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June 15, 2001
How should school leaders deal with resistance from others about changing the established educational models?
OHLER: To get teachers to integrate technology there needs to be a shared vision of what everyone wants from their institution. This sounds obvious, but it is very problematic, often overlooked, and ultimately the undoing of many well-intended efforts.
What's more, teachers, like everyone else in the world, need incentives. You can't ask teachers to create new mental schema just for a good time, although some will. Incentives not only reward teachers for their efforts, but they also show teachers that you are serious; that you are not just a change wanna-be. If you want to get really serious, you can make innovation a criterion for advancement within the organization, or at least part of the review process.
WARLICK: The challenge to us is that the school experience people are so comfortable with happened in the '50s, '60s, and '70s when industrial-age education was still relevant. By the nature of those classrooms, we were indoctrinated to a certain way of thinking about how schooling should happen. This is why parents, board members, legislators, and virtually everyone else feels so secure in telling us how we should run our schools. This is why our response to demands for reform rarely extends beyond "more time in school," "more homework," and "more tests."
Anthropologist Jennifer James says that one of the essential skills of an effective leader is the ability to tell a story. This is what we need to change society's vision of schooling-a new and compelling story. Leaders need to tell a story, and the story must be classical in nature, with a problem, protagonists and antagonists, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. The audience (and co-author of the story, as this is a conversation) must see itself as a tragic, but heroic, protagonist. The problem is that our children are setting forth on a great adventure-their future-that is unknown and even frightening. The climax is the fantastic possibilities that new education and technology can afford us, and the resolution is a future that our children can share with us.
The biggest problem has been a lack of canvas upon which to tell that story. Yet the solution is found within the problem: the technology that we wish to integrate into our schools can be the canvas. We have an opportunity today to turn our schools inside out, to invite our community back to the classroom and to reshape the experience that they had ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. We have to find those teachers who are stepping out beyond the old models, partner them with other teachers, cultivate the contagion, and showcase the results.
OHLER: Here's another tidbit for leaders: Stop telling your teachers how different everything is. Instead, tell them how things are the same: we are still after good education that is in touch with the realities of the times, and we need to tell stories to convey ideas, concepts, facts, and culture; and to prepare students for citizenship, work, and life in general.
Therefore, leaders must make teachers less afraid. They can do so by making sure teachers understand the following: the short half-life on information and information overload change our essential relationship to the information and knowledge we learn and help our students learn. The bottom line is that the leader needs to convey to the teacher: "Be comfortable with not being a know-it-all anymore." You can perhaps be a "find-it-all" or a "facilitate-your-students-to-find-it-all," but you can't be the know-it-all.
We don't have the "right answers" in school the way our parents had. Things, facts, and situations are fluid. Consider how a map of Europe has evolved over the past ten years. Linear learning models, such as reading a book, yield to associative learning models, such as the click-here, search-there experience of being on the Web; as well as relationship-based models, in which knowledge is created with others rather than learned from a single source by ourselves.
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