CONTEXTS

Good leaders have always shared attributes. They pull signals from the noise that each generation seems to encounter as overwhelming. They tell stories. They are brave and resilient. They organize people around a common purpose. They keep an eye on priorities and push their teams. They realign their teams when they get off track. They can be tough or tender, idealistic or realistic, strategic or tactical, as the need arises.

Though there may not be much new we can say about leaders, there is—will always be—more to say about the context in which leaders do their work, especially when that context changes dramatically.

The greatest athlete of his generation, Michael Jordan, had a great deal of trouble switching contexts (moving from basketball to baseball). He could lead the NBA in scoring almost at will, but his stat line in minor league baseball was dismal. When he switched sports his physical attributes did not change, but his ability to apply them, to profit from them, certainly did. Our work, in this book and in the projects we have planned for the future, is designed to ensure that the leaders we most care about (school leaders) do not lose their touch the way Jordan did when the game he was used to playing—and playing well—changed.

To handle new contexts school leaders have to build new skills, new awarenesses, new sensitivities, and new habits. And they have to ensure that their new habits do not handcuff them to what will soon become relics from the past. The challenge is not overwhelming, but it persists and will continue to persist. School leaders must care about, and tend to, online spaces and the way in which teachers and students interact with, and within, them, especially as these spaces become more ubiquitous in and around our schools. School leaders must care about, and tend to, the blended experiences put forward by their schools, thinking of the online aspects of their school as carefully as they would think about a new wing of their school. We are not sounding a death knell for buildings in which school unfolds, just being clear-eyed about where much of school takes place now: online.

Much of the game—from the way people discover your school on a website, to the way that website helps them to deepen their understanding of your faculty and programs, to the way students gather educational materials, to the way in which teachers and students talk to each other and build relationships—is online.

Think about the last time you visited a website, let's say to buy something, where the interface really did not work very well. You could not figure out where to click to do what you wanted to do. There was no obvious way to seek help. If you completed a transaction, you did so in spite of the interface. Do we want students in our schools to have learned in spite of our online interfaces? To do high-level calculus in spite of …

Or, think about it this way. If, as a school leader, you walked into a classroom and found clutter, lack of clarity, a jumble of unorganized information scrawled on the board, a mess that obscured student learning, wouldn't you intervene? Would you not help the teacher? Why would you not do the same in Moodle or Blackboard or their equivalent at your school? Why would you not do the same in the case of poor email communication?

LIMITS

Blended leaders insist on a certain online presence for their organizations—that their organization's online presence be as good as it can be, as user friendly as it can be, as polished as it can be. They insist, too, that it improve incrementally, that it is maintained, that it is civil and reflects the best intentions of the institution. Blended leaders are the ones who care about the fact that people applying to your school cannot find what they need online, or that teachers have to perform eight different moves, six different ways, to upload a document to an online learning environment. They are the ones who say that an online resource could be more functional, more beautiful.

And they are the ones who, both understanding and respecting the online space, use the online space to connect with people, to build and maintain relationships, to learn, to save time, to construct knowledge, to be creative.

They use the online space to extend their leadership, keeping things moving in an age where a lot of people spend a lot of time reading on screens, staring at screens, touching screens, interacting with screens, and in fact, where a whole army of people, on the flipside, are devoting their considerable talent and energy to making those screens even more touchable, even more fun to play with, even more beautiful. As Scott Dadich writes in an article in the September 2013 issue of Wired, “the next great challenge for design” is “weaving the threads of technology, information, and access seamlessly and elegantly into our everyday lives” (Dadich, 2013). Fast forward to April 2015 to Farhad Manjoo's review of the Apple Watch in the New York Times and you see some of these predictions bearing fruit:

The Apple Watch's most ingenious feature is its “taptic engine,” which alerts you to different digital notifications by silently tapping out one of several distinct patterns on your wrist. As you learn the taps over time, you will begin to register some of them almost subconsciously … after a few days, I began to get snippets of information from the digital world without having to look at a screen—or, if I had to look, I glanced for a few seconds rather than minutes. If such on-body messaging systems become more pervasive, wearable devices can become more than mere flashy accessory to the phone. The Apple Watch could usher in a transformation of social norms, just as profound as those we saw with its brother, the smartphone—except, amazingly, in reverse. (Manjoo, 2015)

Blended leaders find a way to tame the complexity that ripples outward from ingenuity. Because of their own professional and personal networks, they hear about innovations more quickly than others. Because of their mindsets, they seek to understand these innovations before adopting them or abandoning them. And finally, because of their awareness of, and allegiance to, their organization's missions, they understand how to process innovations into existing systems.

So, to use the Apple Watch as an example: The blended leaders in your school heard about it first, understood it quickly, and knew right away that if it is as amazing at delivering covert messages as Farhad Manjoo says it is, it shouldn't be on the wrists of young people taking summative assessments or standardized tests.

Case closed—for now. For a restless blended leader, though, there is no saying that the Apple Watch needs to be permanently banned from teaching and learning environments (especially if its price comes down). They keep their eyes on new technologies, waiting for them to align with teaching and learning goals, waiting to see if such technologies will become better spurs to growth and problem solving than the ones their schools currently offer.

Blended leaders also look to leverage complexity—to see what new flowers can bloom in it. Give them Google Apps for Education (GAFE), for example, and they will begin by taming it, helping the community to build a common assumption that everyone in the community will be able to access—securely and privately—materials shared within the Google ecosystem. Once baselines for use are established, blended leaders will begin to leverage GAFE to generate outcomes that were not easily accomplished without it: easy-to-create Forms (for students) and automated spreadsheet entry (in Sheets) of the form results; collaborative presentation design (in Slides); easy website creation (in Sites); collaborative map making (in Maps), all with a very low barrier to entry.

Ultimately, blended leaders care most about the blending of the limited with the unlimited. Schools will always be artificially limited. They are rarely rich and they need to have clear policies and rules. But they should always also be inspirationally unlimited. Learning, in any given area, should not end simply because a grade has been levied. In the real world, learning begins after feedback, after evaluation, as resilient people ask, What should we do to respond? What should we do next? What should we do with what we learned?

Schools have to set limits. But, as Steve and Reshan are fond of saying, they have to set unlimits, too, for students, teachers, and leaders.

SPREAD THE SCREWDRIVERS AROUND

The last time Steve had a problem with his laptop, he brought it to a member of the school's tech department. Instead of taking Steve's machine into a secret room and returning it two or three days later, the tech handed Steve an OWC Envoy, a set of screwdrivers, and a new SSD (do not worry if you have no idea about the first and last items on that list; Steve felt the same way). The tech then gave Steve a few brief instructions about what to do, patted him on the shoulder, and said, “You can handle this… . Have fun.”

Later that day, Steve sat down with his wheezing laptop, removed the screws, and peered inside a device that, in one form or another, he has used nearly every day for the past two decades. What he saw inside was … underwhelming. A few boards and circuits and wires. A few more screws. A band or two. He quickly did what he was told to do, popped the case back on, turned on the machine, and got back to work.

Weeks later, Steve's laptop is still humming along. It works the exact same way it did before it started having the problems that led Steve to bring it to the tech department in the first place. But Steve does not see it the same way; he is not working with it in the same way.

It is subtle and almost impossible to articulate, but now that Steve has disassembled and reassembled his laptop, he understands more of his own power as a user. He understands that the computer will do anything he tells it to do and that he can tell it to do almost anything he can imagine. Since that time, and for the first time, he has set up “smart mailboxes” and rules in his email, set up multiple databases to prepare for the upcoming school year, and set up a few recipes using IFTTT—“If This Then That,” a service for automating tasks between otherwise disconnected applications. The tech who helped him to fish may have been in a hurry that day or he may have been acting deliberately (or, more likely, some combination of the two). Regardless, when he handed Steve the tools to fix his own laptop, he shifted Steve's view. He made him more of a programmer, more of a maker.

Education is buzzing about “maker culture,” and for good reasons. Look around and you'll see tangible making via physical computing like Arduino or Little Bits or Makey Makey; fabrication like 3D printing and laser cutting; or simply the reemergence of the elements of historical disciplines like home economics (sewing, cooking) and shop (carpentry, automotive).

Then there is the digital side of making, which includes the software and screen-based digital tools to support tangible processes like coding a program in Scratch, designing a 3D model for printing in Sketchup, or drafting a mockup of a piece of furniture in Photoshop. Even Lego has jumped into the game, creating ways for children to build physical Lego creations and then import them into digital worlds.

But the idea of making and its relevance to schools is not new—what is new is that the entry point for accessing both the physical and digital tools and resources needed for making have grown as prices have dropped, user interfaces have been optimized for novices, and attention has shifted (or spread) back to thinking about “technology” as its own discipline (see the reference to the split of the strands in Belief 1).

So what should leaders do in this environment? Quite simply, they have to spread the screwdrivers around, to pick up the screwdrivers themselves, to help make or fix things that facilitate further making or fixing of things. Few activities are better for making learners, making leaders, or making makers … than making itself.

We believe that effective leaders are edging into this mode of thinking and are excited by it. As they lead, they make websites, Twitter handles, hashtags, auto signatures, infographics, slides, movies, and apps. They release prototypes, establish workflows, create models, and develop platforms. They fix fonts, straighten up shared tables, reduce clicks, share workflows, shed steps from those workflows, fix default settings that are bugging people, force updates with upsides when people are comfortable with the old version. They consolidate resources, move old online course material into new school years, write simple programs to eradicate collective headaches. They build partnerships with other school people and other non-school people. They hire sketchnote artists to represent ideas or learn to make sketchnotes themselves. They build … bridges … between people and people, people and machines, machines and machines … continually … in and out of view, and usually more out than in. They iterate continually, reflecting on previous prototypes, applying user feedback, and making the next version—of whatever they are working on—stronger than the last version. You will know you are in the presence of a masterful blended leader when the things around you simply work better, and you are not sure exactly why.

OFF ROLE

A shift in people's thinking comes when we stop associating roles with certain professions or contexts. Designers are in art school; leaders are administrators; learners are students and in school; makers are in workshops. Okay, but …

All humans are all of those things (designers, leaders, learners, makers). The key, we have found, is to realize the potential value of each role in different contexts and in knowing when to shift from one role to another.

Steven Levy recently resurrected a piece he had published in Harper's in 1984. In telling the origin story of the electronic spreadsheet, it explores both the difficulty and triumph of fitting round roles into square contexts. Dan Bricklin was in business school, doing his best to play the part of the aspiring businessman. But his mind kept bending back to the field of computer science, in which he had developed a deep proficiency at MIT and in two tech-heavy jobs. He was in the middle of an assignment for a finance course and he got itchy in the way that people who understand the power of computers sometimes do. According to Levy:

Bricklin knew that spreadsheets were needed for the exercise [and] he wanted an easier way to do them. It occurred to him: why not create the spreadsheets on a microcomputer? Why not make an electronic spreadsheet, a word processor for figures? (Levy, 2014)

Of course, as Levy tells it, people told him he was crazy and that he should not be wasting his time doing something that could be handled in a different department or by someone lower in the hierarchy. Thankfully, he persisted, leading to a historical schism in the world of business:

[There] are corporate executives, wholesalers, retailers, and small business owners who talk about their business lives in two time periods: before and after electronic spreadsheets. They cite prodigious gains in productivity. They speak of having a better handle on their business, of knowing more and planning better, of approaching their work more imaginatively. (Levy, 2014)

All of that because Bricklin was off role and yet decidedly on task. He was not procrastinating; he was spending time to save time. He was bringing a lacrosse stick to the basketball game, allowing him an unheard of reach and an unrivaled advantage. Levy captures the value of the venture nicely: “A brilliant model is not only beautiful, it yields insights impossible to attain by any other method” (Levy, 2014). Such models become common outputs of electronic spreadsheets, and Bricklin's story, too, becomes a model for leaders who understand the value of role shifting, of picking up an outside industry's tools to remake the tools in one's own industry.

Blended leaders do not feel a need to be technologists, but they are wired to be techno-curious. To have a technological bent in their thinking. To know that, if they don't continue to make or acquire new models, they will continue to see the way they always have, stymying progress and possibility. To know that, if a problem keeps popping up, or an opportunity keeps slipping past, that something can be built to make sure the problem never happens again and the opportunity always happens again.

PROFILES IN EXACTLY THAT

Have you ever heard of MinecraftEDU? Did you contribute to the Kickstarter campaign for Make!Sense? Do your colleagues and students use Explain Everything? Each is an innovation founded or cofounded by a practicing educator who saw and seized an opportunity to apply a technological solution to a contextual problem in his own practice. Each is a story of an educator who used design methodology, continual testing, and implementation in context to realize his ideas. Each is a story of a teacher and leader who shifted to a different role—maker, inventor, game designer—without ever fully shedding his primary role—helping students reach their full potential.

Minecraft is an open-ended design world with an active community of players and creators who bring their worlds to life. MinecraftEDU was started by Joel Levin after using Minecraft with his daughter and thinking he could bring similar excitement and deep creative and exploratory experiences to students at his school. Unlike Bricklin in the previous example, Levin found that his school's strong, forward-thinking, growth mindset-oriented leadership was willing to take a risk and try something new. Along with that, he found students excited about a gaming/learning experience, not fully realizing the skills they were acquiring as they were playing what they normally perceived as a game.

He then decided to start crafting his own worlds for Minecraft—worlds that could support and extend his teaching, learning, and blogging. Soon other educators were interested in his work, and he teamed up with some excited graduate students in Finland who were interested in studying Minecraft as part of their thesis research. They formed a company—TeacherGaming—to bring MinecraftEDU to the masses. Support from Notch/Minecraft (a company later acquired by Microsoft for ~$2.2 billion) followed, and they continue to share their work all over the world at conferences and trade shows.

Stephen Lewis once invented a clever tool—the Color Day Calendar AutoMater—for importing block and letter day school schedules into traditional calendar programs. A consummate inventor, he then created a new prototype called Make!Sense. As a science teacher, he found that probes and sensor equipment manufactured by traditional vendors were costly and often difficult to use. Also, the devices were not always forward compatible with new hardware and software. He decided to create his own set of low-cost probes that could plug into any device—a phone, an iPad, a laptop—and make authentic experimentation and data collection more accessible, more possible.

In order to raise the necessary funds to produce and distribute this invention, he started a Kickstarter campaign to fund enough prototypes to build and share with others who might be excited about the idea of low-cost scientific probes. He only asked for about $4,000, but he ended up raising almost five times that amount and was selected as a “Kickstarter Staff Pick.”

Photo by Stephen Lewis

Always tinkering and trying to make new things, Lewis ultimately wants to help improve students' learning experience, and for him, this can best be done by making teachers' lives easier (through a calendar importer tool) and classroom activities more accessible and authentic (through Make!Sense).

Reshan had been interested in screencasting when he learned about it at a conference. Instead of simply using it to record his own lessons, he had students in his school record solutions to problems and then share those solutions in the class, with other classes in the school, and with a pen-pal school in Canada. The process was very rewarding for the students, and it gave Reshan interesting insights into how his students were thinking through some relatively abstract concepts. Unfortunately it was not an easy process to get going, requiring a lot of hardware and software, and it was not easily distributed or scaled. One setup per classroom, if that, was the norm.

Enter the iPad. An all-in-one device at a much more reasonable price point, it offered the same multiple hardware pieces (touchscreen board, microphone, computer screen) required to make a screencast. Unfortunately, though, the software needed to make screencasting possible did not exist when the iPad was released. While continuing to keep his eye open for such a tool, Reshan started an ed tech blog (http://www.constructivisttoolkit.com) where he wrote about iPad tools that were not necessarily designed for educational settings but allowed students to create interesting content.

One day he wrote about an app called PhotoPuppet made by two inventors, Bartosz Gonczarek and Piotr Śliwiński, in Poland. They wrote back to Reshan almost immediately after seeing his post, and soon after the three of them formed a working relationship. Many details in the story are skipped here (intentionally), but just a month later they had formed a business partnership, and a few months after that, Explain Everything, a unique screencasting interactive whiteboard was released for the iPad.

These three stories are unique and extremely relevant. They are the stories of educators who have crossed into the realm of entrepreneurs while trying to best serve the learning needs of students all over the world. They show that it is possible to turn an idea into reality by leveraging a network of people and information.

“BOTH–AND”

We are clearly enthusiastic about the possibilities for leadership in a new context. But, if you have read this book closely, you should have noticed a slight hesitancy at times. Blended practice is a “both- … and” construction. In our jobs and in our lives, we are quick to take three steps forward, but we usually end up taking one step back. The online world that we live in is, after all, eerily similar to the one Ray Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451.

In that fictional, yet prescient, world, too, screens were omnipresent. In that world, too, “screen time” was hotly debated, and at times, tied to status. If you had a flat screen on all four walls of a room, you were a digital elite.

We are not far off from where Bradbury said we would be when he wrote that people would talk to and interact with their screens (and would want to do just that), or when he said that people would be incredibly wrapped up in television programs—so much so that they would long to participate in them, to share their reality with the reality on the screen. In Bradbury's world, teenagers walked around with ear buds in their ears, rarely taking them out to experience the world around them.

And the teenagers also did awful damage to one another—they lost all sense of empathy. A kind of repressed brutality lingered just below the surface and sometimes reared its ugly head. People forgot how to be truly happy. What is worse, they forgot to even ask a question so simple, so direct, so fundamentally important: Are you happy?

Bradbury's book was published in the early 1950s. In September 2013, Louis CK, a philosopher-comic in the line of George Carlin, appeared on The Conan O'Brien Show and delivered a bit/rant about why he does not allow his daughter to have a cell phone. Though it is a bit filthy in places, even with the television edits, it is also observant and profound (like much of his other material). He thinks that we rush to our screens (mainly our smartphones) whenever we feel sad and/or alone … and he feels that, by avoiding sadness and alone-ness, we sacrifice potential happiness, potential humanness. We lose the ability “to just sit there.” He has a point.

And it is also worth stating that he had a point when he cut against the grain of conventional online wisdom, selling his comedy show through a website without DRM (digital rights management). People could either pirate it and pay nothing, or go to his website and pay $5.

He made $1 million in a fairly quick period of time, defying the consultants and the businesspeople and the attorneys, while elevating the dignity of his audience and his art.

Louis CK understands online behavior and how to get his point across in an online world; at the same time, as he pointed out in his cell phone rant, he understands the dangers of excessive reliance on that same online space, and he understands the ways in which online behavior might ultimately affect, quite seriously, our offline behavior.

Louis CK now, and Ray Bradbury before him, peered directly at reality … and saw that we share it with the technologies we create. He, and Bradbury, saw that the blended state of our lives has always been a problem, has always been an opportunity.

And, as has been the case throughout this book, the outside world leads us directly to a consideration of school, where enterprise is blended, too, where considerable problems meet considerable opportunities, too.

We have bounced between the words “problem” and “opportunity” to stress the importance of belief. When you look at a student or a colleague lost in the Internet during a class or meeting, do you see that as a problem (“Distraction is destroying us”) or an opportunity (“I wonder if I can ask that person, who is so engaged with the Internet, to bring back some useful research for the conversation we are currently having”)? When your email is overwhelming you, do you see this as a problem (“I hate email so I'm going to ignore it whenever possible, even it that further complicates my life or my colleagues' lives”) or an opportunity (“I need to develop or research a better system to extract more value from all of these conversations that people want to have with me over email”). And when you talk to very young students (or your own children) about computers, what do you say?

Steve recently took a car ride with his kids. His son will be issued a laptop by his school next year, when he's in fourth grade, and on this particular ride, that computer became the topic of conversation. Steve started the conversation, innocently enough, by saying, “You'll get a computer next year, Hunter. That should be pretty cool.”

Steve's daughter, who was four at the time, said, “Hunter will be a giant next year.”

Hunter, in his way, responded to both comments: “The computer's mainly for homework… . And I won't be a giant. That's about six months from now. I'm not going to grow that much.”

After a pause, he kept going with that idea: “Imagine that. I wouldn't fit in this car. Dad, we're going to need a new car if that happens.”

And then more from Chloe: “You know … your heart is a muscle.” They were doing what they do best, randomly associating and having fun, but I wanted to go backward in the conversation. I wanted to talk more about computers because Hunter's comment about homework had hit me like a punch. I cut in.

“That machine is for homework, sure, but it is also for other things. Like making stuff. And storing music that you love. And programming. And doing math. And keeping track of birthdays. And combining pictures with sounds.” I was getting carried away because it seemed so important, at that moment, that my kids understood that computers are not just for doing homework, are not just for word processing, are not just for spitting information back to a teacher. “A computer actually can make you a giant!”

There was a pause and Steve felt his message settling in; he felt that he had been a good dad, a good educator, a good citizen.

“But then I won't fit in the car,” Hunter said, and his sister and he burst out laughing and started talking about how they might need to use a saw to cut off the roof of the car if Hunter does become a giant.

So maybe Steve's point did not land with as much precision as he had hoped, but he is proud of the way he reacted, and he is happy with the set of beliefs that guided such a reaction. Our reactions, the way we respond to each situation, hinge on our beliefs. And our beliefs matter because they can shape everything from the way we pull a student or colleague into a conversation to the way we take responsibility for our communication practices to the way we help the youngest students (or our own children) understand the power of computers—and the gargantuan responsibility that emerges from connecting them.

Here is the thing we must not miss: Networkedness and onlineness make it impossible to be ignorant to the way others are living, make it impossible to avoid opportunities for empathy and understanding, without making a deliberate choice. When Reshan took a class on social and moral development at Harvard, he learned from Mary Casey (who studied with Carol Gilligan, who studied with Leo Kohlberg) that ideas around race and hatred of others that stem from no information and no attempts at empathy are culturally, and humanly, situated. No young person is born with those biases. The world around them makes such biases develop and stick over time.

The reason we digress on this point is that, with education generally, we have a responsibility—or opportunity to correctly address a responsibility—to educate and support the whole development of young people, rather than simply advancing personal ambitions, national goals, or societal norms. The stakes are larger now because the levers are longer: we should, and can, strive to advance and protect the human species. Kids need adults to bring them along until their brains are developed enough to make rational, independent, experience-driven decisions. Regardless of whether they are our own kids, the kids we teach, or the kids on the other side of the planet—they need adults in their lives who do three things:

1. Establish norms: Set goals and boundaries in order to prevent anyone getting hurt—physically, emotionally, intellectually—and to have a plan should such a situation arise.
2. Provide access: Open networks to people, tools, and ideas.
3. Get out of the way: Allow young people to develop on their own, at their own pace.

Do you remember Ahmad from our introduction? He was last seen asking Steve if he could survey his entire school to discover a problem to solve using his computer skills. He has assembled a small team and they are ready to get to work.

Do you remember the Startup 101 team from Belief 2? They launched their startup in May 2015. They graduated from the high school that sponsored that activity in June 2015. They celebrated with their families, traveled a little bit, attended college orientations, filed away their high school diplomas, and got back to work on their app. They were last seen meeting with administrators from their old high school, hoping to form a partnership that will allow them to test their app in a live setting.

These passions started in school, evolved half in school and half out of school, and, really, what's the difference?

What if domain expertise were less important than we sometimes suggest it is?

What if good teachers (and good leaders of good teachers) strived to develop a vast array of pedagogical strategies, a deep understanding of human cognition, and a contagious passion for their domain, not only enjoying the domain for themselves, but helping others to enjoy it for themselves?

What if some of our most cherished school practices were getting in the way of learning? And what if we found a way to tear those things down, to step aside, to hold the microphone for the students in order to amplify their voices, their understandings, their dreams?

Students are capable of much more than we can imagine. We do not control learning, and we should not seek to. We do not control all that kids can and do learn, and we should not seek to. We should, on the contrary, be wide open ourselves—to learning from anyone, from any source, from any amateur, from any student.

Blended leaders engage with and as thought leaders. They design and care for spaces. They reject insularity and embrace sharing. They challenge and change meeting structures. They articulate and advance missions. They keep the off-ramp open and use it frequently. They establish norms, provide access, and get out of the way. These are the practices that we believe will keep our schools most viable, most vibrant, in the twenty-first century.

Our beliefs evolved directly from our work in schools, our reflections on that work, our continuous conversations about that work, research we read, books and articles we read, and our observations of other industries attempting to thrive in the same cultural and economic conditions in which we find our schools. Our goal has been to describe school not as it was, not as it is, but as it is becoming.

We urge you to try on our beliefs to see if they help you frame your work (for yourself or for others) and to hold these beliefs up as “tests” for reality, perhaps via discussion groups. Are they accurate? Do they hold up in your context? Do they help you see fresh and new paths for your work? We realize that beliefs are not actions, but they can precipitate actions.

And so we come to the end of our book, which, of course, if the book is worth anything, is just the beginning for you. But also, in the connected world in which we find ourselves, this is just the beginning for you and us. What will we do with that insight, with what we can all do and learn together?

Photo courtesy of the authors