2.2: Leader

Educators seek out opportunities for leadership to support student empowerment and success and to improve teaching and learning. Educators:

a. Shape, advance and accelerate a shared vision for empowered learning with technology by engaging with education stakeholders.
b. Advocate for equitable access to educational technology, digital content and learning opportunities to meet the diverse needs of all students.
c. Model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning.

The second ISTE Educator standard is named “Leader”. It is fitting that after you participate as a Learner that you move into the position of the Leader. It is known that you retain the most amount of new learning when you are placed in the active position of teaching back the new information. ISTE 2.2 focuses on moving educators to a leadership role in which they help to “shape, advance and accelerate a shared vision for empowered learning with technology”. This standard takes one step further from just participating in a learning community, but helping create, advocate for and represent educational technology possibilities and opportunities. My favorite piece of this standard is C. “Model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning.” Les Foltos talks about an educators natural state being independent in his writing, “Peer Coaching: Unlocking the Power of Collaboration”. While this is common, it isn’t helpful in advancing in your teaching craft. This substandard pushes educators to share their findings with others! To even go one step further than sharing, but to also help colleagues learn the process of finding and vetting new resources.

Read more about how I found a way to help “shape, advance and accelerate a shared vision” concerning digital education and educational technology in my post, Learning and Leading with Twitter.