Another “Jump Out”

Browsing through the blog postings from NECC, this one-liner shared during Andrew Zolli’s keynote panel discussion jumped out at me: (thanks to Jorge on his Desert Dew blog)

In the new paradigm, the Principal is now called “The Chief Learner.”

Pow. Why? It comes down to learning. Great teachers since the beginning of time know that learning is the engaging part, and do whatever they can to engage the kids in it. Technology has provided a veritable magic carpet to expedite the learning. Great teachers saw this instantly and took off with it (regardless of whether or not they were “techies.”

Unfortunately the principal of today has become “The Chief Moderator,” “The Chief Compromiser,” and/or “The Chief Lawsuit Avoider.” Not because they want to, but because they have had to. When the focus goes away from learning, the system suffers, and that is a lot of why our system struggles.

The Chief Learner…that’s what we all want our leaders to be.

On a somewhat connected note, this is why ed-techers love the new stuff – including me. I was not-so-nice in my previous post about twitter, but I now see that the folks there involved in it were LEARNING something new, how to incorporate it, how to utilize it. That is the addicting part of what we as educators do. I believe the key to why we got into the business, whether we knew it or not, is that we love to learn. Technology is great since it provides a never-ending (and often overwhelming) stream of new things to learn.

Keep it focused on the learning, and from that all the right things will happen.