Compelled to share

Welcome to the Ed Leader blog. It’s taken me a while, so there is a lot of catching up to do but it is worth sharing why I am compelled to get started with this.

I believe that education requires collaboration and the sharing of resources, information and ideas all assist in making our schools better. Furthermore, schools and teachers ask for students to be lifelong learners but too often us teachers and education leaders become complacent and do not live out the goals that we set for our students. While I agree that we focus on our students to make a better world we neglect to think about our own role as adults. We are the role models and the ones who will not only inspire our students, but we motivated and push each other into taken action that makes a difference – because we can.

Social networking has been on my mind for a while now and I can finally say that I am here sharing and collaborating beyond the face to face interactions in my school, in workshops and in conferences. Funnily enough, my final push into the blogging arena and greater uptake of Twitter usage came from a session at the recent ASCD 2014 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. There I attended a session with 5 educational leaders who had met through online collaboration and it was amazing to see what is possible to achieve through this medium. Certainly in my time following that event, my learning curve has been steep but I am becoming a better educator and leader from it. But there was one statement in this session that finally pushed me into action, which went something like this: We have a moral obligation, as educators, to share our practice and learn from each other for the benefit of our students.

As this blog will share thoughts, ideas and resources on all things education leadership, I see it as fitting to share my one liner about leadership in education.

We are first and foremost role-models for the teachers and students we lead. We cannot expect them to put into action the things we say, if we are not doing them ourselves first. To talk the talk we must walk the walk.