#StretchEdu - Keynoting at Lead 3.0

Necessity is the mother of invention.

In the Fall of 2017, Danelle Bowron, the Educational Services Coordinator for ACSA, reached out to me to ask if I would be interested in performing as the Keynote Speaker on the opening day of the Lead 3.0 Symposium in April of 2018. For those who aren't familiar with this gig, it is my all-time favorite flavor of Edu Conference. Lead 3.0 is custom suited to me: the "3.0" is based on the trifecta collaboration between three organizations that each have influenced my career - the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), the Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL) and CUE - which produces California's premier educational technology conferences and events. These three incredibly influential organizations in the California educational sector, have collaborated each of the past ten years to produce this event that focuses on Leadership, Technology, and Innovation.

No joke, I love this conference. I dig tech, I present on this topic all the time and am continually fascinated by the ways that educators are leveraging these tools to create access and equity in American classrooms. I think many people assume that innovation goes hand in hand with tech, but what I have come to realize is that any invention, sprung from the mother of necessity, qualifies and if it works...it should be shared. So, the crux of this conference for me is how Tech and Innovation can be shared amongst Leaders. Thus a need was proposed: I accepted the honor of keynoting and now I had to decide what I could share with the overwhelmingly sophisticated eduLeaders in the room.

A room filled with leaders from across the state, educators of every shape and size of the educational landscape. The room would fill with principals who were masters of culture. There would be directors who are amongst the nation's leaders in curriculum and assessment design. This room would host TOSAs who lead teams of innovators, as well as superintendents who lead districts large and small. My charge was to speak for about an hour.

"Talk about whatever you want."

Yikes. What in the world could I say that would tie together the relevant experiences of such a diverse and intimidatingly #eduAmazing group? This problem became my catalyst for creativity; this was what kept my head spinning for several months; some people sing in the shower, I spent the last season of my life speaking to this crowd in mine; this problem to solve became my mother of invention.

I am a 20-year educational veteran and have now worked and lead in K12 environments as well as a short tour of duty at the district office. As I searched my inventory of topics that might reach this entire group, I found my centerpiece: Leading Change. This is one of my favorite EduTopics and one that I have spoken on often. On many occasions, I have talked about "Stretching our Rubber Bands," in the direction of change. This analogy has carried many talks for me and is my favorite way to describe the iterative process of both learning and making change. However, for this particular talk, having an hour to fill, I decided to organize everything I knew about leading change, every eduNugget of knowledge I have that is at all associated with the topic of "Stretching our Rubber Band," in the direction of change. This exercise catapulted my thinking to a new found depth of understanding around a topic which I thought that I already knew well.

I started by brainstorming all of the effective tips and tricks I could recall using over this past decade or so as an administrator. Looking at my mind-map on paper, it dawned on me that I knew maybe more than I had realized, but the more significant realization was that when woven together, these tips were the foundation for creating a school culture, filled with educators that are adaptable, open and willing to engage in change.  Rather than a playlist of methods to coerce people to make change, these topics laid the foundation upon which smart, hardworking adults, find their own reasons to stretch in the direction of a commonly agreed upon state. I felt like the idea cloud I had generated was a curation of every eduLeadership book, lecture, side-conversation, and experience I had taken in for over a decade: now the challenge was to organize these thoughts into one story.

To make sense of this eclectic collection of leadership lessons learned, I did what any good EduNerd would do: I created an acronym. The topic of my keynote evolved into: "Building a Rubber Band Culture," and the acronym that sprung from this central theme became "STRETCH."

 

Once my thoughts were curated into these seven buckets, the keynote started writing itself. In fact, the problem of filling an hour became an entirely different issue: I had too much content rather than not enough.  As I put this speech on its feet, began to rehearse and eventually performed this story for hundreds of the most amazing EduLeaders in California, it became a reflection of my career and a celebration of my journey as an educator.

As I look back at the experience of first being asked to speak, which was maybe the highest honor of my professional career, to the process of organizing my thoughts into one coherent story, I am appreciative of the mother of invention. I don't know that I would have taken the time at this point in my career to stop, reflect, analyze and organize my experiences thus far, however, being asked to speak in a room filled with people I hold in incredible esteem was a powerful motivator that lead to a work that I am incredibly proud of. I am grateful for the opportunity to have spoken at Lead 3.0, humbled by receiving so much feedback and honored to have been a small part of such a successful event.

I have shared the video of my keynote here in this blog post, and hope that anyone who has the time to give it a watch would recognize that these topics apply to each of us in educational leadership positions. My hope is that anyone who has the chance to sit through my talk would realize the influence we each have as leaders to inspire innovation. During this keynote, I did something I have never done before - I launched a hashtag. I wanted to create a space where ideas may be curated as well as questions posed around the topic of Building a Rubber Band Culture. Already it has been such an honor to watch those who were in attendance at Lead 3.0 begin to use this hashtag as a place to celebrate. Should anyone reading this blog, or watching this keynote have any inspired thoughts that generate from the conversation of Building a Rubber Band Culture, I would be honored if you would share your thoughts using the hashtag #StretchEdu.

Keynoting at #USDLearns

I talk a lot. If you know me, you know its true. In these past couple years, since I started my Learn with John Eick Podcast, I have been blogging a lot less and just talking into the voice recorder a lot more. I just like the way words roll off the tip of my tongue more so than my fingertips to the keyboard. I like the pregnant pause that just can't be captured by an ellipse, or the slow escalation of volume as a sentence builds toward its crescendo through a microphone. I really love the spoken word as a speaker and a listener. I devour audio books, I enjoy podcasts with every breakfast, I prefer Voxer to text messages and sometimes I sit in church, just to hear the pastor spin a yarn. However, as much as I love to speak, it still makes me nervous every time.

This week I was #EduHonored to keynote the opening of a day of learning at Union School District in San Jose, CA. The district brings in amazing presenters for their PD days, people like: Tim Bedley, Coach Ben Cogswell, Eddie Campos, Traci Bonde, Jeremiah, Ruesch, Efrain Tovar, Princess Choi, and Bob Dillon, just to name a few, and the whole thing is organized by Jon Corippo from CUE and Andrew Schwab (an Associate Superintendent in Union School District who is also the president of the CUE Board). Needless to say, this is a district committed to amazing professional development for its teachers. I have visited three years in a row, and have walked away each time thinking that the teachers in this district are doing it right: one stretch of the rubber band at a time. 

What makes me most nervous about speaking is not the speaking itself. I love the showmanship of taking the stage, I love the canned bits that always get a giggle, I am always happy when I am bringing a crowd with me down some spontaneous rabbit hole, like when I mispronounce a word or a cell phone goes off and there is an opportunity for a one line sidebar to remind us all of the reality of the situation. It isn't the speaking that ever makes me nervous - it is the message. It is the exposure of sharing your own thoughts, the vulnerability of exposing your own ideas, that make delivering a keynote so intimidating. Standing in front of 400 amazing educators, not that scary, telling them how they might develop themselves professionally...terrifying. 

I have known that I was going to speak for months, and while the awareness has often been in the back of my mind, it is always the week before a speaking gig that it becomes the most distracting. Monday, I knew what I was going to say and my slides were more or less built. Tuesday, I wanted to make sure I got some rehearsal time in. Wednesday, feeling confident, but starting to think, "Maybe that middle section could be changed." Thursday, I listened to a podcast by Bill Selak at 6AM, and it sparked an idea that I had to pursue. Thursday night: complete rewrite (based on the sparked idea). Late Thursday night, building slides, rehearsing in my hotel room. Friday morning: deliver a keynote that was less than 24 hours old - and I was terrified that it wasn't polished enough to go in front of such an #EduAmazing crowd. 

I captured a 12 minute segment of the speech and have included it here. As I watch it, as low quality as the video is (sorry I walk off screen a bunch), I am proud to say that these thoughts are mine, the delivery sounds like me, and I am very grateful to everyone who was involved in allowing me this opportunity. Thank you to Union School District for having me out, thanks to my colleagues at CUE for the constant inspiration, thank you to my Board and staff at Westlake who allow me to travel, and thank you to Bill Selak for his podcast about the technologies of the Punk Rock music from his past which inspired me to think about the technology that inspired the art of mine.

Every Test is Formative

Every test is formative.

I think I was in pre-algebra as a 13 year old version of myself, I was sitting at the dining room table, frustrated at the textbook flopped open in front of me resting on top of the macrame woven placemat. The book might as well have been in Greek, we were half way through the first semester and all the getting to know you, light weight, easy assignments had long since withered my early A in the class to a D that was a gift considering I now could not complete a single problem in chapter 6. Looking back, knowing now what I did not know then, I realize that I had holes in my learning: it wasn't that I couldn't comprehend pre-algebra, I was just trying to learn to use tools that I had never acquired, in an effort to accomplish a task that could only be perceived through a fluent understanding of the tools themselves. I was at a brick wall, a dead end, and all the help in the world could not move me forward - until I moved backwards.

My dad sat down next to me. I love my dad, and always have, but he was always more of a sock you in the arm and, "go get'em slugger," kind of dad. I was an young teenager and we had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn't tell him what I was doing as long as he didn't ask: it was a symbiotic relationship from which we both benefited. However, on this given day, in this given moment of frustration, my dad taught me something that has carried me for my entire life. He didn't try to push me forward. He didn't even try to help me with the homework that I clearly couldn't do. He did the unthinkable. He started turning textbook pages in the wrong direction. I didn't even know they could do that.

We went backwards, page by page, looking for the last place in the book where I felt confident. Granted, it was farther back than either of us had hoped, and to be honest, the story doesn't have a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow ending: I never did all that well in high school math. However, the lesson I learned that day made an impact.

I remember saying to my dad that day, something to the effect of this, "I guess it doesn't matter if I don't know something, I can always go back and learn it." While I remember my dad grimacing at the thought that I was ok with failure, I look back and think that this was my first introduction to a growth mindset.

Every test that I take just informs me what else there is to learn.