I have been back in Palmerston North now for about half a week and have been in constant reflection about the experiences and learning from the Otago School of Business Executive Ed Leadership course.
I have had some incredible personal revelations about how I think and ways that I am naturally inclined to approach a task or problem, or ways I think about planning an event or project. The original theory behind the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI), which was the tool we used, would suggest that these are innate tendencies that are simply a part of who I am. While I recognise that some of my tendencies may have become learned, through necessity as a teacher and as a dad, it was mind blowing to think that there are people out there who work in the same or a similar way that I do (perhaps not too many though – maybe 1.7% of the population? Can't remember the exact stat). The next revelation regarding the MBTI is that there are a whole bunch of people who think and work very differently to me! For the longest time, I have wondered why groups of teachers are such poor listeners. For example, say there's a presenter up the front delivering a PLD session. A whole lot of the gathered teachers will be chatting to the people around them. "How rude!" I would think. "They should be listening!" I grumble in my head. But no more! I now recognise that those are the extroverts who need to share their thinking aloud to make sense of the information that they are taking in. It's not that they aren't listening. It's that they are listening, are very interested, and need to make sense of what they're hearing.
So how and why is this important to me? I am going to be delivering PLD sessions to a whole bunch of these very professional extroverted teachers. They are going to need talking time and it is my responsibility as an aware introvert to provide that talk time – just like we do with our kids. We spend so much time thinking about differentiation with our students, I wonder why we forget to think about it for each other......
I also had the opportunity to review some feedback from my colleagues regarding my own leadership practices via a Kouzes and Posner Leadership Practices Inventory. I was so genuinely nervous to review the results of the report. One of my reflections from the week is that I need to work on my resilience when I receive feedback about improvement. Rather than going into a spiral of beating myself up about what I could have done better, I need to get in habit of viewing the feedback as a tool to make me into a better leader – that will surely help me to become an increasingly confident person too. On to the feedback! I was initially surprised to see that the area that involves Enabling Others to Act was high scoring and Inspire a Shared Vision was on the lower side. I thought that was quite unusual at first because I see myself as someone who enjoys regularly talking about big ideas for the future of education. After taking time to process this though, I can see how I actually save my conversations about this stuff, that could involve some bold ideas for teaching and learning, for those that I have a high level of trust with and those that I perceive as holding similar values to me. My next step in this is to unpack the details of this report thoroughly – it is a rare opportunity to get this detailed level of feedback and I feel that I have a responsibility to use it wisely.
Finally, a quote was shared that I can't get out of my head.....
"A wealth of information creates of poverty of attention."
It's a quote from Herbert A. Simon dating somewhere around 1960 and referring to business practices and more recently has been reframed by Mark Sagor in response the impact of digital media. As we bring more and more devices into classrooms, schools, and homes, the impact of this quote is eye opening and kind of terrifying. We can become so caught up with, and even proud of, the amount of information that we have access to. We have got ourselves into a habit of needing to consume it regularly without stopping to consider how much value that information actually adds to our lives. We are trapped in a cycle of having to know stuff. And not necessarily important stuff. And possibly we're becoming less discerning about what media we actually class as important.
I haven't quite decided what the implications of these thoughts are for either my life in school or personally, so I can't comment on that yet but I do know that it most certainly will reshape my thinking around how I choose to use and access digital media myself. At least I hope it will.
The photos attached are from an amazing experience at the Orokonui EcoSantuary, the Otago Museum Science and Technology exhibition space, the beautiful university itself, and the sweet ride that got us to and from the airport (couldn't resist including, it was a special part of the experience!).
A huge thanks to the team at Otago Exec Ed and the Royal Society for making the week possible. Ngā mihi nui!
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