Creativity is just connecting things.
Steve Jobs
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (n.d.) created a framework for 21st-century learning in which the “4 Cs (Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Critical Thinking,” para. 3) are highlighted as student outcomes we must seek to elicit in order to prepare them properly for college and careers. Typically, when we think about the 4Cs of 21st-century learning, we do so with our students in mind, yet we believe that much like almost everything else in education, what is pertinent to and important for students is also pertinent to and important for educators. As 21st-century educators, we must focus on the 4 Cs in our own daily activities. We want our students attending our schools to be authentically and actively engaged in these college- and career-ready behaviors. For them to act in such ways, we need to model the way, learning from our own experiences, and passing this learning on to our students. We agree with Jobs that the first of these 4Cs, creativity, is all about connecting things. We would also suggest that the other three are all about connecting as well. When we collaborate, we are connecting with other people; when we think critically, we are connecting thoughts in our own minds to other thoughts and ideas we have or about which we are learning; when we communicate, we are clearly involved in connecting with people and ideas, sharing our own thoughts, reflecting on the thoughts of others, and making connections as a result of these exchanges.
In this book, we have described eight “Key Connectors,” or intentional ways that highly connected educators act in order to grow and learn professionally so that they continue to serve their schools and their students in the best ways possible. It all starts with connecting to a personal and professional learning network as outlined in Chapter 1. No one can begin to incorporate any new ideas they learn into their professional practice until they first connect to other people who are resources for these ideas. Once they have begun establishing their P2LN, connected educators then realize they can learn beyond the walls of their own classrooms, schools, or districts and beyond the school-day hours, and begin to learn what they want, when they want, and how they want. When connecting through their P2LN, they focus on the three Cs so important in the lives of educators, consistently looking for new ways to focus on communication, collaboration, and community. Although connected educators take away many exciting new ideas to try in their own schools and classrooms, they tend to give more than they take and derive just as much joy and energy from the giving as they do from the taking. They not only possess the growth mindset of which Dweck (2006) wrote, by looking to take ideas from others that they think will help them grow, but also a “giving mindset,” knowing they will grow as much, if not more, by giving as they do by taking. Connected educators are masterful at living in and making the most of the present while also keeping an eye out to the future. They connect what they did yesterday to what they are doing today—and what they think they may have to do tomorrow. Always looking forward in this way, they strive to be tomorrow, today. Connected educators we know who have truly benefitted from connecting, and benefitted others in return, always keep in mind that every successful connection begins with relationship-building. Even in the midst of daily new advances in technology which allow us to connect in ways that can be considered impersonal, connected educators always focus on relationships, relationships, relationships, regardless of the vehicle they are using to connect. Connected educators model the way for others, knowing that the way they behave will have an impact on whether those around them will also strive to become connected. Even if they are connected to thousands of other educators around the world, they do not lose sight of those immediately surrounding them in their home workplace and they make the time to support their co-workers by showing how getting connected can help them, making sure to do so in a non-threatening, patient, and servant-like manner. Finally, connected educators know when to unplug and make time to connect with themselves as well as their close family and friends in ways that require intentional unplugging for significant amounts of time. They are passionate about staying connected to their global P2LN and just as passionate about staying connected to the people, places, things, and ideas awaiting them in the immediate world right outside their doorstep. They know that like anything else in life, staying plugged in too much can be counterproductive to the ultimate goal of growing and learning.
We have noticed that connected educators who have discovered that connecting with others is both a productive and joyful way to enhance their professional lives find both the joy and the meaning in connecting. These educators come in all shapes and sizes, representing all races, nations, genders, languages, and any other demographic subgroup imaginable. Yet, they share an amazing amount of desires and behaviors in common. The key connectors described in this book are the ones that have stood out to us as most commonly held among our own P2LNs and the traits that we believe are most important for others entering the rewarding arena known as connected education.
Although we concur with Steve Jobs’s statement in the quote at the top of this chapter, suggesting that creativity is all about connecting “things,” we suspect he would include “people” under the “things” umbrella, as we cannot truly be creative in isolation. To create, we must connect with others. Creativity is sparked by connecting with other people. Oftentimes, connecting with one person leads to connecting to others, and before too long, this process compounds exponentially and quickly we become connected to an entire network of other people, each of whom is then connected to each other, in some degree. A seemingly haphazard collection of individuals in fact shares a larger bond in common.
When we were young, most of us played a game called “Connect the Dots,” where you drew lines from one dot to another to another until you had created a “whole,” a picture of something recognizable, from a series of scattered, seemingly random, dots on a page. In the previous eight chapters of this book, we highlighted educators from our P2LN as ones to follow in the “Follow 5” feature. After initially reaching out to them to gain their insights into specific aspects of connected education, we decided to go back and ask each of them: Who connected you? If you had to list only one person, who was the person most responsible for getting you started on the oath to connectivity? We started by asking the question of ourselves. Todd said it was most likely Jeff, during a time they were collaborating on another project. Jimmy said it was Jim Wichman. For Jeff, the person who encouraged (even badgered!) him to connect was Nancy Blair. To be completely honest, each of us had to be convinced that taking this next step in our educational journey would be worthwhile. We were all extremely busy already and were dubious that the extra time and effort we would be putting into this venture would be worth it in terms of any tangible benefits. Several years later, we are convinced that it completely changed and re-energized us as educators and as human beings, helping us to learn more than we ever could have done had we not taken this leap of faith.
We were curious to find out who connected our learning network colleagues we have highlighted throughout this book. Most of these connected educators have been connected for many years and together they have hundreds of thousands of educators around the globe who follow them on Twitter as a way to learn from and interact with them. They have been so successful for so long as connected educators, we wondered if they would even recall how they first got started. To our mild surprise, each of the 50 immediately replied, typically with an anecdote about where and when this nudge to get connected occurred, as well as by whom. We share the following list with you to show that each of these well-established educators started at ground zero. If you are reading this book as an educator who is just now pursuing an interest in this area, know that we have all been at that point and we are all thrilled we stuck with, it is due to the learning we have acquired, the relationships we have established, and the experiences we have shared. Every educator on this list below fervently agrees that getting connected has enhanced their lives and careers and they are extremely grateful to the person listed beside their name, who originally encouraged them to connect:
We suspect that many, if not all, of our P2LN colleagues listed above had no real idea what they were getting into when they first dipped their toes into the realm of connected education. Like you, perhaps, they may have been hesitant, even resistant, to get started. They likely had a multitude of excuses as to why they could not or should not devote the time to this new venture. They may have even scoffed at the idea at some point in their professional lives. Regardless of their initial attitudes, however, each of these educators is now passionately committed to continuing to seek new ways to connect with educators around the world as a way to improve their own professional lives as well as the lives of the educators with whom they are connected and the students they serve. Wherever you are currently on your journey to connectivity as an educator, we encourage you to take the next step; it is a giant step forward in your professional life.
Getting connected to other educators around the world is actually quite fun once you learn how to go about creating a learning network and begin interacting with members of your network. However, if it were only about meeting new colleagues and having fun, we doubt that anyone would continue along this path for long. What keeps connected educators energized about their learning network is not only the people with whom they connect, but also the ideas they get connected to, ideas that help them get better at what they do so that their students will have, as our P2LN member says, “a better tomorrow than they had today” (T. Murray, personal communication, July 14, 2014).
With knowledge so readily accessible in today’s technological society, it is no longer the case that any one person has (or needs) the answers to all of life’s questions or that any single individual is the smartest person in the room. Instead, we have reached a point whereby the smartest person in the room is not a person at all, but the room itself, meaning the collective wisdom of all who are gathered together, whether face to face in an actual room or connected together in a virtual room of some sort. The ideas we can brainstorm together are larger in number and higher in quality than the ideas we can generate alone. To gain access to the best ideas in education today—and to share your own voice, offering ideas that you have seen work—you must be connected beyond your immediate network of colleagues. We will not be able to do all that we can for the students we ultimately serve if we are not willing to look outside, as well as within, our own organizations.
Wiseman and McKeown (2010) argued for shifting away from being a genius (trying to be the smartest person in the room) to instead becoming a genius maker (using their intelligence to access and multiply the genius of others). Connected educators are poised to make just such a shift in the field of education, accessing the genius of learning network members and, in turn, empowering them to become even more impactful. Instead of trying to walk into a room (actual or virtual) and show how smart they are, connected educators—like Wiseman’s multipliers—know that such an approach only serves to lower the shared IQ in the room, causing ideas to die and energy to sap. As a result, they apply their own intelligence in a different way, a way that amplifies the intelligence and capability of everyone around them while at the same time letting those around them learn from them and notice the effect they, too, are having on the room. According to Wiseman and McKeown (2010), when they were around multipliers,
People got smarter and better in their presence. Ideas grew; challenges were surmounted; hard problems solved. When these leaders walked into a room, light bulbs started going off over people’s heads. Ideas flew so fast that you had to replay the meeting in slow motion just to see what was going on. Meetings with them were mash-up sessions. These leaders seemed to make everyone around them better and more capable. These leaders weren’t just intelligent themselves—they were intelligence Multipliers.
(p. 5)
Connected educators are education’s version of intelligence multipliers—with the caveat that in any given situation the connected educator acting as the primary multiplier can change; every active member of a P2LN is an intelligence multiplier, sharing their own wisdom, stealing the wisdom of others, building their own capacity, growing the capacity of others, multiplying each other’s intelligence. The network member who shares an idea that works during one Twitter chat, for example, and sparks several other ideas in return, may be the same network member at an Edcamp that weekend who is inspired and gains wisdom from listening to another network member share a different idea which is totally new to him or her at that point in time. Connected educators understand—like Wiseman’s multipliers understand—that how much you know is not what matters if you are trying to learn, grow, and be the best you can be. What matters is how much access you have to what other people know and how you can use that knowledge to create new ideas which help you in your own setting. Connected educators are constantly seeking to find new ideas as well as share their own ideas, connecting what they already know with something they recently learned and at the same time, connecting their learning network members with ideas they think will help them in their own quest.
We hope that many people reading this book already consider themselves to be connected educators; for them, we hope that the ideas we have discussed in this book have validated their own thoughts and behaviors and have sparked at least a few additional ideas about the importance of remaining connected. We also hope that many readers are educators who currently are not connected or are only just beginning on their journey to connectivity. To you, we encourage you to press on in your journey, knowing that if you stay the course, you will find it a course well worth pursuing. We also ask you to connect with us, following us via Twitter, emailing us, or calling us whenever you have an idea to share or a question to ask. As educators who have benefitted immensely from the collective wisdom of our own learning networks, nothing brings us more joy than returning the favor whenever we are able.
At the outset of this book, we stated that serving as a connected educator is more of a mindset than a skill set. It is not so much about what you know and are able to do as it is about who you are and how you behave, including living out the eight key connectors emphasized in this book as characteristics of connected educators. Our abbreviated definition of connected educators as ones who are actively and constantly seeking new opportunities and resources to grow as professionals says it all: they do not have all the answers, nor will they ever be as good as they want to be, but they will leave no stone uncovered in an effort to serve students better tomorrow than they did today. In addition to beginning this book by writing about what a connected educator is, we also stated that it is important to start with asking why it matters. As we stated in the preface, the “why?” varies only slightly among all connected educators with whom we have worked and boils down to a relentless desire to find out how they can be better at what they do in order to better serve their students.
The average day in the life of every educator in the world is one that, from start to finish, is filled with a literal flurry of activities, duties, responsibilities, decisions, problems, conflicts, events, meetings, phone calls, and emails, to name but a few of the many things that consume our ever-so-precious allotment of time. Everywhere we go, educators joke about not even having time to use the restroom or eat lunch, and often times, the joke is more of a reality than it is a joke. As ridiculously busy educators ourselves, we know just how busy you are and we would be lying if we said that becoming a connected educator will require no additional time from your already depleted store. It will require time. It will also require patience to see the results. But if you stay the course, we promise that eventually you will begin to understand that by connecting the dots, you will begin to transform these individual pockets of excellence into a network of excellence.
If you began upon this journey years ago, congratulations on leading the way. If you have yet to start the journey, it is not too late. In fact, starting today would be an ideal time to start. Do not wait until tomorrow. Start small, perhaps by setting aside 20–30 minutes, four or five times a week, to connect with like-minded educators. Some days, you will find yourself on a roll of extremely worthwhile interactions and find that your 20 minutes turned into an hour or more of time invested in connecting. On other occasions, you may find that all you can do is tweet out a quick quote that you like or a single photo of something that happened in your classroom. Start small. Stay the course. Share your story. Reap the benefits that are sure to come your way as a result. Your professional and personal life will be enriched by doing so. Each morning, Jeff sends out a short tweet exhorting those in his learning network to “Work Hard … Have Fun … Be Nice … Today!” When you are surrounded by an active P2LN, you will find yourself surrounded and supported by a host of people who work hard, who have fun, and who are nice … each and every day! Their hard work, fun-loving attitudes, and kind natures will help to make your bad days less bad and your good days even better. You, in turn, will do the same for them. And, together, we will all become smarter and better at what we do because two heads tend to be better than one, three is better still, and so it goes. To paraphrase the words of a quote typically attributed to Woodrow Wilson, we must use not only all the brains we have, but also all the brains we can borrow. Our work is too important to not use all the brainpower available to us. By entering into the world of connected education, we can contribute our own brainpower to the world while learning from the best and the brightest currently serving in the noblest profession of all: the education of our youth.