Skip to main content

Scott McLeod: Dangerously Irrelevant- "Grand Challenges of the Principalship?": April 22, 2018

This week, Scott McLeod discussed redesigning the principal licensure program.  Scott said that they have currently identified "grand challenges" for building leaders, such as principals.  
The grand challenges that he has identified, taken directly from his blog post are:
1. Turning around a low-achieving school
2. Repairing a dysfunctional school staff culture
3. Preparing future-ready graduates
4. Meeting the needs of students with unique needs
5. Better engaging diverse student and family communities

Scott said that he is currently accepting submissions of what anyone thinks a grand challenge is that should be considered when redesigning their principal licensure program.  

The first thing that came to my mind when reading this blog post was everything that we have learned and discussed in this class.  At multiple times in this course, it has been mentioned that some of us feel as though our principals or building leaders aren't paving the way to more technology use or maybe do not have it as a priority on the school's improvement plan.  I definitely think that creating a school that is able to use technology to engage, motivate, and prepare students for the real-world should be high on a principal's list.  When our students graduate, they will be faced with a world full of technology, therefore we need to begin to prepare them for it now.  Technology also provides the ability to meet the needs of our students and to personalize learning to raise student achievement.  Looking at the list that Scott provided, I can see where technology may fall under a few of the categories, but I do hope that it becomes a priority in programs for building leaders so that we can see more successful technology integration across all districts.  Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jennifer Gonzalez- Cult of Pedagogy: Updating Your Classroom Design- March 27, 2018

Recently, Jennifer Gonzalez created a blog post about upgrading your classroom design.  We often see classrooms that look cozy and modern, allowing students to collaborate and feel at home, yet many teachers believe that it is impossible to make their own classroom this way within budget constraints and small spaces.  Jennifer interviewed Bob Dillon to gather 12 things that teachers can do to make their classrooms more student friendly and a better place for learning. 1) Ask students throughout the year "What in this room supports your learning and what gets in the way?" 2) Take things out: if you remove items and you don't miss them then you don't need them in your classroom. 3) Mix up Student Seating: try different arrangements or allow students choice in where they sit. 4) Take notice of the perimeter: Are the walls distracting or do they add to learning? Do certain posters need taken down? 5) Reduce or Eliminate Teacher Workspace: Allow students more...
1 comment
Read more

My Technology Use: February 4, 2018: Smart Notebook

I often use Smart Notebook in my classroom, but I will be the first to admit it is often used to post an agenda or as an extra whiteboard in the classroom to call students up to work out problems.  My students have always loved getting to write on the Smart Board.  This week, I needed to teach elapsed time and to be honest, I was really struggling with introducing it.  I wanted an interactive lesson, which kept seeming to be impossible as our school only had a total of 10 mini clocks for the students to work with in a hands-on manner at their desks.  I remembered Smart Notebook and was able to create a lesson using it that I was really proud of and my students loved! I searched for a clock and found one under "interactive and multimedia."  This clock allowed us to move the minute and hour hand to review how to use a clock to tell time.  I was then able to put two clocks side by side and call on students to set each clock to a different time, so that we cou...
1 comment
Read more

My Technology Use: February 19, 2018: Conversion Examples

This week, I didn't try anything fancy in my classroom with technology, but instead had a spur of the moment opportunity to utilize technology to further my students' understanding.  We are working on converting units of measure.  It is my first year teaching fourth grade math, and when asking a coworker (who taught math previously in fourth grade) what background knowledge students usually come with as far as measurement goes, she said in the past they had a basic idea of what each unit of measure was.  This year, of course, was not the case at all.  My students picked up on feet and inches, but kilograms, grams, meters, millimeters, etc. were all very foreign words to them.  I quickly realized that there was no discussion that was going to help them understand, so I turned to technology for help. We went through each unit of measure individually and because it was spur of the moment, I only thought to Google each unit of measure and show real-life examples of...
1 comment
Read more