This morning I took part in a focus group looking at developing leaders throughout the education system. The group had an excellent range of leaders present from executive heads of large colleges to lowly teaching deputies like myself!
The interesting thing that came out from the whole of the morning was the overwhelming feeling that the training at the moment on offer provides excellent opportunities in terms of leadership theory and understanding, but perhaps does not as yet provide practical operational experience / mentoring.
Most people seemed to agree that the best development they recieved was the face to face non judgemental discussions that were as a result of attending such events / training. It also highlighted the importance of having a mentor to challenge and guide you through early leadership.
This confirmed for me the value of blogging and using Twitter (see previous post) as professional development tools. Although these tools do not provide mentoring as such they do allow you to reflect and evaluate your thoughts (blogging) and to ask questions to your peers (Twitter.)
The difficulty at present as I see it is that there is no structure to the network that you can put together on Twitter so work needs to be done to put professionals together or hash tag appropriately.
As such I’m going to see if my network can help me build such a discussion forum. #leadershipexchange
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February 19th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
I completely agree with you. I have recently joined the Twitter world and use it mainly for CPD. I have gone from feeling totally lost to having so many ideas that my head might explode.
February 20th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Thanks for prompting me to learn what has tags are in Twitter, for anyone else who wondered: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags
Your ideas have connected with the chapter in Ken Robinson’s book Element which talks about “finding your tribe”. As an inexperienced senior leader I’m wondering where I go to connect to leaders facing similar questions.
Apart from tagging my twitters #leadershipexchange where else do I go to connect with teaching deputies?