Leadership, Embracing Mistakes, and Wise Words from Ike

"Without the critical ingredient that is candor, there can be no trust. And without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.” — Edwin Catmull

“A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done." — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Public Domain photo

“When they enter our school each fall, our sixth-graders write about their hopes and fears for middle school. This year, 35 percent said their greatest fear was failing the state tests. At one of the most socially difficult times of their lives, over a third of our children have more anxiety about standardized tests than any other issue.” — The Faculty of P.S. 167

“Leaders: do things with us and for us, don't do things to us.” — Dr. Jeff Andrade

“We do not need educators who loudly proclaim to not get it when it comes to computers. We would not tolerate an educator in the 19th and 20th Centuries to loudly proclaim to not get it when it comes to reading books. This Century requires a new literacy and there is less and less room for illiterate educators to work alongside those who constantly strive to remain relevant.” — Thomas Whitby

“So why don't students view their mistakes as a valuable asset? Well, students don't think about their mistakes rationally -- they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. "Stupid" is just that: a feeling . . . . Academic success does not come from how smart or motivated students are. It comes from how they feel about their mistakes.”— Hunter Maats and Katie O'Brien

A Baker's Half-Dozen Quotes

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
--Henri Bergson, French philosopher (via Joanna Seymour, ADE)

Lesson plans should be that, plans. Students and teachers should have the ability to transform lessons into authentic learning opportunity.
- Jackie Gerstein EdD, Argosy University

In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements.  But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. For a more inclusive world, we need people who can appreciate and build on different values, beliefs, cultures.  The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces.  But in modern economies, we create value by synthesizing different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, which requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields.  

- Andreas Schleicher- Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division at the OECD.


Using CC allows downstream users to customize content, and in some cases can help students save money on textbooks. Chuck Severance, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, was able to publish a textbook in 11 days (available to his students for $10) because he remixed an existing book offered under an open content license.
-Timothy Vollmer - Policy Coordinator Creative Commons



“My business is circumference,” Poet Emily Dickinson writes. This is also the business of leadership. To understand the significance of circumference we need to acknowledge the new mindset required of leaders for integrative whole mind learning. As we struggle with new discontinuities, fragmentation and sudden change it is vital for leaders to think in more complex and holistic ways. This involves a shift in focus from a narrow and reductive emphasis on individualism based upon an industrial model of managing where the leader is the strong dependable self-made individual or hero towards a style of leading which expands the circumference within which the leader leads.
- Michael Jones- leadership educator, writer and pianist



Getting teachers to put themselves out there and blog is the challenge. Too many of our educators believe in “Do as I say, not as I do” teaching philosophy. We need more transparency in education. We can make that happen with more thoughtful and responsible educators blogging to the world.

- Tom Witby -- Adjunct Professor of Education at St Joseph’s College in New York.

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Flickr CC Photo courtesy of quinn.anya