2.2 Entrepreneurial leadership for technology: an opposable mind  (Page 2/11)

1. Visionary Leadership
2. Digital Age Learning Culture
3. Excellence in Professional Practice
4. Systemic Improvement
5. Digital Citizenship

The following questions are addressed in this chapter:

• What are the key aspects of a technology plan leaders need to know to optimize high-quality student outcomes?
• How can leaders tie technology plans to institutional mission and priorities?
• What can leaders do to avoid excessive detail and technical jargon?
• Once change in the curriculum and instructional strategies are implemented, how can technology plans be realigned?

So, what's the problem?

Some (including this author) might argue that perhaps technology leadership as practiced by today’s principal is outdated unless it helps faculty and students to address the great challenges presented by technology in our schools. Much of what we see happening in schools (along with the literature just presented) focuses on the management of technology. Our principal preparation programs, mine included, cover technology leadership lightly if at all, and rarely extend beyond the most basic skills (i.e., word processing, spreadsheets, and database use). A theme of this chapter is that effective technology leadership has more to do with teaching pedagogy and human relations and much less to do with technology itself.

A principal’s mission must now include designing and implementing new strategies to help teachers and students recognize, understand, and integrate technology with teaching and learning in the classroom. The mere presence of hardware and software in the classroom does not assure meaningful learning for students. We are beyond the point of deciding whether or not we will accept technology in our schools. The crucial task at hand is to decide how to implement this technology effectively into instruction.

As early as 2000, Avolio discussed the relationship between leadership and technology and suggested that leaders must play a more proactive role in implementing technology, and more specifically, interface the human and information technology components. Many point to the problem of overemphasis of the technological aspect at the exclusion of the human resource function. Avolio warned of the creation of “information junkyards” (p. 4). The essence of technology leadership is to produce a change in attitudes, feelings, thinking, behavior, and performance with individuals.

To carry off this improvement in technology leadership, principals must be willing to alter existing leadership practices evidenced in most schools; and they must also be open to the probability of participating in a transformation of traditional leadership skills, knowledge, and habits of mind.

Today’s rapidly changing environment requires the technology leader to become involved in discovering, evaluating, installing, and operating new technologies of all kinds, while keeping teaching and student learning as the guide and driving force behind it all. Vaill (1998) issued an accompanying caution: “The technologies the organization employs entail learning time to exploit their productive and economic potential” (p. 45). If schools are constantly “upgrading” their technologies, they may never reach a productive flow of instruction, a flow on which effective teaching and learning are based.