Ingram's Reflections on Instructional Leadership

Roland Ingram
EDLD 5352 Instructional Leadership

“Outcomes” should be the driving force behind change and the gauge upon which me measure success, however, failing to meet the intended outcome should not be seen as a failure unless the attempt that was made to achieve it was anything less than 100%. I must, as an educational technology director, make sure that my staff not only sees the value in the advances we are attempting to make but also that they are actively engaged in helping our campus to achieve success in those areas that we have identified as needing improvement.

As we strived, as a campus, to meet our goals we met with many successes and few failures. Our successes came in the forms of identifying our campus’s technology needs, coming up with a plan to address those needs and a timeframe in which to do it, identifying potential problems and being proactive in dealing with them, identifying beneficial professional development sessions and attending them, and finding additional funding for purchasing technologies. Our failures usually took the form uncooperative staff mired in a teaching philosophy that, though functional twenty years ago, is completely useless in today’s classroom and with today’s students.

For the most part I was successful in carrying out the course assignments. The one problem, as I stated throughout the duration of this course, is that the Technology Plan for our district has not been updated in a couple of years, so it was difficult for me at times to assess the needs of our students. I had to rely on casual conversations with administrators and superintendents for my information. The greater frustration connected to this, however, was that my district is very active in pushing technology but, without an updated plan, cannot possibly accurately assess whether or not they are achieving their goals.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from this course was that, no matter how technology savvy I think I am, I will always be “behind the times.” It is just moving too fast for anyone to keep up with. That is not discouraging to me though, because my intention was never (and will never be) to “know it all.” I simply want to give my students the best possible chance at success by staying as up-to-date as I possibly can. Another thing I learned, that was discouraging, is that no matter how much enthusiasm you show, you simply cannot convince some people that they need to change their methods of instruction to incorporate new technology.

Blogging, as I mentioned in Week 3, has been very useful to me in the past and will continue to be so in the future. It allows teachers to differentiate instruction to a whole new degree and gives the students a different and more creative outlet for their work. It also gives the student a more comfortable intellectual platform from which to express themselves. We would do well to start making it a mandatory part of school curriculum, so that teachers and students will have time and opportunity to find common educational ground.

The concerns with blogging and blogs are too many to list. Privacy, plagiarism, harassment, inappropriate behavior, the list is long. However, we cannot and must not let that list deter us from embracing it as a new form of educating our children. Blogging is a reflection of the world in which our children will be living and working, and to ignore that future would be hugely irresponsible of us as educators.

The easiest part of using blogging to communicate with school stakeholders would be to set it up. It would be a simple matter to create a space for stakeholders, teachers, and students could go and get news about the school and/or express their opinions. The hard part would be to insure that ALL stakeholders had the means to access the internet so that all stakeholders could be represented equally. Additionally, parents of students might also need to be educated as to how to use a blog, or even a computer for that matter.