Introduction- The Tipping Point and Change in Education

My wife and I were on a road trip, we were newly weds taking our first summer vacation together. The plans were to travel through to the west coast and hit Seattle for a couple of days, make our way back through Vancouver, visit with some friends, hit the Okanogan area, specifically Summerland and then return home to Calgary. We arrived in Seattle thinking that we were going to find some camping and decided to stay in a hotel in the downtown area. After our first day of wandering along Pikes Pier, we returned to have a rest. While watching television I came across this guy talking on the local Seattle public television station. He looked like what you would stereotypically expect as an intellectual/academic.

He was speaking to the city council of Seattle about Major Junior hockey in Canada and the role that the month that the player was born in having an impact on how successful the player was. Needless to say I was hooked. The next day I talked with my wife about it. The book that the talk was based on was called "Outliers", one of which has made him a very popular writer.

Getting back to school in the fall of last year I was in the depths of trying to survive teaching. My eleventh year, I was teaching a highly academic course of chemistry with a colleague of mine who is an engineer, not a chemical one. We were teaching a course with little support as the individuals that had taught it in the past were no longer at the school. We were two newbies, excited at the prospect of this new teaching experience yet quickly overwhelmed for another school year. Needless to say I was not able to pursue any personal reading nor explore any academic endeavors, such as taking a course for my masters in education. Of course as you would have it my wife and I were expecting a child in the month of November.

It was not until the end of June when I was able to clear this fog that had enveloped me for the previous ten months. I was looking for something to do other than supervise another exam when a colleague of mine heard that I was interested in Malcolm Gladwell's work. As fate would have it (not that fate is something a fundamental postmodern thinker would ever write in a blog), the individual I was speaking with actually just finished reading two of his books, one of which was "The Tipping Point- How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference." He gave me his copies of both books and said pass them along to someone when you are finished with them.

Having enrolled in a masters in education focusing in leadership I would have to say that the itch that made me enroll is this idea of the leader and what makes a good one. I spent my time in two schools over the past eleven years as a full time employee, and have had the opportunity to work under six different principals throughout that time. Having had the opportunity to explore leadership from the inside, working within a leadership team, I saw the impact that the leadership can have on a building. I was inspired to pursue this further and here I am.

The purpose of this blog will be to explore Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point through the lens of applications for leaders, specifically school leaders. I hope to take you on my journey as I read and reflect on it's implications for leaders. It is my desire that through these short posts I will be able to form and explore my ideas on leadership. This experience will be an organic one in nature, at this particular point I am not sure where it will lead me or you as the reader. So off, may this be a journey that is as insightful for you as it will be for me.

References

Gladwell, M. (accessed November 16, 2010). Gladwell.com. Retrieved from http://www.gladwell.com/bio.html