I INFLUENCE OTHERS TO CONNECT

Objective:  Demonstrate leadership by connecting with those who are not building a personal learning network and influence them to start connecting online.

#ByronEdChat

In order to collectively make a meaningful impact as leaders, our cohort of Byron Public Schools teachers facilitated and advertised a weekly chat for members of our school district.  Twitter chats are forums for discussion around set topics of interest, offering a virtual coffee shop where ideas can be tossed around and everyone can openly share their thoughts.  Unlike a traditional gathering of people, everyone can talk at once in the thread, preventing a dominant personality from taking away another person's voice.  Since it was voluntary to participate, people came on their own free will from the influence of their peers.  Participants entered our initial chats as both experts and complete newbies, but members of the chat were ready to coach when anybody needed help.

Our four chats were themed around Byron Public Schools' mission: "Learn, Share, Innovate, and Inspire."  I co-facilitated the first chat on learning.  My partner and I used a common chat format -- six questions, each for 10 minutes, with participants posting their answers and follow-up questions to the hashtag, #byronedchat.  Participants were excited to be there, the chat was fast paced, people felt listened to and included, and the overall tone was exciting and upbeat.  It sparked a continuing trend of people returning and new folks joining us in subsequent weeks.  The only negative comment was that the pace was too fast for many to keep up with -- there were too many questions, too many people, and too little time.  To address this feedback, the moderators of the later chats reduced the number of questions and helped everyone get more comfortable with the tools that made the chat easier to follow.  Included below is a capture of this first district chat.

Throughout the month, this project steadily grew its user base from 15 staff (beyond the 10 in the cohort) to 30 by the final night.  As a grassroots effort to better connect staff within and between buildings, it was incredibly effective.  It also served as an effective forum for the kinds of discussions that normally don't happen -- asking the big picture questions about teaching and learning.  Even if it didn't always lead to new initiatives overnight, staff had an opportunity to advertise themselves as open to change, something that could enable future projects to get started.  Surveys to staff members confirmed that over 70% found the chat helpful and that 85% of participants wanted to participate in future chats.  Though connecting with other professionals and learning new skills were reasons for attending, the most commonly cited reason was to keep up to date on what other district teachers were doing.  In many ways, these chats served a social need in the district, but because of the way they were facilitated, they had so many other benefits built in.

Below is the planning document amongst our cohort that lays out the planning through final surveys.  This process offers an awesome template to other cohorts or districts looking to start a similar initiative.

Reflection

This graduate program is focused on educational leadership, yet it is composed of a cohort of all teachers.  A grassroots initiative facilitated by teachers to influence a district is a model that I always appreciated, but now am learning how to effectively implement.  The #byronedchat concept is simple in theory -- invite people from your district to go on Twitter at a certain time, watch for tweets with a given hashtag, and respond back to questions and other participants.  The ease in which we seemed to pull it off also makes it appear simple.  However, as a cohort of nine teachers, we had years of socially integrating into our respective buildings.  Through influence, we were able to extend an invitation to colleagues to join us -- about 1.5 people per each of us -- to get things started.  From there, the planning of questions and careful facilitation of the chat to involve everyone became factors in bringing people back and recruiting a few more participants.  Our initial influence came from the relationships we built with other staff ahead of time, and the maintenance and growth of the idea came from both our new skills in leading Twitter chats and the relationships we continued to build and grow in our online interactions.  By replying, favoriting, and retweeting colleagues, we demonstrated our continued investment in learning from them and listening to what they had to share.  I think this is the key to effective leadership at all levels of an organization.

Beyond effectiveness, making this a full-cohort project gave me the opportunity to learn from my peers.  The tutorials, surveys, and questions that others created, along with the group's collective plan for the entire initiative, gave me a model that I can draw on for future grassroots change initiatives.  I also found it helpful to co-plan the LEARN session with another teacher since it gave me a chance to discuss and think through questions aloud before committing to them.  With over an hour on the phone in front of a shared Google Doc, we went from vague concepts to clearer questions that logically flowed.  On the night of the chat, my partner and I both reached out to different people in discussion to make sure nobody was missed, and in the cases where we did not have enough mental bandwidth to join every conversation, the other members of the cohort stepped in as active, un-official co-facilitators.  I couldn't imagine ever leading something like this alone.