (18/4)	Make sure your timeline completes Stage 3 by May 1.
3*	1 May	Completed (17/5)	Be sure that the data you are collecting addresses the Big question
4	8 May	Completed (17/5)	This week overlaps with your School ICT Change Plan. You need to be finished Stage 3 of your ARP before this week or it becomes quite a challenge to be doing both tasks.
5*	17 May	Completed (17/5)	ARP due to be submitted to course facilitators

* Mentor feedback required before progressing

LSDA Week 9 E-Journal

Thinking outside the box, exploring the possibilities and beginning to plan

An honest start. Week 8 is missing... Why? Well nothing resonated with me, I was feeling let down and overwhelmed. 8 Forces for Leaders of Change again stated the what, but did not discuss the how. I am feeling like some of the information being presented is missing its mark with me. I am looking at things a bit pessimistically at the moment and that is something I have to work through. However, I really do want to gain the most benefit from this course.

Moving on...

I am looking forward to the school visits this coming week and also hearing from Wayne Craig (MCREL).

Moving on further...

Thinking outside the box. This is something I resonate with. In fact an area I enjoy pushing others into. I know I am a big thinker and do have a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, so the week 9 viewings did help cheer me up a bit. :-) 

I did gain a few personal messages which support me and what I am doing in my own classrooms from the videos presented. I won't go into them here, however the growth I can obtain from those messages will then follow on to help others at my school. I just need a better version of the current model I am toying with first before many of my colleagues will see it's true value. Try, fail and iterate often!!

Sir Ken Robinson's How to escape education's death valley is a great start for inspiration on the areas which we as educators can begin to question the status quo and ensure that we personally are not leading our classes into 'death valley'.

However, Emily Pilloton's Teaching design for change was the real re-enforcement for me. I have been involved in design thinking sessions before and stated at the time that this is how we should be designing curriculum and learning tasks. Even more so, maybe this is a critical skill we should be teaching our students. It provides them with the big idea-creativity skills they need to "think outside the box".

Maybe this is also the way leaders should be thinking about change? Why shouldn't we? The question asked shouldn't be "what if this were possible?" but "why shouldn't this be possible?". Then a design thinking approach could be used to make it possible. The great thing I love about design thinking is it removes all barriers to a problem, it forces you to think big, to trial and review, then iterate. You can always make a big idea smaller and add the constraints back on. But you will never get anywhere if you start small and are mentally held back by factors outside your control.