SEEing to Lead: Impact to Influence with Jed Stefanowicz

In this episode, we're bringing you a conversation from SEEing to Lead, hosted by Dr. Chris Jones, right here on the Be Podcast Network.     As a Digital Learning Coach in Walpole, Massachusetts, Jed Stefanowicz provides job-embedded professional development and instructional coaching for academic technology. Through conferences, workshops, and coaching, Jed aims to engage and build staff/student digital learning capacity, keeping the focus on practice over product. As a 25 year elementary educator, speaker, blogger, and former Massachusetts Teach Plus Policy Fellow, Jed shares his passion for effective tech integration to transform teaching and learning, creating engaging and equitable digital learning environments and experiences that activate, innovate, and motivate digital learning. He is the author of Take AIM at Digital Learning: Activate, Innovate, Motivate and Impact to Influence. Check out his blog at [email protected] Key Takeaways: We need to recreate the structures to teach rather than just expecting it to happen. Leaders are facing a blank slate as they work to stretch people past their comfort zone because people have been out of their comfort zone for the last two years. Learning something on YouTube is going to teach you how to do it, but not understand how to apply it. We need to find ways to create and support teacher agency. It's essential to be aware of circumstances, surroundings, and how to apply the requisite skills to excel in a situation.  Moving people from motivation to commitment is the only way to make progress forward.  Education at any level has to go beyond a transactional experience by starting with what people are passionate about.  You can't be a coach and equipment manager at the same time.  You have to respect where people are to engage them in growth. Leadership isn't about implementing an agenda, but instead finding what the goals of those you serve are and then helping them achieve them. Stick to the A,B,Cs = Always Build Capacity It's about process/project not product. Subscribe to SEEing to Lead: Subscribe on Apple Subscribe on Spotify About the host: Dr. Chris Jones has been an educator in Massachusetts for 22 years. He is currently Principal of Whitman-Hanson Regional High School in Whitman, Mass. and Vice President of the Massachusetts State Administrators Association (MSAA). Chris was named the 2022 Massachusetts School Counselors Associaltion’s (MASCA) Administrator of the Year and is a finalist for the Massachusetts School Administrators Association’s Principal of the Year award. Reach on Twitter at @DrCSJones