Roland Martin and T.D. Jakes go One-on-one about the importance of fathers in the African-American community
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Roland Martin and Bishop T.D. Jakes talk one-on-one about the importance of fathers in the African-American community, the Bishop Eddie L. Long scandal and what Black men look for in leadership.
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Teach Yourself | Teach Others
The Good News today is from 1 John 2:26-
27 As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him.
The online Daily Bread for further insight is Beware! http://odb.org/ghk#.TsPT6Zh8F4I.
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Back 2 Basics | Lessons in Leadership
A great way to practice Lessons in Leadership is to review a alphabetic acrostic, which is a writing style that I learned in the book of Proverbs 31, the story of the virtual woman.
It is also covered in todays lesson at our daily bread: Grieving From A To Z.
A simple, complex application would be found in Jeremiah as we begin the November Lessons in Leadership Series.
See how well you can recall these qualities at the end of the study, also feel free to chime in with your opinion as we build this study out.
8 Lessons in Leadership
- One can glean that God’s calling of a leader matches His empowerment.
- Those Leaders expect criticism and sometimes must comfort
- Leaders must not only endure change but create it.
- Effective leaders identify with the sins, failures of their people
- Leaders can be compared to both watchmen and shepherds
- Great leaders never lose their ability to empathize
- Successful leaders find memorable and creative ways to communicate truth.
- Leaders must cling to their God-given vision even when the people stray.
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Value-Based Leadership
Read PS 15:1 and John Maxwell’s Commentary on Value-Based Leadership. Discuss the value of strong bilical principles as a rite of passage.
We are excited to be here and invite you to participate in the Outreach Committee. Outreach is about actionable items that we can do in the community, that encourages, motivates, and invites those who will to come and join us in celebration of our Lord’s Blessings.
We have traditionally met on Saturday Mornings, and will continue to do so where necessary, however it may be more effective to meet for 10 minutes after church each Sunday to update each other.
Things we are currently involved in:
Family Ministry Outreach (Love Dare)
Prison Ministry Outreach (Letters and Counseling)
Youth Outreach (JUMP-PREP/MYEEP/Boys Choir)
Multimedia Outreach (Cisco Academy/Text Messaging/Creative Ministry Design)
We would like to start that new tradition this morning, entitled Concern. Connect. Commit. (for women), and Commit. Connect. Concern. (for men). Should you are available please join both myself and Johnny Clarke in the reception hall after service, for a brief meeting and coffee.
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John Maxwell | Pike Place Fish Market
From John Maxwell’s Site
Good Leadership Qualities are described in a article that I found last week, I was in Seattle, Washington, for one of my favorite events: The Exchange Gathering. One morning, we enjoyed a presentation by the guys from the world-famous Pike Place Fish Market. If you’re not aware of them, “the Fish Guys,” as they call themselves, are famous for great fish and even better customer service. At least four books have been written about their philosophy and methods. And the Fish Market is known as one of the most fun places to work.
They also put on a bit of a show, shouting and throwing fish back and forth over the heads of customers. In our presentation, the owner, John Yokoyama, shared their commitment to customer service and world peace while his guys launched a few large salmon around the conference room. They even let us try our hands at catching fish.
(I got my chance down at their shop. And for the record, I caught the fish as it flew past my head.)
One of my favorite lines from the Fish Guys was this: “Love the people first; sell the fish second.” I think it encapsulates so much of what I believe about business. People don’t care what you know until they know that you care. The second of my 5 levels of leadership is all about relationships. And I believe that you can’t lead people if you don’t love people.
I look for personal growth lessons all around me, and I find them in the most unusual places. Who knew that a bunch of fishmongers would remind us of what’s really important in life?
What about you? Does your organization have a similar mission – to love the people first, and do business second? It makes sense philosophically, but it’s also good business advice. John Yokoyama also said, “We’ve made a commitment to have our customers leave with the experience of having been served. They experience being known and appreciated whether they buy fish or not.”
The Pike Place Fish Market develops lifelong relationships with their customers, and this has made them world-famous. What are you doing to serve the people you lead or do business with?
Born to Lead
The term “Go” means just what it says, Go and lead, be the difference you wish to see. A strong, successful man is not the victim of his environment. He creates favorable conditions.
–Orsen Marden
Technology is not automatically going to improve the education. However, does the fact that the education has not improved established that technology cannot aid the improvement of education?
If a company that is listed on the stock market had declined in value in the last month, does that prove the CEO is doing a bad job?
Regular readers know that not only am I something of a tree-hugger, but I’ve recently become convinced that social media (not MySpace and Facebook, but the wide variety of Web 2.0, collaboration, and communication tools available to us on the Web) can have a very important place in education.
It is the maturation of these tools, as well as the dropping cost of computer hardware, that leads me to believe that we can, in fact make our schools largely paperless to the benefit of students, teachers, parents, and, well, trees.
The time is ripe for some actual research on this matter, allowing me to either prove my point and create some best practices for the integration of social media and 1:1 computing into a school or convincing me that social media and computers in schools are basically a distraction from real learning.
Intel, for example, has reported considerable success using their Classmate PCs in classroom settings, providing software that allows teachers to direct learning and minimize distractions (controlling and/or blacking out student screens, for example, or pushing content to all student machines at once). My goal, however, is somewhat more ambitious, although considerable smaller in scale than Intel’s efforts. I want to know if devices like the Classmate, when incorporated with appropriate hardware and software on the back end, plenty of bandwidth at home and at school, and a suite of Web 2.0 tools can positively change the way we function as a school ecosystem and, at the same time, drastically reduce the resources we consume.
So how do we find out? Here’s what I propose, but please talk back below if you have suggestions on other implementations, questions, or avenues of research.
I just happen to have an elementary school in my district with a small number of students (about 140), solid internal network infrastructure, aging computer equipment with too few terminals per kid, and the highest per capita paper consumption of any school in my district.
1. Provide every student, kindergarten through sixth grade, with a Classmate or other similar device (the new tablet Classmates and Eees coming soon would be ideal to replace the average spiral notebook, among other things).
2. Provide all teachers with a full-featured multi-media laptop suitable for content creation and management.
3. Implement a software stack and student and teacher machines such that teachers can control and direct learning; include polling and quizzing capabilities similar to those of interactive response systems as well as classroom management systems like Moodle.
4. Implement a server infrastructure supporting the storage and sharing of all documents and, wherever possible, electronic texts and supplemental classroom materials.
5. License the use of e-textbooks wherever possible and appropriate; task teachers with creating electronic repositories of useful supplemental materials regardless of the presence of an electronic text.
6. Create a robust wireless infrastructure both in the school and in common gathering areas in town (the town is fairly rural and geographically quite large, meaning that broadband penetration is not yet adequate to serve all students).
7. Expand the existing website to become the repository of all school information and tie into Google Apps for Education, providing all students, teachers, staff, and parents with access to the facilities within Google Apps.
8. Given the lack of broadband penetration, consider pushing announcements and parent materials to each student’s laptop to be shared with parents as needed.
9. Provide ongoing professional development (and, as a result, develop an appropriate “going paperless” curriculum) for teachers so that they can fully leverage the technology in class.
10. Leverage additional Web 2.0 tools to facilitate collaboration and sharing within classrooms, within the school, and within the community.
11. Solicit feedback on “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the effort via teacher, student, parent, and administrator contributions to a going paperless blog.
12. Use standardized testing data over multiple years of this program to more objectively assess the impact educationally.
There’s obviously a lot of arm-waving going on here; this would require a concerted effort by teachers, staff, and technologists to make this happen and ensure that teachers are prepared to deliver and receive content electronically. However, it should provide some broad strokes regarding the direction I’d like this research to take.
So if that’s the plan (in a nutshell), what are the costs and benefits? Obviously, this will require some cash. Even at $400/kid, we’re looking at $56,000 just for the computers. It’s easy to imagine needing to replace these every 3 years. The servers capable of storing large numbers of documents and data as well as handling networking functions and serving up Moodle-style classroom management apps are another $10k. Adding additional broadband into the school, training time, wireless, etc., and a number somewhere around $100,000 every three years starts sounding conservative but realistic. That is not a small number.
It’s a number that just might be worth it, though if we can show a direct benefit to students. Do students achieve more because they always have access to materials and the help of peers and teachers using the same social networking tools emerging in business? Do parents feel more connected to their kids’ education? Are parents becoming involved with their children at night, sitting around the netbook at the kitchen table and reading the daily announcements? Are kids easily able to determine their homework assignments and quickly submit assignments to their teachers? Do kids learn better with frequent assessment and feedback via interactive quizzes and tests administered in class on their computers (there is already considerable evidence to suggest that frequent and immediate feedback directly increase performance and retention)? Do kids begin to think more critically and logically if they are taught programming and computer science from a very young age (as in, as soon as they can write and understand basic math operators)? Can kids leave elementary school viewing social media as a tool for getting work done, rather than a giant distraction encompassing only MySpace and Facebook?
I think the answer to each of these questions is actually yes. However, it will take research to get past what I think in my geeky little head and move on to real answers. I don’t have $100k sitting between the couch cushions, but as my thoughts on this crystallize further, I’ll be taking it folks who just might have cash or equipment that could use some testing in this context. It seems as though Dell, or HP, or Intel, or Sun (or any of the other usual suspects) would have a vested interest in trying to justify significant initial costs to “go paperless” and, hopefully at the same time, to revolutionize the way we use technology to educate our kids and connect our school communities.
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21 Laws of Leadership | 21 Days of Success
- An Ordinary Guy February 22, 2012Steve was just an ordinary guy. He quietly served in a church I attended years ago. He helped prepare communion, shoveled the church sidewalks in the winter, and mowed the lawn in the summer. He spent time with teenage boys who had no fathers in the home. I often heard him telling people at church in his quiet way how good the Lord was to him. During prayer […]Anne Cetas
- Slacker? February 21, 2012While studying the book of Proverbs in my small-group Bible study, our leader suggested that we change the description of a lazy person from a sluggard to a slacker (6:6,9). Ah, now he was speaking my lingo. I immediately started thinking of all the people I consider to be slackers. […]Cindy Hess Kasper
- The Remedy For Fear February 20, 2012In his first inaugural speech in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the newly elected president of the US, addressed a nation that was still reeling from the Great Depression. Hoping to ignite a more optimistic outlook regarding that economic crisis, he declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” […]Joe Stowell
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- Level Up, Week 7: The PinnacleWelcome to Week 7 of our group study of The 5 Levels of Leadership. This week we’re studying Level 5, The Pinnacle. The difficulty with teaching this level is that Level 5 leaders are just not very common. Until now, you’ve spent your time nudging group members to reach for the level being discussed. But [...]Originally posted at: John Maxwell on Leadership […]
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