Principal-to blog or not to blog

Principal-to blog or not to blog by Penelope Swenson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Why might a principal want to blog, or NOT? Blogging is not for everyone. As a professor, I can do an occasional blog, but as a principal, you would want something more consistent. Do any of your teachers have class or “teacher blogs” that are on your school/district servers or using other systems? Some superintendents blog. Does yours?
Plus side:
• Timely information
• Promote the school
• Inform parents, community, press of calendar, activities, initiatives, successes
• Inexpensive means of communicating
• Keep focus on mission, vision
• Provide connections to articles, videos, etc. regarding developments in education

Minus side:
• Must keep it up
• Can say too much
• Some parents do not have access
• Legal issues regarding posting student names, photos
• Could be seen as political

Should you do a blog as a principal?
• Are you a good writer?
• Who is/would be your audience?
• Do parents have access to the Web?
• Do you have important information to share?
• Can you keep the blog up with posts at least monthly?
• What is your district policy regarding blogging? Must publications be approved by the D.O.?
• Could you use blogspot.com or one of the other sites set up for blogging or is that “off limits” for your district?
• Do you have the time? Will the blog save you time or be time/cost effective?

There are benefits to getting on the Web with your message. There are pitfalls. Read some of the blogs below to get an idea of what other principals are doing.

A very traditional, informative, support the school blog is from an elementary principal in Massachusetts. You will find it at http://pineglenprincipal.blogspot.com/ .

From a South Carolina middle school, this blog is similar in content to the one above but with a Twitter feed and podcast. See it at http://sullivanms.edublogs.org/ .

Patrick Larkin, high school principal, has a blog at http://burlingtonhigh.blogspot.com/ and his own Principal’s Page at http://cms.schooleffects.com/contentm/easy_pages/easy_page_view.php?sid=28&page_id=5 . Both have timely and useful information and links.

Check out this wonderful wide ranging and informative blog http://weprincipal.blogspot.com/ by Melinda Miller, an elementary principal with many interests.

Blogs, thinking, and academe

Some of the most interesting writing in academe is in blogs yet blogs are not recognized as credible academic work. A fine scholarly article below on blogs is found at http://www.thesacredpage.com/2010/11/sbl-paper-weblogs-and-academy.html .

I find blogs highly useful and would like to see them as a more full means of engaging others in pondering--maybe along the lines of the salons, etc. noted in the RSA "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Stephen Johnson

I’m in a pondering mode. My blog is an excellent way to extend a classroom discussion, share ideas, and think through a concept. How to make the blog more viable as a form of academic publishing is still out there on the horizon.

Flog or dismount?

I did not write the following list, but it certainly applies to some situations. In times of high demands/expectations and resource declines, this silly list imparts a sort of off center wisdom.

Flogging A Dead Horse ?

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed from generation to generation, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in modern business, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including some of the following:

01. Buy a bigger whip.
02. Change riders.
03. Threaten the horse with termination.
04. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
05. Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
06. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.
07. Reclassify the dead horse as "living impaired".
08. Hire an outside contractor to ride the dead horse.
09. Harness several dead horses together to increase speed.
10. Provide additional funding to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Conduct a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declare that the dead horse carries lower overhead, and therefore performs better
than some other horses.
13. Rewrite the expected performance parameters for all horses to accommodate the dead one.
14. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

I've been pondering the real wisdom in dismounting. The hard part sometimes is recognizing and accepting that some horses are, in fact, dead. As educators, we can not give up on kids, but we can discover that certain programs or processes are just not working--essentially, dead. We also may discover that what is not working for us may respond for someone else.

Changing metaphors, sometimes I need to remind myself that key to being an effective leader is in the refrain of a Kenny Rogers song:

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.

Sometimes success is in walking away and not trying to flog our dead horse.