Coming to Terms With My Role as an Edtech Administrator and My Contribution to Education, Edtech, and Educators
Recently, at the ISTE 2019 conference, I presented on building an educational technology professional development program on a budget. It was only the second time I had given this presentation and I was fortunate enough to be collaborating with my edtech sister, Kelly Martin. It was my first time presenting at what is the gold-standard conference in our field and I was feeling the incredibly trite combination of excited and nervous. Now that it is said and done, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the presentation, our message, the systems we have tried to build, and the pedagogical practice we have tried to improve. Our presentation, in many ways, speaks to a professional identity crisis I have been having since decided to cross over to the Dark Side and become an Edtech Sith Lord, an administrator.
I came into edtech as a teacher coach. It was my job to be the expert on the tools AND to coach teachers. I would partner with them, build lesson plans and activities with them, and be in the room as support when we tested those lesson plans out with students. I loved it. If I am 100% honest with myself, after three years of being an administrator, I still miss it. In fact, I am going to commit a teaching taboo and admit: I think loved that job more than I loved my 14 years of being a classroom teacher, because the only thing I have loved more than helping middle school kids succeed by finding what they are capable of, is helping teachers succeed by finding what they AND their students are capable of.
So when I became an administrator, when I made the conscious decision to join the Dark Side and trade my green lightsaber for a red one, I knew what it was I wanted to accomplish and why I was doing it. I wanted to build a great educational technology department in a district that was just starting out with edtech. I had had a great model at Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District, lead by Dr. Melissa Farrar. To this day, FSUSD still employs two of the best educational leadership role models I have met, Dr. Farrar and Kristen Witt. I was part of the team that first started the educational technology department in FSUSD, and naturally had some ideas on how I would do it “differently” or maybe “better.”
I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I had my what and my why in place. The how… well that has proved to be trickier, and more difficult than I expected. A thing I didn't expect is how much being on The Dark Side was going to pull me farther and farther from direct contact with teachers. It has been a bit of a sacrifice, one that I am certain I would make again. Yet, it would have been easier if I had realized that going in.
So now, after ISTE, after I have been allowed to represent myself as some sort of expert on building an educational technology department, I am reflecting even more on these questions: Am I effective? Am I an effective leader? What do I essentially do? How do I approach it? What do I believe in here?
Teaching can be solitary work, but at least you have a whole school of other teachers, and a vast social media teacher community. One of the hardest things about my job is that to find a professional community you have to have friends outside of your district, because there's only ever one of you. Even with that, I think what I still wrestle with most, having moved to the Dark Side, is missing teachers and classrooms.
When I do get the chance to speak with men and women who do a similar job and we discuss how we interact with teachers and how we create professional development systems, there are common threads. What I have to say on this may not be terribly original. It could be summed up as “hire good people, and then get out of their way”, but since I have been reflecting on this, I thought I would share what the most important tasks of an Edtech Sith Lord are.
Recruit Revolutionaries
Every educational technology administrator I know in any public school district anywhere, who does not also have to do the IT portion of that work, is constantly messaging this to the entire organization: “We are not IT.” I like to tell people that IT works with boxes and wires, and edtech works with hearts and minds. Because we work with hearts and minds, we need the right people. Recruiting quality people is a quintessential part of building a good professional development program, educational technology or otherwise.
One of the things you quickly find out when you're recruiting for professional development is that even the best and most experienced teachers are not necessarily going to be the best professional developers. The skill-sets certainly overlap to a degree, the same way that there is overlap between pedagogy and andragogy, but they are not the same. Additionally, probably unsurprisingly, good teachers who are comfortable in front of a room full of second graders are not always comfortable in front of a room of their peers. So you do have to find people who are willing to do all the parts of the job. Good teachers are a must, but you cannot stop with that criteria.
The reason I want to recruit “revolutionaries” is because an effective professional developer has to be willing to stand in front of a room full of teachers and say, “what you're doing is good, but it could be great!” An effective professional developer is an agent of change. Being a champion of “it could be so much better” requires bravery, ardor, and perspicacity. Your people skills have to be on point. As a professional developer, you are yourself a recruiter. A recruiter to the cause of improved teaching practice, and you have to find a way to be both subtle and enthusiastic, to be a Pied Piper of teachers when you're telling them “you can do better,” because that task is fraught with push back and hurt if you do it with a heavy hand. You must achieve a balance of gentle, yet relentless urging forward of your colleagues.
Recruiting revolutionaries is no easy task, and they are usually in short supply. Another thing you have to be mindful of as a leader of revolutionaries, is that revolutionaries want change...and they want it now. Managing that expectation and engendering patience in them...also not easy. I wish I had better guidelines here, but I am not always patient myself, and sometimes my revolutionaries have had to teach me patience, but it is definitely a thing to think about. If you have done your recruiting right, you will find yourself being an Edtech Sith Lord who leads Edtech Jedi.
Clear the Path
The next thing I have learned over the last three years is that I need to clear the path for the revolution. In other words, I need to set up conditions so that my revolutionaries can get on with the work of proselytizing, being agents of change, and winning hearts and minds. What’s more, I need to ensure we don’t run out of the physical and emotional supplies they need to carry on. In short, you truly must support your revolutionaries in every conceivable way.
Clearing the path can take many different forms. The most obvious is making sure that your team has the technology they need. You want them to be innovators and explorers so “standard issue” is often not enough. Hopefully, they will ask you, “Can we get some ____?” At first, or at least for me, my first compunction was to say, “yes.” But what you soon realize is that you are on the Dark Side, and you have peers and superiors on the Dark Side, and one of those higher Sith Lords is going to ask you why you spent $3,000 on 3D printers. You had better be ready to justify that cost using standards, superintendent goals, or board goals.
In this case, one part of clearing the path is starting to ask your Jedi, your revolutionaries, “why,” and asking them to think about the pedagogical purpose for trying the cool new thing. Even when you yourself think it's super cool and don't want to ask why because you want to play with the new toys too, you have to ask that question. Another part of clearing the path is communicating and “educating” your peers and superiors behind the scenes to make connections between your experimental/innovative work and more conventional areas of education. If they already understand your department goals and vision to the point where they can guess why you’d be going to trainings or conferences, or purchasing technology they’re not themselves familiar with, then they’re less likely to question or push back.
In fact, much of clearing the path is actually done away from your team. It might mean working with IT, principals, or union leaders. Sometimes clearing the path means finding paid professional development or peers for your Jedi and putting them in the same physical space to make connections and find support. And this last point, making sure your team has a professional community, is an example of clearing the emotional path for your team.
I feel like, in order to do the work of professional development in education well, you have to really want to do it. If you have recruited revolutionary Jedi, and they are anxiously waiting to see change, then they might be in for some disappointment in the day-to-day. Especially in public education, changes are often incremental and slow. The word glacial comes to mind. However, if you can give your team a sense of belonging to something, remind and show them their accomplishments from time to time (hint: you will need this for yourself too as a Sith Lord) and provide opportunities for fun and bonding, then their emotional path will remain clear.
Develop Your Developers
This may not be as straightforward as it might sound. Obviously there is the normal goal-setting and driving people to develop their skills. In educational technology, we have the benefit of having many different certifications out there for our people to pursue. I work in a GSuiteEdu District, and I am very happy to say that we have added many Google Certified Trainers and Google Certified Innovators in our district, at all levels, and we have grown the number of Level 1 Google Certified Educators dramatically. This has been an outstanding achievement for our district, but this technical skill expertise is not enough.
One of the things I have figured out, and it seems obvious when I read it, is to find out how people want to be developed, how they want to grow, and then find ways to grow them in those areas. This has two difficulties involved in it. The first difficulty is that sometimes you need to set aside how you want someone that you are leading to grow. Sometimes you have a need on your team, and you only have so many team members to fill it, and the team need can drive your actions in a way that isn't always best for the person you're trying to develop. There are, of course, certain basic team needs that must be fulfilled, but as new challenges or roles come along it's good to be judicious and deliberate in assigning those roles and the accompanying development that goes along with them. The second difficulty comes when the team member isn't really sure how they want to grow themselves. Allowing somebody the time and space for self-discovery and reflection can be difficult, especially if you are an impatient Sith Lord, but it will pay dividends in the long run.
And then there's this other thing, which seems to go opposite to the idea of developing people how they want to be developed. Sometimes you can see the potential for strengths in people; sometimes these strengths have no direct impact on the work of your team. Sometimes you can see that people are good at things even if they don't know that they are good at those things, or, and this is a hard one, even if they don't necessarily want to be good at those things.
One of the members of my team is a natural diplomat, a clear-headed communicator, and has an overriding sense of fairness. It's like he is a natural-born, level-headed leader. This is a role he shies away from. Every time he is in leadership he distinguishes himself so people keep asking him to do it. I think he would be a fabulous administrator, and it has taken me over a year to get him to a place to even consider it. For my part, I have had to be mindful and creative about how I use certain situations to help him see his strengths and the opportunities they might afford him.
So in a way, being a Sith Lord is being a talent scout. This is pretty obvious at the recruiting phase when you're looking for the initial attributes you want on your team. In addition, as you work with your individual team members--and you really should approach developing your team members as individuals--you need to be looking for their strengths so that you can build on them, and their areas of growth to mitigate them. The difficulty that comes as a team leader is when you know you need to push somebody up to a new position or a new challenge which will require them to leave your team. That can be hard, and downright annoying, but you develop yourself as a leader when you find new people to recruit and develop. You have to remember that teams succeed because of systems AND people. Build both, and in the long run the work will succeed, individuals will succeed, and the accomplishment will be satisfying.
