KnowAtom's Blog

Communicating Among Tribes

Oct 30, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

Characteristics of the key tribal stages.

If you're looking for some pointers on how to understand what type of a tribe you're dealing with—important if, say, you're a new principal to a building and have multiple tribes involved—you can look to the indicators in the image above. Stage 1 tribe members will say things such as, "The kids have no chance." They will be isolated, will have a Me vs. Them attitude, can see no way out, and don't understand why they should bother.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership

Understand Your Tribes

Oct 28, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

If we want to create inquiry-based next generation classrooms in which students are free to use their creative, evaluative and analytical skills, we must first ensure that the leadership is in place to create those environments. It all comes down to our teams, first and foremost. To understand why this is so important and how it impacts education, it is first important to understand tribal leadership itself, and how we choose to organize ourselves in community.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership

Are School Leaders Tribal Leaders?

Mar 9, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

As educational shocks occur, they are going to affect everyone. If everyone can collaborate, think of solutions, look at the accepted practices and think about the organizational threads of execution, you are going to fall into alignment and be best adapted to handle this change to Next Generation Science Standards.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership

Communication in School Tribal Cultures

Feb 2, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

This post is the third post in a leadership series about the connection between the tribes that make up any school or district and the ability to make meaningful changes to create a next generation learning environment. The first post explored why understanding tribal leadership can help school leaders make the shift to the Next Generation Science Standards, and the second post explored the five tribes in the context of an educational environment.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership, School Climate and Culture

An Introduction to Tribal Leadership, Part 2

Jan 31, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

 

In Part 1 of this series, we wrote about how the concept of tribal leadership, from the book Tribal Leadership, can help school leaders looking to implement the Next Generation Science Standards. (If you missed the first post, click here.)

According to the authors of that book, we are all members of several tribes. We may belong to a political tribe that favors one party or another. We may be a member of another tribe defined by its religious belief, it's preference for a particular sports team or one's chosen profession—soldier, factory worker, teacher, or lawyer. Tribes form naturally around ideas and values. They have a central culture, ideas, and values in common.

Within a school building, there might be one tribe or multiple tribes. The researchers defined a tribe as being between about 10 to around 150 people, made up of like-minded people with shared values. Every tribe has a dominant culture, which falls on a scale of one to five. Each of the five stages has overarching views of the world and speaks a common language.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership, School Climate and Culture

An Introduction to Tribal Leadership, Part 1

Jan 31, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

In 2008, Dave Logan and John King published the book, “Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.” This book summarized their research into the different “tribes” that make up every organization, and described how leaders can “assess, identify, and upgrade their tribes’ cultures, one stage at a time.”

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Topics: Tribal Leadership, School Climate and Culture

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