Source: http://www.enter.net/~skimmer/images/colorgas.jpg

“Leadership doesn’t just reside in the principal’s office,” said William Parrett in a podcast on Leadership Skills for Working with Kids in Poverty, “it resides in the classroom.” The fever-pitch focus on student academics is at an all time high, but new research points to other valuable aspects of “schooling.”

Lleras analyzed data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, which followed 11,000 high school sophomores for a decade, tracking scores on standardized tests, teachers’ appraisals of student work habits and the ability to relate to peers and adults, among other indicators.

When she cross-checked the indicators with students’ self-reported earnings 10 years after graduation, Lleras found that those who’d been rated high on social skills by teachers were earning more than classmates with similar test scores but lower social skills.

“It’s important to note that good schools do more than teach reading, writing, and math,” she says. “They socialize students and provide the kinds of learning opportunities that help them to become good citizens and to be successful in the labor market.”

Who can argue with a research finding that highlights that the more socially adept our children are, the better they do in life? And, what about technology relationships, online conversations and collaboration?

More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites…older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.
Source: Pew Internet: Social Networking

And, consider this other Pew Internet study about our children:

• 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet.
• 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos.
• 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments.
• 28% have created their own online journal or blog.
• 27% maintain their own personal webpage.
• 26% remix content they find online into their own creations.
• 55% of online teens ages 12-17 have created a profile on a social networking site.
• 47% of online teens have uploaded photos where others can see them.
  Source: Pew Internet – Teens and Social Media as shared at The Praized Blog

Are our children in schools part of this group? Certainly, some are but what about children living in poverty? How are we helping them make the connection between what happens in schools and the technology they do not have access to at home? In urban city school youth, the desire is to get kids to college. Could this be John F. Kennedy’s idea to get us to the goal we can see–the Moon–rather than the one we can’t see easily, Mars?

If mediocrity is the norm in the school, as shared in the podcast, it takes courage to fight against the status quo. If this is true for poverty, it definitely has to be relevant for children in poverty settings who lack access to technologies that connect and enable collaboration at a distance. How do we get this leadership in schools in the classrooms? We take the boot off of teachers’ necks, a boot where each shoelace eyelet is labelled with some brilliant innovation that JUST HAS NOT WORKED SYSTEMICALLY.

Dr. Chris Moersch (The LOTI Guy Speaks blog) makes these points about enhancing what happens in the classroom…in essence, this is what an awesome learning environment looks like:

1. Higher-Order Thinking: Students learning/questioning at synthesis/evaluation and create levels.
2. Engaged Learning: Students help define the task, the process, and the solution; collaboration extends beyond the classroom.
3. Authenticity: The learning experience is directly relevant to students and involves creating a product that has a purpose beyond the classroom that directly impacts the students.
4. Technology: Technology use is directly connected and needed for task completion and students determine which application(s) would best address their needs.

In each presentation I’ve seen Chris do, he says, “Why use technology when you can’t get HEA first?” In a recent blog entry, he writes it this way:

Why focus on Web 2.0 and related technologies when most classrooms are still encased in a Teach 1.0 paradigm characterized by lectures and/or teacher-led presentations, sequential learning materials, teacher-directed projects, and traditional assessment schemes? Maximizing the use of these advanced technology tools first requires a fundamental shift from Teach 1.0 to Teach 2.0 pedagogy.

The answer is simple–lack of leadership…not in the classroom about poverty but in the office, the board room, and at the superintendent level. A profound lack of understanding about how use technology to systemically re-align a multitude of initiatives and get them pointing the same direction. Simply, how can our leaders lift themselves out of the poverty of thinking regarding engaged learning, higher-order thinking when they are so unable to embrace learning and creating online the way students do?

If you were a student in these classrooms where educators don’t model what they preach, would you have any respect whatsoever for the teacher? If you preach lifelong learning but you aren’t doing it, why should I listen to you?

One way to get started is to start building those online social skills…get a Facebook account, reflect on your practice using a blog. These are “simple” tasks that go a long way to putting us on the road to lifelong learning, a journey one can only teach by experiencing it first-hand.

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