ASCD Annual Conference Scholars

Putting Leadership Learning into Action

Rick Allen

How many times do educators go to a professional conference—as attendees or presenters—marvel at the many sessions and speakers, the networking, and the real learning offered but return to their school or office overwhelmed, filing away their notes and best intentions until "there's more time"?

That's just the issue that ASCD believes its inaugural class of ASCD Annual Conference Scholars have begun to surmount. By chatting on a regular basis through social networking and finally meeting in person in San Antonio, these 22 highly motivated educators have been thinking through the many facets of this year's theme: educational leadership.

"The idea for the Scholars was born out of a desire to extend the learning found at Annual Conference," says Lindsay Martin-Bilbray, ASCD Annual Conference project specialist. "Professional development should go all year, and not in just three- or four-day spurts. The ideas that ASCD promotes are applicable in so many ways during the year."

ASCD invited the newly formed group of ASCD Conference Scholars to join forces during the 2009–2010 school year to stimulate discussion and share their experience and worldwide perspectives on school leadership by blogging on ASCD Inservice, posting to Twitter, and writing for ASCD Express.

This year's Scholars include teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, and university professors from five countries, including  the United States, Canada, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore. They are led in their ongoing discussions by two veteran educators, Tom Hoerr, head of the New City School in St. Louis, Mo., and book author on multiple intelligences and school leadership, and Jen Morrison, a teacher and consultant who's completing her doctorate in educational administration at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Morrison's and Hoerr's goals for the Scholars are simple:

• Reflect on your own leadership.
• Connect, network, and share ideas with a diverse group of education leaders.
• Experience and practice with new technology in a helpful, goal-oriented environment.
• Plan for growth and change before the Annual Conference, reflect on and apply learning from conference sessions, and use the learning to implement change back home.

In addition to conducting their own presentations in San Antonio, the Scholars will also be attending two working luncheons to practice using Twitter and ASCD Edge, the organization's new social networking platform. Scholars will be tweeting from the conference so that other participants can engage with them on Twitter. In between the technology and their own session commitments, Scholars will also have time to socialize at a private reception.

"We also believe that the Scholars can become a cohort—a mix of people who learn with and from one another," Hoerr says. "This has already taken place through our Scholars' blog posts and at a virtual conference. Coming together at the Annual Conference and continuing to interact online will create relationships that can facilitate learning. 

"We all come to our roles with different experiences, skills, and outlooks. By learning how others see problems and by understanding how they approach solutions, our horizons are widened. Roland Barth's notion of collegiality—if children are to grow and learn, the adults teaching them must grow and learn too—is relevant here. While typically one thinks of this in a school or, perhaps, across a school district, the Scholars are using the Internet, virtual conferences, and physical interactions to learn."

Since October, ASCD Conference Scholars have been taking part in a wide-ranging discussion on what school leadership means—the theory, research, challenges, and practicalities of implementation—through the ASCD Inservice blog. Morrison and Hoerr led off with blog posts provocatively titled "Do We Pay a Price for Being Nice?", "Have You Been Used?", and "Better Leading Through Technology?". Those first six posts yielded more than 135 responses, and more than 4,400 people have stopped by to read both posts and comments.

"Learning is constructed, for students and for adults, in interaction," Morrison points out about the Scholars' varieties of interplay. "Collegiality extends the interaction—creating challenges to what we already believe and offering thinking and options that we would never think of as individuals....I'd like to think that experiencing the benefits of sustained and intense connection means that they now have a model for how they can create that collegial dialogue among their own colleagues." 

With input from conference sessions, the Scholars will continue their conversation after they leave San Antonio. As Scholars define their own leadership goals, they'll share their perspectives about and experiences of their efforts to put new ideas into play in their own professional settings, including classrooms, administrative offices, and districts. Watch for ASCD Annual Conference Scholars posts on Inservice and through a special issue of ASCD Express on May 28.

Click here for more information about the ASCD Annual Conference Scholars program.