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The number of students from international schools across Shanghai and across the world that were able to participate and be a part of this event were inspiring to me. Elementary students, middle school, high school… all were represented and each and every one of them brought something unique to the festival. From the gregarious student to the shy student, many students were able to explore learning 21st century style by telling stories using film as the medium. As Scott McCloud mentioned in his opening S2F2 speech, films are still a relatively new medium and the potential to discover new things using film is great indeed.

Scott McCloud was in attendance at the event, having spent the week in the city seeing a few things while in Shanghai. Most importantly, he spent his week interacting with our students and learning from them as they learned from him.

From what I can see, the film festival brought more than a bunch of kids together who worked hard in their after school hours. Instead, I saw a passionate bunch of learners coming together to share their learning. Yes... learning! Students were engaged. They learned planning. They learned dedication. The learned about the power of creativity, collaboration in the spirit of competition. There were winners and losers, but frankly speaking, the winners and losers were all equally happy no matter what the result. Most interestingly, the community that was created also created an audience and that audience was left wanting more.

Let's face facts. Our kids toil over detail work for projects and grades. Their work, while sometimes fun and enjoyable, often heads to the dark closets of their parents memories for a few years and that is it. Some schools (not many) have invested in infrastructure to "preserve" the work for portfolios and digital records. Kids will work hours and hours on a project, fulfil the requirements and then have a simple number or letter grade assigned based on a rubric. Some just get grades based on a teacher's opinion. None of the work ever gains an audience. This is not the case in these films. I observed work that was clearly created for course assignments. I observed biographies, science labs and humanities projects all created with the dedication of the students who are driven to succeed. The difference is the community recognized the work as their own. A film was a part of them. Our festival included student written narratives, documentaries, public service announcements, animations, and more. I laughed. I cried (really!). I was proud.

I’ve loved working with David Gran, Mikey McKillip, Jonathan Chambers, Amanda DeCardy and all of the others on the board for this event.

You want to start your own Film Festival? Start here. David Gran has done a great job on a prexi to tell you how and he has created a wonderful ning site as well on International Student Film Festivals.

Check out the webpage: http://www.shanghaifilmfest.org/ for further information. I predict an expansion of the festival in years to come.

Andrew Torris
This entry has been reposted on "Sentiments On Common Sense"

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Author's note: I wrote this post about a year ago and updated a little here for Leadertalk. I stumbled upon it the other day while cleaning out my hard drive. It hit home with me as we all are facing some tough community issues right now and I decided we really need to get our PR machine running at 110% capacity. Thanks for reading. This post is also is cross posted on Sentimentsoncommonsense. Thanks for reading this post! Andy

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We need to do a much better job of self promotion or we will be run over by our own failures and lack of progress.

In act one, scene two of Julius Caesar, Caesar asks a soothsayer what the future holds.

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak. Caesar is turn'd to hear.
Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.

Let’s face it. Common sense would tell anyone that no school is perfect. In fact, by nature of the school improvement process, we honed our knives of self improvement by becoming very, very good at self criticism, and ultimately it is also deemed cathartic to announce our own weak points out loud and with robust vigor and valor. Alas, this time of year people get cranky and irritable. The ides of March saying often comes to my mind.

Such announcements like,

“Our school has progressed just 10 percentage points on the nationally normed test in the past three years, missing our target by 2 percentage points. We are disappointed in missing our target despite the tremendous progress we have made.”

The newspapers and online networks out there are all over this stuff, and the fuel for the school critics’ fire is among the worst in journalism falling just short of the criticisms and interrogations meted out on Meet the Press and Jerry Springer combined!

Sigh… why do schools insist on focusing on the negatives? Must we be so self critical? Is it a deeply held community expectation that we be negative about ourselves?

Would we appear to be trying a cover up if we instead said,

“The progress that our school has made in the past three years equates to 10 percentage points, and has moved our school to within 2 percentage points of our target. The school will reevaluate their academic targets and continue with our aggressive school improvement progress to ensure our students continued success.”

Much nicer if you ask me.

Alas… things do go bad in schools sometimes and black and white honesty is the best policy for sure. We seemed to have our share of them lately, and sadly some are really out of our control, although that is NOT the message a school administrator wants to send. To take responsibility and not being able to truly implement mitigating steps is certainly frustrating. I won’t make the laundry list of things that go awry, as I suspect you have two or three on your mind right now.

Instead let’s turn this coin over and I propose some positive communications that will rebuild the interest and confidence in the school.

Taking the old motto “Ten to glow on, one to grow on”, I figure that we must provide 10 or more quality examples of positive results in our schools to counter balance the single quality result.

Guiding factors for these include:
• Always tell the truth. (This should be easy)
• Do not exaggerate. (This is harder than you think)
• Make the message understandable. (This is the hardest thing to do!)
• Recognize your experts. Show them off to your community. Quote them frequently.
• Any school event or school personnel recognized by an independent source (i.e. newspaper, professional organization) should be published and republished. Theses events and people should be your poster children.
• Focus on direct implementation steps taken by the school, and not just mere happenstance occurrences.
• Student learning data must be targeted and not over generalized
• Over reliance regarding co-curricular (sports, after school, clubs, etc) for positives should be avoided.
• Concrete, real life celebrations of school events connected to learning are most efficient.
• Be visible with your positives and the positives will make your visibility less negative even when bad things happen.

My other suggestion is to think ahead of the curve. One area that I need to do a better job of addressing. Perhaps a weekly "devils advocate" session with some trusted colleagues will squeeze out those negative thoughts to address, change and squash in the public setting. My favorite recently has focused on a proposed program change in our school. The critics have come out in vocal fashion, spreading rumor by email and by voice to anyone on a mailing list.

What are we to do? My suggestion is the truth should be spread. Accurate, factual, research-based information and "on-the-ground" examples that share the positives. The mere thought that your veracity and honesty are being questioned hit hard with emotional impact. One must step forward professionally and let those attacks roll off your shoulders to the floor where they belong. The fact is, we may not always win the battles that we fight on these issues, but if we stay true to our beliefs about putting children first and focusing on what is best for our schools, we will most likely always triumph in the long run.

Andy Torris

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This entry cross posted to "Sentiments On Common Sense"

I found Scott McCleod's PDF handout on the 100 Principal Blog project almost 3 years ago when I took the initiative to start my school principal's blog. My tech integrator at the time, Jeff Utecht, was so proud. He had been gently encouraging me to think about taking it on as a way to communicate to our school community. One weekend, I sat on the couch, laptop at the ready and leapt into a wordpress blog provided by Scott.

One of the key reasons for principals to blog that Scott mentions in his handout is "Reason 10: Thought leadership".

Andrew Torris

A blog can be a great place to put thoughts out there for the community to chew on. Is a school considering a new initiative or an important change? Does the school want feedback on a particular topic or issue? The principal could post some information and questions on the blog and solicit community participation. This is similar to setting up a meeting with an advisory board or interested group of stakeholders, except that the potential reach is much greater since everyone in the school community can see and participate in the conversation, not just the few individuals who might attend a face-to-face meeting.

Hmmm... great I thought. I wrote. I wrote. I wrote some more. Then it happenned! Proof that somebody out there (except the few who actually left a comment) is reading my thoughts and perhaps internalizing some of my message! My personal blog was cited as a source of information in a committee meeting this week at my school. The teachers and administrators noted value in the post "When is it too much? AND When do we say “DO IT or GO!”?, which was posted on my blog and here at leadertalk and the post "I am probably jumping to conclusions here but- Professional Conferences/Seminars Probably DON’T work!"

Most notably, I write in the post about professional conferences about the need for follow through and deeper learning opportunities. I stated:

The key question that comes to my mind though is when will leaders be held responsible for the follow-up for their entire organization and when will we as learning professionals take on the sustained follow-up ourselves. Isn’t that what a PLN created to do for me? Can we not sustain our own learning?

Then I walked into the room yesterday and there on a piece of chart paper under the words "professional development" was "Andy Torris' blog post". The first words out of my mouth were, "Just another reason to be careful what you post online!"- which got a pretty good laugh from my colleagues! The follow up conversation was about what I had written- nothing to earth shattering if you ask me- but it did help the discussion as the ideas around the commitment of administrators in our organization have to deep, followed up professional devleopment. More importantly though, are the high quality comments to this post. Jon Nordmeyer, a colleague of mine, left some great links to the a site at Berkley. Another leadertalk contributor, Blair Peterson left a comment pointing to a post by Seth Godin.. And yet another blogging administrator Ed Shepard, who also is one of my twitter friends noted that my post made him realize that:

I am under the firm belief that I can get my staff to change or focus on doing one major thing really, really well during the school year. This could be anything from curriculum to classroom management. Either way it is a broad to specific focus designed to create a common practice and develop a common language within the school community. This focus is kept in the forefront and is ingrained in everything we do the entire school year. It requires a bit of research and development, but insures a long-term and long-lasting effect in the school. After the year ends, we start the whole process again with a new focus.

Well stated Ed! Can't that same thought hold true for administrators and blogging educators as well. Many, many educational bloggers and web-designers are quickly realizing that over time, your personal professional learning network is enhanced and thus your "Thought Leadership" is sharpened by leveraging the use of the web 2.0 tools available to us on a daily basis. This learning is not work. It is engagement. It is engagement on the deepest level, as it meets the needs of a social learning WITH access to a rich research base AND expert advice!

I can't close here unless I offer some common sense advice though.

1. Remember: What you write and create is essentially your professional persona that will follow you for years. Use the tool wisely. As I said in my last post on Sentiments on Common Sense, "You really do have to be careful what you write!"

2. BE CLEAR that your blog is YOUR BLOG or the SCHOOL's Blog. I need to go back to my blog and make sure it is plainly stated. People seem to know who I am. People probably know where I work. I hope they see my writing as professional and also a bit personal. I also hope they see that I am not crazy about the content.

3. Embrace the comments and respond to them. I am more apt to read blogs that I get notes back from authors after I have left a comment. Let the commentators know you have read the note and maybe even responded to their notes. It expands the learning!

In the end, it really is about reflecting, learning and modeling that for our community. Don't you think?

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The entry has been cross-posted to Sentiments On Common Sense.

Image by Old Shoe Woman via FlickrMy colleagues and I got in an animated conversation the other day about the actual demonstrable skills teachers and administrators must have to be successful members of our school community. Beyond the basics understandings that teachers must have of the new uses of the read/write web, what exactly do we expect our educational professionals to be able to use to enhance teaching and build better learners?

I've been pounding my fist of late in these meetings, demanding a well developed professional development plan that is clear, concise and has reasonable accountability build into it- with a sharp eye on the short term and a vision for what will be in year 2 and year 3 of the plan. I personally feel it seems like a reasonable and common sense request, and as I have said over and over, I could probably sit down and write a draft myself, but that would not help us address what really needs to drive our school's technology training strategy. Then...out of the blue... it came out of one of the participants mouth. Their words (paraphrased and combined) were:

When are the school administration going to start holding teachers accountable and make them use technology and follow the technology plan? We have NETS for Teachers in our performance evaluation program. We are working hard to ensure that training is in place for our teachers, but it will all be a huge waste of time if teachers are not held accountable.

Interesting thoughts, indeed! I didn't say it but I wanted to hold someone else accountable. Nonetheless, the conversation continued and what followed was a significant discussion about the frustrations of the technology specialists. These folks are working long hours to prepare lessons for their peers in addition to preparing lessons for the students. As we are all aware, adults are a lot more demanding than children and thus the time investment has been significant. A typical PD session that is voluntary results in just a few "interested" teachers showing up, and the technology use being enhanced in classrooms where there is already integration already going on. It is certainly not a loss, but it is not the gain we're hoping for either.

So the question held in the air around us and we all were responsible for the answer. Ultimately, we are talking about professional responsiblity and instructional excellence. Ultimately, I feel it comes to making the standards and embedded skills in the standards managable and understandable for all members of the instructional community in a school. One of the resources we are using to build from is a resource called "23 Things". This group of educators has put together a great list of resources and concepts that they feel best addresses the current needs of a practicing teacher in a classroom. We took that list, analyzed it, and then added to it and adapted it in ways that will best meet our needs at our school. What I think the 23 things and our additions and modifications does in this Professional Development Mashup is make the whole mess of what would seem to be disjointed applications, resources and skills into chunks of possibilities. I would share it here, but it is not quite done. When it is, I will do so. But, the creation and formation of this structure does not answer the key question posed. Are the administrators going to hold the teachers accountable? If they are, do they have the will- the guts - the understanding of the technology to say "You must meet these standards or go find another school or another job?"

It is a tough call. In 2000 the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations published a report called School Technology Leadership: Incidence and Impact. In the report it states:

For technology to become an integral part of a school, it not only is necessary to help teachers use the technology but administrators must be involved in it, too. The importance of training for developing teachers in technology has long been recognized in the educational community. These findings indicate that administrative leadership and decision-making are equal, if not more important than spending on infrastructure to maintaining a successful technology program.

...Charismatic people may contribute to technology integration as well, but it is even more essential for a school to distribute leadership and become a "technology learning organization," where administrators, teachers, students, and parents together work on how best to adapt new technologies to improve learning. (p. 17)

(Thank you Drape's Takes for drawing my attention to this quote!)

After it is all said and done, I have to continue to believe that until we hold the ADMINISTRATORS accountable for understanding technology and exploiting the power of the web, we cannot and will not be able to hold our instructional staff accountable. As was stated almost 9 years ago, it is the leaders who must build a "technology learning organization".

What do you think?

Posted by Andrew Torris

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Reference:

• Anderson, R. & Dexter, S. (December 1, 2000). School Technology Leadership: Incidence and Impact. Center for research on information technology and organizations. I.T. in education, paper 98. Retrieved December 26, 2008 from http://repositories.cdlib.org/crito/education/98

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