My article in Technology and Learning magazine, Top 3 Leadership Skills, is up online! T&L asked me to write about the top three tech skills administrators need, and fortunately, they allowed me to write about the soft skills that are more important than knowledge of any one tool.
I focused in a short piece on three ideas – Filtering: the ability to sort throgh all the information that comes through these days; Fearlessness – the need to be willing to take risks; and Foresight – the idea that we have to be able to imagine the ramifications of the decisions we make. Are those the most important? Maybe? Probably? Probably not? I don’t know. Perhaps more importantly, they aren’t explicitly tech skills, and that was the point of the article.
Being a techie is a helpful start to bringing a school into the modern age, but it’s not essential. If we counted on principals to be experts in everything at their schools, we probably wouldn’t get very far. I’m very comfortable with the idea that I am nowhere near as masterful as my teachers in every content area except English… and there I probably only come pretty close. But I think I can make sense of good teaching when I walk into a class that isn’t in my strong skill set, and I do love how much "stuff" I learned from students and teachers in the past few years. I have often found myself doing an observation and losing track of "observing the teacher" because I too busy learning from what was going on in the classroom.
And perhaps those are the most important leadership skills for being ready to change our schools – openness, humility and a true spirit of inquiry. I don’t claim in any way to always be good at all of them every day, but I strive to be. Those ideas embody the best of who I hope to be. And they are the skills the students and teachers of SLA need from me if I am going to be the leader they deserve in these very exciting and challenging times.
The trope that the "world is changing" has been beaten to death, but it still bears repeating from time to time. You don’t have to know where everything is going, you just have to be willing to let the change in, you have to be humble enough to accept that you really have little to no idea where the world is going, but you still have to try your damnedest to help your kids get ready for it as best you can, and you have to be truly curious about where the world might go… and want to work with your kids to figure out whatever small piece of the puzzle you can.
Approach your students, your schools, and the world with an open heart and open mind. More and more, I find myself coming back to that idea. It seems to me that might be the starting point for meaningful change. And that idea is both incredibly easy and so incredibly, incredibly hard.