My last blog post was a reflection from the book Quiet Leadership by David Rock. As I continue to read, i am bombarded with insights and helpful information as a leader and as a teacher. These tidbits are too good not to share. At the end of each step or section, Rock summarizes his approach. I've collected these summaries and my other insights below for you as quick take aways. I highly recommend that you read this book - it is eye opening! All the statements below are direct quotes or paraphrases of David Rock with page numbers from the paperback edition included for your reference. QUIET LEADERS...
And these are only from the first 3 steps of David Rock's "Six Steps to Transform Performance at Work." More to come soon. Try this tomorrow. Put even a few of these leadership qualities to practice and see how they change your interaction with people. Even your family - it amazes me how much this book applies beyond leadership and expands into the classroom and at home with my husband and son. -- Allison Petersen @alcp
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Ok, seriously. You have to read this book. It's called Quiet Leadership by David Rock. I am 50 pages in, and I cannot stop underlining almost every sentence I read. (I always tell my students not to underline too much, and here I am NOT taking my own advice). At first, I bought this book to learn more about leadership. I was planning to apply the concepts to my new role as an Instructional Coach. It came highly recommended to me by Kevin Washburn, who does a lot of research in neuroscience and has great book recommendations along those lines. But as I have been reading it, I am realizing that it applies to many more elements of my life. David Rock uses neuroscience to discuss how to truly change a person's performance by changing a person's thinking. This also relates back to the idea of changing a person's mindset (Mindset by Carol S. Dweck), which is not easy. He explains seamlessly how the neuroscience and true understanding of how people handle situations can play an important role in influencing a person to change their perspective and/or behavior. There are so many elements of the book that have my mind whirling so far, but this one about how people tackle new ideas really stuck with me today. Rock explains how the brain handles new ideas: "Anytime we try a new activity, behavior, or way of thinking, we are literally forging a new pathway in our brain. We're creating circuits that don't currently exist. Doing this takes energy and requires extensive use of our conscious mind...Before we feel comfortable with a new idea or behavior we have to own it, we have to develop our own hard wiring for the idea. Getting to this point requires we go though a stage of mild discomfort, uncertainty, and often even frustration and fear" (52). As I read this section titled "The Challenge of Changing Behavior," I immediately thought out three places I have seen this happen lately: My Son - Cooper is almost 3 years old. Whenever he tries something new, from a toy to a game, he will react quickly with frustration that he doesn't know how to do it. Just today, he was playing with the water hose in the back yard, and it stopped working because the line had kinked. He almost started throwing a full blown fit over the fact that he couldn't get the hose to work. I had to talk him down and walk him through the steps to stretch out the hose. His natural reaction to something new is immediate frustration. My Students - This past year, I taught many students who held a firm fixed mindset about their abilities as students. So whenever I presented something challenging or anything that forced them to think, they would immediately give up. Analyze a poem? They would freeze. Stare at the wall and do anything to avoid the assignment. Give a hard test? Sulk through it, coming up to ask questions that they hoped would lead to me just giving them the answer. Their natural reaction was to shut down when presented when new challenges or anything that stretched their thinking. Teachers at a Workshop - We were fortunate to host Architecture of Learning on our campus this year. (Side note: You REALLY want to bring this to your school!!). Kevin Washburn puts best practice teaching strategies into a sequential order based on neuroscience and brain-based research. This workshop is very challenging and requires a lot of brainpower because participants begin embracing a new way of thinking when it comes to teaching. The teachers who came to this workshop were truly challenged by the new content; some of them were just unsure how to wrap their heads around it all. Being strong teachers who wanted to learn, they worked hard to understand, but the initial reaction to some of this new ideas was frustration and a need for clarity. They immediately wanted to discuss the new material with each other to better understand. Not long after that, the new ideas became energizing and exciting, but only because they began to "own" the ideas themselves and understand how the new concepts applied to their individual classrooms. So, knowing how common this is around me, I realized that these three concepts are going to be vital to me as a wife, mother, teacher, and leader: 1) New ideas require mental energy and evoke strong emotions. 2) The initial reaction will most likely be frustration and fear of the new. 3) People have to begin to "own" an idea themselves before they can accept it. David Rock goes into detail in the next sections of the book to discuss how positive feedback and encouragement can help as people try to tackle new ideas. Can't wait to share those thoughts soon! This is just a snippet of the great thoughts coming from reading this book. So I encourage you to pick it up - try out some of these new ideas tomorrow as you interact with the people around you. You will be able to understand their thinking better. Who doesn't want that?! --- Allison Petersen @alcp NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month where writers try to tackle the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. 30 days 50,000 words, impossible right? Impossible for your students? Not as impossible as you might think. It equals out to be about 1,667 words a day. This may be too much for an average student, but for those who love to write it could be just enough to get the juices flowing.
So, why don't you start a NaNoWriMo Creative Writing Club tomorrow? It is as simple as the Field of Dreams mantra "if you build it, they will come." NaNoWriMo starts in on November 1 and you can have them ready to take on the challenge in 5 Easy Steps: 1) Log onto the Young Writer's Program NaNoWriMo site ywp.nanowrimo.org: Do a little research. About 5 minutes on this site is all you need to see how easy this will be. Since it is geared specifically for young writers and educators, it has everything you need to prepare the students. Create a classroom for your club and get things up and running. Check out the workbooks for students and educator resources. I also used our already established kidblog site to create a private NaNoWriMo blog just for these students to have a safe place to share their ideas and writing. I posted the word count poster from the starter kit (order for free from the site) on my wall and had students keep track of their word counts throughout the month. Students who were not even in my English class would pop in to write down word counts or see how others were doing. 2) Get The Word Out: Make flyers (borrow mine by clicking here or use the ones online here) and post them in the hallways and on your door. Tell the kids! Tell them what it is and how crazy the idea is; they will latch onto your enthusiasm. Tell them it is a club so it is completely optional, but that it will be great if they like to write. Use any other avenues you have available to share the idea with parents, such as principle's newsletter or emails home. 3) Hold Your First Meeting: Find the best time that works for you and the students. Even if it is only 30 minutes, it will work. Use a computer lab or if you are 1-1 have the students bring their computers. Tell them about the premise of NaNoWriMo and get them signed up on ywp.nanowrimo.org; you can add them to your class by getting their usernames. I printed for them some specific pages (not all 115 pages) of the YWP Workbooks so they can get started planning out characters and plot. 4) Kick-Off Party: Get the whole group together on November 1 for the first day of writing. Meet in the morning or after school, have snacks or order pizza (get a parent to help), and have everybody typing for a goal of 1667 words. First one to the word count gets a prize. Make it fun and get them writing. It's all about energy and momentum. Print the contracts and writing coupons from the website and hand them out at the party. Make them feel like it is a real commitment. 5) Be Their Biggest Fan: Your job after November 1 is simply to support them. Be there when they need help with a character or a plot idea. See them in the halls and ask them how they are doing. Encourage them after week one when it starts to become daunting and overwhelming. Write them notes of encouragement and unlock the computer lab before school. Support these young creative minds as they need it. Each week I give them a short mini-lesson about a writing technique, such as dialogue or how to create sub-plots (all using ywp website). If you have time, which you probably feel like you don't, read Chris Baty's book No Plot, No Problem: A Low Stress, High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days where he tells the story of NaNoWriMo. He makes this sound manageable and somehow logical. And he gives great tips and techniques. I also splurged for $9.99 and signed up for Writer's Digest's digital magazine subscription. This has given me some fantastic ideas to share with students. I am doing the NaNoWriMo club this year because I knew I had about 5 girls who wanted to write and would love this project. I have over 20 kids who have shown interest in the club and at least 12 at our club meeting each week. You just don't know who will want to try this out. Try it yourself and see what comes of it! Encourage creative writing in your students. --- Allison Petersen @alcp The school year is starting to creep up on us. Well, at least those of us that start in August. With a lot of thinking this summer about my new role as Middle School Curriculum Coordinator and some inspiration from my amazing PLN, I have been setting my goals for the upcoming school year.
I have the privilege of taking on more responsibility as an Instructional Coach this year, and I am really looking forward to it. But I felt like I needed to help define this role for myself. So I began researching and compiling an Instructional Coaching Storify with resources. This ASCD article, Ten Roles for Teacher Leaders was incredibly helpful in crafting my thinking. By taking the time to state my new role clearly, I feel prepared to also set specific goals to guide me throughout the year and provide a focus for tasks. I narrowed it down to one sentence, inspired by recent ideas from my PLN: Daniel Pink's book Drive and video What is my sentence? Jaime Vandergrift's (@jaimevanderg) recent blog post: What Defines You Matters. Jaime also recently joined Will Deyamport (@peoplegogy) and Jerry Blumengarten (@cybraryman1) for a video on the topic: Peoplegogy TV: Your One Sentence. My one sentence: My goal is to energize teaching and learning by fostering a learning mindset in teachers and students. The idea of a "learning mindset" came from several places. One is in recent discussions with Kevin Washburn (@kdwashburn) and his wife Julia, of Clerestory Learning. We discussed the importance of creating a culture among teachers that is one of growth and improvement with an open mind toward change. Also from reading books like Mindset by Carol S. Dweck, Quiet Leadership by David Rock, and Choice Words by Peter H. Johnson. All highly recommended, by the way! So, the question is... How will I "energize teaching and learning and fostering a learning mindset among teachers and students?" These specific goals are helping me answer that question.
Formulating these goals has been an incredibly enlightening and rewarding experience for me as I see my role at school transforming. Putting in the thinking and research that is required to create these goals has been professional development in itself. Please Try This Tomorrow! Craft your "one sentence" and set your goals for the school year. Give yourself focus moving forward. Energize and prepare yourself now for the onslaught of busyness and craziness that is about to come. Please share your goals with me if you blog them! Can't wait to learn from you! Maureen Devlin (@lookforsun), who has a powerful blog Teach Children Well, recently posted her goals for the rest of the summer: Focus, Focus, Focus. Great read! __ Allison Petersen @alcp One of my recent posts Build a PLN provided some tips on how to build or expand your personal learning network. This is a HOT TOPIC on Twitter lately! I cannot believe how many members of my PLN are either writing about The Power of Twitter or The Importance of Blogging. I have seen posts daily on the topic and love to continue to be inspired to grow by my PLN. I want to catalog all of these energizing posts so that they are available for reference later, so needless to say, I started a Storyify. I also wrote about How to use Storify to Organize Tweets recently. Hopefully some of the links below will inspire you to continue to build your PLN tomorrow! I hear a lot of people on Twitter say "I usually just favorite tweets and go back later to read them." This is something I do as well. But it starts to get overwhelming! The favorites list gets longer and longer and much harder to navigate. I have started using Storify to categorize and organize tweets I have retweeted or favorited. With all the insightful and helpful resources I find on Twitter, I truly need a way to keep them organized for future reference. And the favorites list isn't working for me anymore! Storify to the rescue! Such a helpful tool!
This year, my school was doing intensive research about 1-1 and BYOD programs. We were asked to call other schools who have implemented and see about their results. I did this, of course. But I found most of the answers to my questions on Twitter. I came back with a much more enthusiastic and optimistic outlook of BYOD than some of my colleagues. As I was participating in chats, asking questions, getting answers, and finding sources, I started to keep track of them in a story on Storify. This helped me to synthesize the information and to share it back with the group of teachers doing the research. It also helped me to REMEMBER all the amazing ideas I had learned on twitter. Below is my Storify from my 1-1 Research and the most recent one I created called Blogging Tips and Ideas. Try this out tomorrow and see if it helps you organize and sort all the great ideas and links you find on Twitter! Summer is a time of reflection and growth as a teacher. It is a time to catch up on all the reading I wish I could have gotten done during the school year. I have a list of professional books that I want to read that I know I may only scratch the surface of even in summer. But there is one thing for sure I know I have time for in the summer - and that is Twitter. Twitter is an amazing place to grow as a teacher. It may even be more beneficial than reading 10 PD books this summer. I am relatively new to Twitter. This is really only my third year knowing what a PLN (professional learning network) is and my first year truly trying to build one. But if there is ONE thing that you can DO TOMORROW to improve yourself as a teacher, it is to build a PLN. Here are three ways that have helped me build my PLN. And these are things I have time to focus on during the summer, so they are going on right now for me. 1) Build a Purposeful PLN on Twitter When I say "purposeful," I really mean it. I try to keep my professional and personal lives separate in the social media worlds. I use Twitter for educational professional development and very rarely tweet about anything personal. (Facebook is my personal posting avenue). But because of that, I am specific about who I follow, and I look closely at people's bio before following them. By being a little picky, I am able to create a twitter feed that I know I will always be able to learn from and hopefully link up with people who would also like to learn from me and be interested in the types of education focused material I will be posting. Find people who you admire or already love to learn from on Twitter and look to see who they follow and who they mention. Odds are, those are the people you also want to have as a part of your PLN. Always keep an eye on the Follow Friday (#FF) hashtag to see who other people recommend that you follow. Participate in Twitter chats, even if it is just to find new people to follow. My biggest secret to a Twitter chat is using two devices. It may seem like a bit much, but it helps me follow the stream and respond faster. Hootsuite is a MUST by the way - it helps you to watch a specific hashtag. If you try to view a single hashtag only using Twitter, you may miss some of the feed. I watch the stream on my iPhone using the Hootsuite app. Then, participate in the chat by entering posts and ideas from my iPad or computer either through Hootsuite or Twitter. If I don't have two devices available, I usually particpate from my iPhone since it is what I have with me. A few Twitter chats you may want to try out: #NTchat, #1to1techat, #TLchat, #EngChat, #EduCoach Official Educational Twitter Chat Schedule via @cybraryman1 2) Start a Blog Reader This is my newest element to my PLN, and it has provided amazing insight! All over Twitter, everyone has been talking about the sad departure of Google Reader. Well, maybe they liked it, but I never seemed to jive with Google Reader. But I read many posts about other options, and I looked into Feedly. My heart fell in love. Feedly is EASY to use, EASY to organize, EASY to sync, and EASY to read! It is also beautiful and visual (for us visual learners out there)! Using Feedly, I created categories to help organize the types of blogs such as Education: Technology, Education: Writing, Education: Reading etc. Then, I went back back to the bios of all of my closest twitter connections and found their blog sites and added them to each category. Now, anytime I make a new connection, I try to add their blog to my feedly. Daily I am able to quickly look at my iPhone app and see what people are blogging about. This is an amazing extension of Twitter since it goes beyond the 140 characters and allows for teachers and educators to provide much more detail to the interesting things they are doing in their classrooms and schools. I realize now that this element is a MUST HAVE to expand and continue to learn from my PLN. If you have a blog, please post the link in the comments section so that I can add your feed. 3) Start a Blog Yourself This one still intimidates me, but every summer I begin to embrace it again. Here is the most important element of having my own blog space: having a place to expand on my thoughts or share something more in depth. I often share ideas on Twitter with specific people and wish I could elaborate. But as we know Twitter is much better expressed short and sweet. A blog gives me the opportunity to elaborate on a specific teaching practice I mentioned, or a book I read, or a technology integration idea I came across, or a new professional development opportunity. When I blog, I don't have a lot of faith that my ideas are particularly new or insightful, but I was reminded that "what may be obvious to you could be amazing to others" from this video (see below) by @sivers shared with me by @nikkidrobertson. This has truly changed my outlook about blogging and helped to motivate me to get writing! Start your own space and use the blog to have others learn from you, just the same way you learn from them. This way you have the blog ready when you have something longer than 140 characters to share. You will be surprised how quickly you will find yourself using it because of the rich discussions you develop with fellow Tweeps. I've tried several website creators, but I am currently using Weebly and love it more than any other site I've tried. It is incredibly easy to use and quick to set up with elements to personalize your site , and Weebly also has a wide stock of templates to choose from to find the professional look you want. Find a focus for your blog. Nothing fancy or too elaborate is needed. At first, I set a specific goal because I needed some direction. The idea of "Try This Tomorrow" came from the practical types of information I most often share. This is also the type of information I seek out from others in my PLN. What is something that I can use tomorrow that might actually improve my teaching? I want my ideas to be relevant to a reader who jumps over here from Twitter and might be looking for a new idea to use tomorrow in class or to pair with an upcoming project. Try this tomorrow. Expand your PLN. See if you grow, change, and develop as an educator. Not only will you evolve, but you will be energized and excited by all the amazing ideas you will find! --- Allison Petersen @alcp Resources for starting a blog |
About AllisonAllison is an K-12 Instructional Coach. Her goal is to empower educators to grow continually. Recent Posts#5Tips4LMS Series
Cast a Vision Create Momentum A Problem and a Solution HIGHLIGHTED POSTS Re-Center on Vision Letting Go of Control The Power of Positive Feedback Inspiring a Love of Reading Turning Ideas into Habits The Truth About Writing This I Believe Essay Quiet Leadership Qualities Thinking About New Ideas Goals Provide Focus The Power of Twitter Use Storify to Organize Tweets Build a PLN Categories
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