Guidelines for Educational Revolutionaries (1-7)

I've been listening to some podcasts I lost track of in the last few weeks of June and the beginning of July while I was finishing the school year and getting ready and then going to NECC. If you have never listened to Wesley Fryer's blog and podcasts at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, I highly recommend you give him a read and/or a listen.

Wesley has done a series of podcasts on "Guidelines for Educational Revolutionaries" and I think that part 2 in this series really connects to what I was reflecting on in my post below of July 6th, SIGTC Membership Breakfast. He gives what started out as 14 Guidelines for Revolutionaries but has now expanded to include 16 guidelines. He explains these guidelines more fully in his blog and in his podcast, but here is the list:

1. Make time in the classroom for activities that matter: Tasks that are authentically “educative.”
2. Focus on level 2 (transformative) technology use.
3. Seek and celebrate incremental victories.
4. Promote conversations and messy assessment.
5. Embrace reasoned risk taking, along with trial and error / discovery learning.
6. Celebrate failure! Adapt and learn, teach, model and use the “failure bow.”
7. Seek leaders who support this vision, and support further development of administrative technology leadership vision.
8. Be patient and have faith. Changing is coming, but the process often seems too slow to visionaries.
9. Resilience and persistence will win the day more than short-term enthusiasm.
10. Seek novel, safe experiences that invite curiosity and stretch existing perceptions.
11. Feed dreams and imagination: For yourself and your students.
12. Be flexible and adaptable. (Live in a truly flexible frame.)
13. Use the language of teaching and learning, more than the language of technology.
14. Maintain a spirit of humility and servanthood to others, never an attitude of arrogance or exasperation.
15. Seek edification and renewal locally and globally, through F2F conversations and the edublogosphere.
16. Be courageous: instructionally and ethically. Remember Margaret Mead’s quotation: “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I think that his #3 guideline, "Seek and celebrate incremental victories," really hit home with me and brought me back to gain some perspective on the challenges I was reflecting on in my previous post. In the podcast he says that we have to remember that "pioneers" are just that. They are not the majority. He draws an analogy to the early westward moving pioneers in our country saying that we didn't have 50% or more of our citizens taking the plunge and moving westward. It was a relatively small number of people who did that, it was the country's "disruptive time," and it took a long time before it was regarded as less of a risk and the majority began to follow. However, without those pioneers who were willing to take an enormous risk and give up all that was comfortable to move westward, the rest of the country never would have followed.

So, I'm going to keep plugging along, remembering to celebrate incremental steps forward, and try to have faith that we will move through this disruptive time and eventually more and more people will join us.