{"id":629,"date":"2011-02-15T21:02:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T05:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.techtied.net\/?p=629"},"modified":"2011-02-15T21:02:04","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T05:02:04","slug":"leadership-and-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/?p=629","title":{"rendered":"Leadership and Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jay McTighe, one of the gurus behind Understanding by Design<\/a>, has posted this video on his recent encounter with failure.\u00a0 It speaks to the issue of leaders who are often marked by age that is associated with their experience. Even Jay is showing his age despite the fact that he is only 7 years my senior. (This fact caused me to go peak in my mirror.\u00a0 Yikes!)<\/p>\n

At the AAIE<\/a> conference, this was apparent as I looked across a “wise” crowd of international school leaders.\u00a0 The focus of the weekend was technology and the overall content of the conference fell short of accessing the robust technology available today.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean it was a bad conference – just bereft of the tools we were discussing.\u00a0 I would suggest that it drove home the point of the separation between digital natives, digital immigrants, and digital dinosaurs.\u00a0 While Jay is talking mostly about learning (and learners), I’m suggesting that his insights also provide a unique focus on leaders who are desperate to remain open to innovation, but are challenged by their own fear of failure when addressing a complex and constantly changing context.<\/p>\n

Marc Prensky<\/a> helped us to understand through his keynote that our issue is about the difference between nouns and verbs.\u00a0 We need to be less focused on the nouns which constitute the latest fads of technology tools (e.g. – Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.) and focus instead on the skills (verbs) of the 21st century.\u00a0 While we need to embrace the nouns as they emerge and are adopted, the process skills of problem solving, collaboration, and communication remain static and highly adaptive to the new context.\u00a0 A powerful connection when considering Jay’s insight into how we address our fear of failure.\u00a0 As Jay notes:<\/p>\n