Video - Change is good

Greg Davis, who’s on the CASTLE Advisory Board, sent me the Change is Good video yesterday. It’s cute and makes some good points. Here are a few that stood out for me:

1. Re-recruit your best people. As a leader you always should be in marketing mode, obtaining and reinforcing buy-in for desired actions. You can’t just take your stakeholders - even your ‘best’ ones - for granted.
2. Forget for success. It’s difficult to get rid of existing mental frameworks but it’s often necessary in order to move forward.
3. You can’t teach culture. You have to live it … experience it … share it. And most importantly … you have to show it. If we want our staffs to be technology ‘learners,’ what are we doing as school leaders to personally model those learning processes ourselves? Also, what are we doing to help our staffs live and experience the digital, global world on a regular basis?
4. The things that get rewarded and appreciated get done. Leaders control the resources of time, personnel, money, etc. Use them wisely and strategically.
5. Reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. The job is never done. Continuous emphasis of important themes and actions must happen if change is to occur. Say-it-once or do-it-once models of information dissemation and/or staff development are doomed to fail.

FYI, there also are a number of other leadership videos at the Simple Truths web site. Here's a great quote from the You Can't Send a Duck to Eagle School video:

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

Unfortunately our K-12 educational system has been asked by society to chase a lot more than two rabbits...

Thanks for sharing, Greg!

Comments

[Mathew]

1.

Thank you for the web site, I've bookmarked it and checked out the two movies you highlighted. On a technical note, as a filmmaker and someone who's coming off of judging videos for the Horizon Project, it bugs me that so many of these educational films are mostly text. I think we're sending the wrong message to students about what moving images are capable of. This showed in many of the student projects that may have been better as powerpoints than videos.

[Scott McLeod]

2.

Mathew, that may be because many of us educators don't have the video chops to do more. We're getting better, but we're not filmmakers yet (and rarely do we ever get any training on how to do this stuff). Make us some tutorials! Come to NECC and teach us how!

[Jon Becker]

3.

What about the part that says, "What gets measured gets improved?" Maybe we WILL reach 100% proficiency by 2014! (-;

[Mathew]

4.

I won't be able to go to NECC. However, I do create and compile tutorials at videointheclassroom.com and am doing workshops this summer for teachers on taking iMovie/Final Cut to the next level in the L.A. area. I'm glad you liked my Mr. Winkle movie. I didn't realize that you'd linked to it and you probably didn't realize it was mine.

[Scott McLeod]

5.

Hi Mathew, thanks for the link. I'll check it out! And I did know you were the creator of Mr. Winkle - it's great!