Before sharing this month’s Lead the Change, we want to share that the Educational Change SIG has also recently begun a new series, the Doctoral Corner, featuring interviews with current doctoral students. This month’s issue features Alexandra Lamb. We will occasionally feature the Doctoral Corner here on International Ed News.
Scott McLeod
An Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Colorado
Denver, Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading
experts on P-12 school technology leadership issues. He is the Founding Director of the
UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE),
the only university center in the U.S. dedicated to the technology needs of school
administrators, and is the co-creator of the wildly popular video series, Did You Know?
(Shift Happens). He also is the co-creator of the 4 Shifts Protocol for lesson/unit redesign
and the founder of both the annual Iowa 1:1 Institute and EdCampIowa, one of the largest EdCamp events in the United States. Dr. McLeod has worked with hundreds of schools, districts, universities, and other organizations and has received numerous awards for his technology leadership work, including the 2016 Award for Outstanding Leadership from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). In 2015, he was one of three finalists to be the next Director of the Iowa Department of Education. In 2011, he was a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. McLeod was one of the pivotal figures in Iowa’s grass roots 1:1 computing movement, which has resulted in over 220 school districts providing their students with powerful learning devices. Dr. McLeod blogs regularly about technology leadership issues at Dangerously Irrelevant and is a frequent keynote speaker and workshop facilitator at regional, state, national, and international conferences. He has written or edited 3 books and 170 articles and other publications, and is one of the most visible education professors in the United States.
In this interview, part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Dr. McLeod talks about technology and educational leadership. As he puts it:
We also need more research about how these schools and their leaders create cultures of innovation. If you visit these communities, everyone at all levels of the system tends to discuss how it is focused on innovation rather than being captive to glacially-slow rates of change. These leaders create virtuous cycles of innovation that feed on themselves and instill pride in both their internal and external stakeholder groups. It’s awesome to visit a school community in which educators, students, and parents proudly proclaim, “Here, in this school, we are innovative. We try things and take risks and it’s very exciting.” Ultimately, of course, we need experts in educational change to not only analyze these new models of schooling but also figure out how to translate them and transport them into more traditional school contexts. How do we take the exciting work happening in these innovative schools and ‘infect’ others to do the same? That’s the ultimate question for us in this field because – in a technology-suffused, global world rife with rapid changes and new challenges – innovation work is equity work these days.
This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also interviewed Kristin Kew and Thomas Hatch.
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