Is anyone willing to dispute that more principals and superintendents need to attend the ISTE conference? How are we ever going to get administrators to come if they’re never “the target audience?”

@Heather Davis: So you “work at a school where there is little support for IT even though we have the labs etc.” but you don’t see the need for an address designed to elucidate effective leadership? I confess this doesn’t make sense to me. Isn’t the lack of leadership exactly the problem from which you’re suffering? A keynote focused on teachers, not leaders, doesn’t address your issue at all…

Quick: name a problem related to effective technology implementation and integration at your organization. Now, think for a minute: isn’t whatever you chose the responsibility of your leaders at its heart?

We’ve been relying on teachers & teacher leaders & tech integrationists & tech coordinators for decades now. Where’s it gotten us in terms of systemic reform? It’s gotten us isolated pockets of excellence in a few classrooms. When a principal “gets it,” nearly the entire school changes (minus the few resisters). When a superintendent “gets it,” nearly the entire district changes (minus the few resisters).

I’ll repeat… It is the formal leaders (administrators, policymakers), not informal leaders, that have control over ALL of the important variables: money; time; personnel hiring, evaluation, and assignment; organizational vision and direction; professional development; etc. All you have to do is look at a school like the Science Leadership Academy to understand the importance and power of a formal leader that “gets it.”

Why such pushback on a leadership keynote? It’s not like we have one every year. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to remember more than a small few in the history of NECC/ISTE. ISTE has five keynotes and I’m a big fan of Kevin Honeycutt. But one of the keynotes should pertain to effective FORMAL leadership. Otherwise we’ll just keep talking about tools and teachers like we always do… =(

Has there EVER been an ISTE/NECC keynote focused on leadership (maybe Tim Tyson a while ago?)? Isn’t the typical fare either 1) the world has changed and you need to too, or 2) here are some cool tools, or 3) rah rah inspirational from someone famous but nothing closely related to K-12 ed tech?

@Terry: How on earth are we going to get the kinds of school systems we need if we can’t articulate a vision for what effective leadership of those systems looks like? Focusing on teachers and teacher classroom tech integration is what ALWAYS occurs at ISTE/NECC. We can’t talk about “where IT in Ed is going and / or what we can do to improve impact and efficiency” without taking into account the leadership necessary to make it happen. Otherwise we’ll continue to focus on teachers and kids and never see large-scale, systematic change. We’ll also never get administrators to attend ISTE/NECC if we don’t take them into account as participants/attendees. As I noted in an earlier comment, we must get the people who control all of the key resources on board. You can get a lot of teachers on board and still have them be stymied by the leaders who don’t get it.

I do appreciate your comment in that we don’t want teachers to absolve themselves of responsibility unless the leadership gets it. There’s lots they can do even absent good tech leadership.

@kmfullerton: I agree that we need to recognize future leaders as well as current ones. Thanks for bringing this to the fore.

We’ve got 5 keynotes. Can’t one be about leadership?

Vicki, I’m a big fan of the Influencer book, but the research is pretty clear that opinion leaders / teacher leaders / IT leaders / whomever get stymied if formal leaders (principals, superintendents, boards, policymakers) don’t get it. Why? Because it’s the formal leaders that have control over all of the important variables: money, time, personnel, organizational vision and direction, etc. Teacher / IT / opinion leaders are an extremely important part of the equation – and I’m a strong believer in shared, distributed leadership – but the bottom line is that formal school leaders must be the key focus if we want long-term, systemic change to occur.