10 Questions To Help You Become A Better Teacher This School Year, Part 7

7.  Where do my colleagues need my leadership this year?

Two areas come right to mind: to share my thoughts/feelings and in tech support.

First, sharing my thoughts/feelings.  After reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I realized my problem is that I not only am hesitant to share my true feelings, but also I am so willing to keep the peace that I will actually go against my feelings in order to avoid conflict.

But as The Five Dysfunctions of a Team illustrates, not sharing your feelings is worse than causing conflict.  Conflict is good and necessary.  As Dave Ramsey says, if you truly care about something, then you better be passionate enough to push back and argue and strive to make things right.

I need to remember that.  My biggest problem, though, is that half an hour after the meeting, then I finally think of what I should have said or responded with!  I hate that.  From now on, to counter this, I will go in to each department meeting or PLC having brainstormed and rehearsed as many angles and situations involved conflict as I can.  By doing that, I hope to come up with what I should have said or responded with ahead of time.

But, we'll see.

Second, tech support.  With our move to 1:1 and several new staff members coming on board this year (in fact, I met with one of our new English teachers yesterday to answer some of her great questions about how I "seamlessly integrate technology into my classroom" - thanks Mr. Zutz for throwing that out there during the new teacher orientation (there is nothing seamless about how I use technology.  I just am unafraid to use it in everything I do in class) and to show her some of the most effective sites I use) there are going to be a number of staff members who need help and advise with technology.

My best advice will continue to be this - don't try and overhaul what you do.  That just leads to frustration, which leads you to going back to what you were doing before.  Thus, no progress occurs.  Instead, take one piece of technology or one site and insert that into one lesson.

For example, instead of biting off more than you can chews and saying "I'm going to have all of my students keep blogs for all of their assignments in Lit and Lang 9R," I would encourage teachers instead to look at it from this angle: how can I have students create their own blogs for one assignment?  Or how can I create a class blog that students can use for one assignment?