 The word root of the term leader means several things, including guide to bring forth and my favorite to sprout forth. And I think that's what leaders need to do. We need to view our job as germinating, developing new leaders in the classroom and our professional communities. And with our parents in our neighborhoods. And during this session today, what we're going to explore is what that practically means. So let's begin. Hi everybody, I'm Larry for LASA. Thanks for coming to watch and listen to a short presentation on developing leadership in classrooms, schools and communities. I was a community organizer for 19 years prior to becoming a high school teacher 10 years ago. At one point during that time, after a long hard organizing campaign to get 60 homes built, there were affordable low income families. It was time to celebrate their completion. Lupe Garcia, one of the leaders of our campaign, was set to speak. She said, today is a great day. 60 families, including my own, are going to be able to own our homes for the first time in our lives. It's a great victory. But that's not our biggest victory. Our biggest victory is that our children have seen us negotiating as equals with many of the guests here today. Our congressmen are mayor and bankers. And our children have seen that if you organize, if you work together, any of us can be leaders and accomplish our goals, no matter how many others say it can't be done. Our children have seen that and they will remember it for years to come. I think her speech illustrates what leadership is and why it's important. Organizers specifically focused looking at problems as tools to use to develop leadership. By doing so, not only are we able to be extremely successful in crafting solutions to these problems, we also help people develop their leadership capacity to grow long after we're gone. We build a lot more homes and groups that were just focused on affordable housing, got many more people good paying jobs and most job training groups, and generated many more childcare slots than childcare advocacy organizations. By focusing on using those problems, housing, jobs, childcare and others as tools for developing leadership, we were much more effective than those who just wanted to fix the problem or accomplish the task. So how does this relate to education? I'm suggesting that developing the leadership potential of our students, teachers and parents is a key strategy to develop more learning, better teaching and improved engagement for all. Organizers say that the key question that determines if someone is a leader is, do they have a following? In other words, are there people who respect their judgment and will be swayed by it more often than not? Webster's dictionary defines a leader as one who leads others to direct by influence and the key is others. Now I'm going to look at what community organizers see as some of the key qualities needed to get that influence and then quickly mention what we can do to help develop them in the classroom and our professional environments and in our communities. The last part, I'll give more detailed suggestions on what we can do. And one thing to remember is one person doesn't have to have all these qualities. We want to promote a collective democratic leadership in the classroom and our schools and our communities. If you look at the roots of the words passion and intrinsic, they're both an internally motivated desire. In the classroom, are we tapping into the interest of our students and extending them? Are we only teaching what will be on the standardized tests? Are teachers collaborators in the building of their school community? Or are we just told to be compliant? Do we ever ask parents what their hopes and dreams are for their children and for themselves? What do we just call them when we have something for them to do or a problem to solve? A leader has to be able to imagine what it might be, to transcend previous experiences, to be able to see possibilities outside of what it is, to have a vision. There's that story of a man who was walking down the street and saw a bricklayer starting work. The man asked the bricklayer what he was doing and the worker replied, I'm laying bricks. He walked a few more feet and asked another bricklayer what he was doing. The worker replied, I'm building a wall. And the man walked a few final feet and then asked the same question to the worker. The worker replied, I'm building a cathedral. We need to help our students, our colleagues and our parents see those cathedrals, see how steps we take today can lead them towards their long term goals, their learning goals and not just focus on performance goals of grades. We need to help them keep their eyes on the prize. We need to create a culture in our schools where we don't buy into the Wall Street mentality of focusing on short term gains at the cost of long term stability and success. We want to see the building blocks of a truly engaged community or relationships, not just the numbers of people who show up in a back to school night. A mass of people in a room who are not in relationship with each other is a mob that will accomplish little. A bunch of people in a room who are in relationship with another is an organization that can get things done. Good leaders also take risks. The question for a good leader is not should I take a risk but rather which risks should I take and then learn from mistakes. But a good leader isn't reckless. In the classroom we want our students to develop challenging goals but also help them reflect on whether they are realistic and or what might plan B be. We've got to balance what they say they want to do with questions to help them temperate or stretch it. Some might be more conservative. We need to push them to go outside of their experiences. As teachers we want to be able to fight for our vision. For example if we're not supportive of standardized tests. But a long ranger is not a leader. An example of leaders showing responsible risk taking is what happened in Seattle when all teachers in the school refused to give a particular standardized test and won. Of course if you're going to be a leader you need to develop a following. In order to do this you've got to engage others. People need to feel that they are gaining something from being in relationship with you. And in the classroom we are most likely to what to learn what we teach as research is shown. In the school community there's certainly a wealth of professional experience that lends itself to mentorship collegiality. And there are lots of ways to look at parent engagement through those same lens. One creative example of one school is where English and Spanish speaking parents taught each other their respective languages. What might this look like in more detail in the classroom. In our schools and in our communities. And I'm going to give a number of examples for each of these particular areas. But it's a little artificial because a lot of these examples a lot of my these ideas can be used in all three aspects. So in our classroom one day I went around and had a short individual conversation with five students. I explained the next day we were going to read about and watch a short video clip showing demonstrators being attacked a hundred years ago for supporting women's right to vote. I told each of the five and I thought they were leaders. But other students looked up to them. And I would like to help them. I'd like to help them to help lead a small group discussion following the video. Students would be discussing questions like why do you think men attack women demonstrators. Have you or your parents ever been attacked verbally or physically for doing something you or they believed in. I asked them to read ahead of time the short piece in our textbook that we'd be discussing and think of any additional questions that that would be good to have a small group answer. The leaders job will be to make sure that everyone in the group understood the questions got a chance to talk and spoke English. It was a class of ELLs. In addition they would need to help prepare someone else from the group to make a brief report to the entire class. We went through the lesson. Those are the small groups for the uneven. It all went pretty well. After class Jose who had not been one of the small group leaders came up to me and asked Mr. Falazzo do you think I could be a leader sometime when we have groups. I assured him he could. I told him I was pleased that he saw himself as a leader. As I did. In five other people in the room besides me who felt their job was to help other people learn to work together and develop new leaders. Their modeling encouraged another student to say that he would like a chance to do the same. It goes along with this famous quote. So the learning task was done better and leadership was developed. So the Zen of leadership is do the task in order to develop leadership not to accomplish the task. We want to teach the lesson to develop leadership not to cover the material. And by doing so students learn the lesson more effectively. One way we can teach is by teach this aspect of leadership of being explicit. There's lots of research that shows that these qualities of a leader are similar to the qualities of a good learner. I have students identify which ones they want to work on as part of their goals. And there's plenty of reading where students can identify characters as showing these qualities. So how else can we do this? Well, one is by agitating not irritating and community organizing. We talk about agitation is challenging people to do something about it. Something that they're interested in irritating is when we challenge them to do something that we're interested in. In envision and one of the ideas is goal setting. Daniel Pink's well known for one of his ideas of one sentence project to have students develop. One sentence describing how other people would describe them 30, 40 years down the line. You know, they discover a cure for cancer, for example. Risk taking. Be clear on what they want but also push them to look at alternatives. And the willingness to teach others. I gave the example in small groups. In computer labs having tech savvy students teach others in jigsaws and reviewing literature and written tests. We've also got to talk about power. Power means the ability to act and in order for genuine leadership development, people must have their own sense of power. Warren Benes writes leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. In other words, you really can't be a leader without having power. So in our classroom and in our schools and in our relationships with parents, we need to recognize that power is not a finite pie. Giving up some doesn't mean we have less. It means the pie gets bigger for everybody and more possibilities and opportunities are created. In the classroom, by listening, by providing choices to students by being flexible and by helping them develop skills, we can help them develop power. I also do a lesson plan where students describe examples in their lives when they felt powerful and where they categorize it. It's an inductive lesson plan. So how do we develop leadership in our schools? One example is by promoting the idea of teacher pinors where teachers are given more flexibility to stay in the classroom and teach along with giving along with other professional opportunities. Teach a few days, research a couple of days, part-time administrators. In our unions, we can develop leadership, small learning communities. For example, in my school where we have 2000 students, but each we have six small learning communities of 300 students and for 20 teachers each where teachers take a lot of responsibility. Peer assistance review and support, which is a teacher evaluation strategy that's developing a great deal of interest. And of course, our professional and personal learning communities either face-to-face or through social media. Now all those options entail building power and that unfortunately is in a short supply in our teaching profession these days. So how do we do this? How do we develop leadership in our communities? I'm going to look at it through a little bit of a different lens and contrast engaging and not involving parents where engaging develops leadership and involving does not. Involvement, which I think tends to not develop leadership, is the difference between doing to and doing with. For example, one time in a home visit, I talked to a family that was interested in learning English and they wanted their, they were concerned about not being able to give the adult school. I challenged them, said, well, do you know other parents who have that same concern? Would you bring into a meeting? Well, they did. Our school developed an internationally recognized literacy program. We provided computers and home internet access to immigrant families to learn English, but it came out of listening and their energy. Again, leading with one's ears is engagement. Leading one's mouth is involvement and will not develop leadership. Again, we talked about difference between agitation and irritation. We talked about communication, which is a one way. It means to inform that I connected Sheets home. Conversation means to keep company with, to live with. In other words, it's a reciprocal relationship, for example, through home visits. It's not just about improving schools. It's about improving schools and communities. I just want to take a moment to review the last few slides of the presentation. One, that none of this happens by magic. It requires a three legged stool. Leaders, potential leaders, and a plan. A friend once told me what is supposedly an old Chinese saying. I don't know if that's true or not. But the way he recounted it to me said that a man has to stand still with his mouth open for a long time before a roast duck is going to fly into it. And again, I just sort of reemphasizes the importance of making a plan and being strategic. Peter Drucker once wrote that leadership is about doing the right thing. Management is about doing things right. So we've got to decide is are we managers or are we leaders? Are we interested in being actors or just reactors? Do we want to transform or do we want to produce, just produce a product? Thank you.