What Is Strength? (revised)

Strength What is strength and how does one get stronger? Are we ever strong enough? We assume that because we call them ‘strengths’, they are, by definition, ‘enough’. I hardly think so, especially in leadership positions where stasis is death. As a leader I am called to be a constant learner who seeks ever more refined and potent inputs, ideas for my intellection, that I put into practice through empathytoward my colleagues. The bold words above are my five strengths according to Tom Rath’s online personality survey known as the “StrengthsFinder”. By using these existing strength to lift heavier loads, the assumption is that I will get stronger. The essay that follow outlines how I will develop these five strengths into a pedagogy of real power. It will also discuss briefly the value and validity of the 360 degree assessment and the StrengthsFinder. According to the Rathwe benefit more from building on our strengths than working on our weaknesses. His online test, the Clifton Test, determinesand calculates these strengths, explains what they mean, and makes suggestions as to how to use them. What follows is my take on how I will best use my strengths (Input, Intellection, Empathy, Learner, Ideation) to become an educational leader. 1. Input : I yearn to create a satisfying and creative personal learning environment. Productivity gurus like David Allen with his Getting Things Done system are my ultimate aim, but I seek to use my dissertation as a focus forthe input. Since my interests center on technology use it makes sense for my inputs to be gathered within a technology net. I am doing this with a blog (http://tex2all.com/EdDoc), a wiki (http://tex2all.com/wkueddoc/), a browser-based bibliographic and research tool (http://www.zotero.org/), a social bookmarking tool (http://www.diigo.com/profile/tellio), and an information aggregator (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/07325911530332758494). 2. Intellection: I seek to establish networks of like-minded (pun intended) folks to share my interests in Web tools and ideas. I have started to work with K-12 writing teachers (http://wkuwp.ning.com/) while at the same time reflecting on the community of practice that is developing there. This is a way to combine my desire for sharing ideas with a need to think deeply about them by myself. I am sponsoring within my university’s distance learning division a series of technology presentations that focus on online pedagogy (http://www.wku.edu.libsrv.wku.edu/tsonline/facultyLiaisonSeries.html) as well

as a similar one for my doctoral cohort whose focus is on using social networking tools for writing the dissertation. I need to push this strength out into the wider realm of online pedagogy by becoming a part of the larger world of those who think about and ask questions about how we can best use Web tools in higher education. I have already started this by auditing a massively online course sponsored by two leaders in the field, George Siemens and Stephen Downes (http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism). I need to do more. This includes joining a few organizations of interest including systems thinking (http://www.solonline.org/) and communities of practice (http://cpsquare.org/) groups. 3. Empathy: This strength is double edged. It tends to be a faceto-face ability. Extending that skill to peers and students online is my next big challenge. Success in my online work with K-12 teachers involved in the WKU Writing Project’s new web presence will depend upon me growing this skill as will work in their Leadership Council. How do you create empathy over a distance? I am currently studying this. In fact it will probably be the basis for much of my dissertation work—a study of effective online communities of practice. It is clear that I need to partner with someone who has strong command skills (my program adviser, Dr. John Hagamanserves as such a one) and another with activator skills (I am on a quest to find such a person now to help me manage the Writing Project’s website). I also need to put myself in a mentoring position to those who might be interested in doing what I am doing in educational leadership technology. 4. Learner: I believe humans are defined (or at least this human is) by the desire to bring in what the poet Ezra Pound called “the news that stays news”. This is my prime credo in the classroom right next to E.M. Forster’s command to “always connect”. I am always trying to find better ways to bring in and redirect input. The new learner is at the center of a connected, ‘always on’ universe and, most importantly learns by making more connections within and outside of the mind. This insight that our brains exist as much outside of ourselves as within is the central of connectivismand systems thinking. I seek to be this situated learner, one who is more and more consciously embedded in a jungle of knowing, what Marvin Minskycalled “a society of mind”. My goal is create a system that actively charts my progress in the areas of systems thinking and social networking systems. I also need to work on creating ‘islands’ of time for intellectual

work since I do best when I can both follow the breadcrumbs of others as well as blaze new trails. 5. Ideation: I yearn to create new ideas or new combinations of old ideas. I need to create a personal learning environment that is a spawning ground for this action. I think that means studying creative people and trying out their ideas. I am reading Robert Fritz and George Leonard as well as practicing mindfulness meditation as part of my goal of creating an environment for new ideas to develop. I am also working on developing my visualization skills through three tools: Back of the Napkin (http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/), Toodlelist (http://todoodlist.com/), and mindmapping (http://www.mindmeister.com/13193859). The assumption behind this survey instrument and behind the 360 assessment is simple: they measure something accurately. By all accounts there are thousands of ‘personality’ tests in an industry that generateshundreds of millions of dollars each year for private testing companies. Do they work? The best that might be said is that theymeasure a static slice in time, but that they are rarely predictive or determinative. Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, has recounted a very telling storythat summarizes the problems with personality assessments. The quote is long, but worth copying in its entirety, When Alexander (Sandy) Nininger was twenty-three, and newly commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army, he was sent to the South Pacific to serve with the 57th Infantry of the Philippine Scouts. It was January, 1942. The Japanese had just seized Philippine ports at Vigan, Legazpi, Lamon Bay, and Lingayen, and forced the American and Philippine forces to retreat into Bataan, a rugged peninsula on the South China Sea. There, besieged and outnumbered, the Americans set to work building a defensive line, digging foxholes and constructing dikes and clearing underbrush to provide unobstructed sight lines for rifles and machine guns. Nininger's men were on the line's right flank. They labored day and night. The heat and the mosquitoes were nearly unbearable. Quiet by nature, Nininger was tall and slender, with wavy blond hair. As Franklin M. Reck recounts in "Beyond the Call of Duty," Nininger had graduated near the top of his class at West Point, where he chaired the lecture-and-entertainment committee. He had spent many hours with a friend, discussing everything from history to the theory of relativity. He loved the theatre. In the evenings, he could often be found sitting by the fireplace in the living room of his commanding officer, sipping tea and listening to Tchaikovsky. As a boy, he once saw his father kill a hawk and had been repulsed. When he went into active service, he wrote a

friend to say that he had no feelings of hate, and did not think he could ever kill anyone out of hatred. He had none of the swagger of the natural warrior. He worked hard and had a strong sense of duty. In the second week of January, the Japanese attacked, slipping hundreds of snipers through the American lines, climbing into trees, turning the battlefield into what Reck calls a "gigantic possum hunt." On the morning of January 12th, Nininger went to his commanding officer. He wanted, he said, to be assigned to another company, one that was in the thick of the action, so he could go hunting for Japanese snipers. He took several grenades and ammunition belts, slung a Garand rifle over his shoulder, and grabbed a sub machine gun. Starting at the point where the fighting was heaviest—near the position of the battalion's K Company—he crawled through the jungle and shot a Japanese soldier out of a tree. He shot and killed snipers. He threw grenades into enemy positions. He was wounded in the leg, but he kept going, clearing out Japanese positions for the other members of K Company, behind him. He soon ran out of grenades and switched to his rifle, and then, when he ran out of ammunition, used only his bayonet. He was wounded a second time, but when a medic crawled toward him to help bring him back behind the lines Nininger waved him off. He saw a Japanese bunker up ahead. As he leaped out of a shell hole, he was spun around by a bullet to the shoulder, but he kept charging at the bunker, where a Japanese officer and two enlisted men were dug in. He dispatched one soldier with a double thrust of his bayonet, clubbed down the other, and bayonetted the officer. Then, with outstretched arms, he collapsed face down. For his heroism, Nininger was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first American soldier so decorated in the Second World War. (http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_20_a_personality.html) After relating this story Gladwell argues that no test could have predicted Nininger’s‘strengths’. Consider another limitation of these survey shown in the concept map below.

This map (also, available online at http://www.mindmeister.com/13193859) shows four major ideas I am interested in at the moment, superimposedupon the same plane. In red we have the Clifton StrengthsFinder, in black the 360 degree assessment categories, in green we have Peter Senge’s five disciplines, and in pink critiques of StrengthsFindersand 360 degree assessments. This map is designed to show only part of the complexity we (at least anyone entering into WKU’s doctoral program) brings to the task at hand in this particular moment. It is a crude and partial snapshot of what Marvin Minsky called the ‘society of mind’. The reductionist tendency behind the map should at least give us pause as to the permanent validity of their results. In other words, I don’t trust ‘em. Even more devastating is the understanding that as much as half of our ‘disposition’ may be inherited and not readily accessible through self-questioning surveys like the StrengthsFinder. Social psychologist Timothy Wilson’s work suggests that we are of two minds—one that is adaptive and unconscious (think Nininger in battle) and the other constructed (think StrengthsFinder). What I mean to say is very commonsensical: strengths are emergent and may even come from our so-called ‘weaknesses,’buried and genetic. The insight I draw from the 360 assessment and the StrengthsFinder is that I need to be aware as a leader of what emerges as I create with others. I believe that these ‘emergent traits’ are measured in context and arise out of our interactions. Jung may have been only partly correct when he wrote, "Every individual is an exception to the rule… To stick labels on people at first sight is nothing but a childish parlor game." This is far from a child’s game. We ignore at our peril the occasions for which we rise and fall for that is where we ‘find’ our truest strengths.