I spent 30 years in education with 25 of those years in administrative roles. Eighteen months ago I left education and joined Otus, a student performance platform. Otus is a SaaS (Software as a service) company that works with school districts across the country providing learning management, classroom management, assessment and data analytics tools. I recently started reading Hacking Leadership by Joe Sanfelippo and Tony Sinanis. I was inspired to read the book after hearing Joe Sanfelippo speak at the #ICE18 conference. While their focus is on ideas for school and district leaders, I’m finding that the ideas transfer very well to the SaaS world.
They talk about education hackers as those who challenge the status quo and see a problem as an opportunity. At Otus, I find that this is a common approach as we find issues or we have users identify challenges, we treat these as opportunities to show a user a new feature and we take the input as we continuously look for ways to me our system better.
Their first hack, Be Present and Engaged, is focused on building relationships with students and adults. It is the administrator’s responsibility to listen to other and broaden their perspective. They need to be lead learners. In their What you can do tomorrow section they suggest reserving two 15 minute blocks on your calendar each day for relationship building and to find out how things are going.
For us in the SAAS world, I am going to reserve time each day to check in with the main contact in one of our districts to see how things are going. I plan to simply ask how things are going with Otus and let them take the conversation from there. We want to make sure we are present and engaged with our users.
For us celebrating in public can look like shout outs on social media about the great work that our districts are doing. This will not only help us tell our story as a company but also help the district tell their story to their community.
This hack also talks about getting out of the office and engaging with teachers and students. They talk about how this can help address the perception that the administrator has been “out of the classroom” and no longer understands how things are in the classroom. In our situation this means getting out into districts, seeing what they are doing and how they are using our system. It also means professional reading and attending conferences to keep up to date on the current issues and trends in schools today.
In order to implement this hack to the fullest extent possible, a leader must also help others in the organization become lead learners. In my current role, this extends to my immediate members of my team as I help them develop their voice and take on more leadership opportunities within our company and in education overall.
In our work it is important that we take the time to talk about what we are learning from the work we are doing. We need to discuss both what is working from our perspectives and from the perspectives of our districts. In order for us to continue to learn, we need to talk through what has worked and what hasn’t worked. We have a weekly time that we get together as a team to share things we have learned and ideas we have so we can continue to add to our shared knowledge base. This will help us better support our districts and, in turn, help our districts better support their students, teachers and their community overall.
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