Heather's EDET668 Blog

Essential Question 12: How can understanding of controlled disruption and coherence making impact your leadership of peers at this time, and at this level? We tend to think of disturbance as a negative thing, however it is inevitable within a group of people and it can lead to good things.  Fullman (p. 126) said, "When I say disturbance is a good thing, I am not against coherence, but in fact just the opposite: unsettling processes provide the best route to greater all-round coherence. In other words, the most powerful coherence is a function of having worked through the ambiguities and complexities of hard-to solve problems."   I think this question is directly tied to Essential Question 10 .  Disruption, or people with varying opinion, is important for the advancement of the group.  Working with perfect coherence never challenges and leads to complacency.  In a world that changes as much as ours does, complacency is the last thing we want in educa...

Essential Question 11: What is the role of knowledge creation and sharing in a healthy educational organization? "If you remember one thing about information, it is that it only becomes valuable in a social context." (Fullman, 2001, p. 89).  This really says it all.  As teachers, it feels like we are constantly reinventing the wheel. "It is one of life's great ironies: schools are in the business of teaching and learning, yet they are terrible at learning from each other." (Fullman, 2001, p. 103).  I observed this phenomenon  when I completed my student teaching in 2010.  After spending a semester in the high school science classroom I wanted to see other teacher's classrooms, so I sent an email to everyone in the district asking if I could come and observe their classrooms.  I only got one response.  Since then, many teachers have retired and there has been a change in the sharing culture at our school.  The majority of teachers spend lunch t...

Essential Question 10: Explain and give examples to argue why the following statement is true or false: “Get the right people on your team, and get the wrong ones off.” Starting on page 77 of  Leading in a culture of change, Fullman writes an example about two different departments in the same school.  The English department had a strong community of teachers who shared lessons and assignments, helped new teachers, and had positive attitudes about their jobs and their students.  In contrast, the social studies department kept their resources to themselves and were bitter about their jobs and negative about their students.  This example made me think the statement about is true because I'd much rather surround myself with people like those on the English team. However, upon further reading I think the statement could also be false because if you only work with the "right people" there may be no one to challenge the team and ultimately push the team to grow.  ...

Essential Question 9: How is mentoring adults different from teaching children? The purpose of mentoring is to provide support, guidance and advice to teachers to enable them to enhance their teaching skills to develop professionally. ("Introduction to supporting," 2018). In my mind I could change just a few words and have the purpose of teaching. They are very similar, but there are many differences when mentoring adults or teaching children. Adults are more likely to be motivated learners since they are gaining knowledge about how to be more successful at their chosen career. Children usually are there because they have to be and may lose enthusiasm for the subject matter. Adults tend to be more independent learners and can be left to problem solve and make decisions about the direction of the lesson. In my experiences, children are willing to spend less time working on a problem before asking someone to help them. And many of them do not like open-ended assign...

Essential Question 8: What strategies do you use that are related to your “moral purpose”? How do these contribute to your overall leadership? "Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school." (Bezzina, 2007)  While I formally teach science, I frequently make my students aware that my job isn't to make sure that they know the element symbol of gold, but rather that they can grow into successful adults that positively contribute to society.  "Moral purpose is about both ends and means. In education, an important end is to make a difference in the lives of students. But the means of getting to that end are also crucial." (Fullan, 2001, p.26)  There are two main strategies I use to encourage my students to be their best selves along the way: modeling and communicating.  Modeling :  If I have learned anything from being a mother, it is that childre...