My last two posts have been about effective leadership and listening to understand. Earlier this week, I was catching up on podcasts while doing yard work (best way to listen to those podcasts!) and caught a 2-part episode by the One and Only Brené Brown. Her topic tied in so perfectly with my thinking around effective leadership that I couldn’t help but continue writing about it in a shorter post this week (reason explained later).
In an April 5 Dare to Lead podcast episode, Brené discusses Armored Leadership vs. Daring Leadership and uses the following phrase to consider when thinking about both types of leadership: “Being a knower and being right vs being a learner and getting it right.” Brene further explores this idea in her blog, her book, Dare to Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts, and on her Dare to Lead podcast.
As a teacher leader… as a human being, I always want to fall into the latter category: being a learner and getting it right. Brené beautifully highlights the difference between “being right” and “getting it right” in her February 13, 2020 blog: “Acknowledge and reward great questions and instances of ‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out’ as daring leadership behaviors. The big shift here is from wanting to ‘be right’ to wanting to ‘get it right.'”
That’s who I want to be: the person who is always striving to “Get it Right” through learning, right along side those I get to work with. In that vein, I have updated my blog to include two additional pages, which house resources tied to two themes that are woven into most of my posts: “The Science of Reading,” and “The Power of Positive.” In my pursuit to “Get it Right” when it comes to reading instruction, and to “Get it Right” while plowing through life with a positive mindset, I want to share those resources that I continually fall back on in this pursuit.
Part of “Getting it Right” involves using reliable, evidence-based resources to engage in best practices. The pages I’m adding reflect my efforts to house the “Best of the Best” in evidence-based resources in one place. One such resource, a perfect companion to the EL K-8 Language Arts curriculum, is the book, Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters, by Ron Berger, Libby Woodfin, Suzanne Nathan Plaut, and Cheryl Becker Dobbertin. Transformational Literacy addresses the three instructional shifts that arose from the revised 2010 Common Core Standards. The second of these shifts involves grounding reading, writing and speaking in evidence, the importance of which is summed up perfectly at the end of Chapter 2: “Reading and writing grounded in evidence is key to making good decisions as twenty-first-century citizens and citizen leaders in a democratic society. We need citizens and leaders across every level of community, business, and government who seek first to understand issues from multiple perspectives, listening to and analyzing evidence presented by stakeholders with diverse experiences and backgrounds…”
I can’t think of a better set of reasons to include the set of evidence-based resources that I rely on in my pursuit to “Be a Learner and Get it Right”. My time this week and next week will be dedicated to curating these two new pages, Science of Reading Resources, and Power of Positive Resources, which will be visible at the top of this page. They are currently “under heavy construction” (there’s not much there, yet!) and will likely undergo constant revision.