What's Your Brand?

Let's do a little free-association.

What pops to mind when you hear the word "brand?"

Are you picturing a cowboy, marking a cow as belonging to a certain ranch?

Or maybe you have in mind the logo for a specific company?

Or perhaps you're thinking of a celebrity who endorses a particular product?

Or...maybe you are picturing a person, and the way s/he portrays her/himself on social media?

I've been thinking about that last definition for "brand" lately. I recently have seen quite a few people on Twitter responding to this tweet, sharing their own stories of foolishness...

What's the most On Brand™️ story you have from your early childhood.

Mine is when my mom told me not to touch the electric stove when it was red, because that meant it was hot, so I made direct eye contact with her and slapped my hand down on the stove top.

— mu✨ (@prinxeMu) July 8, 2018

Positivity, Expectations, and Learning from Simulations

The end is in sight for my semester as a student. It's been a very, very busy semester. I'm taking two courses: Research in Education, and Leadership in Educational Technology. Both have been interesting and valuable. Both have been taxing, but in very different ways.

The leadership course especially has been really interesting. We started the course by learning about our own strengths and how those impact our approach to leadership abilities. (We used the StrengthsFinder assessment--it was really helpful for self-knowledge!) One of the key elements of the course was to use a commercial leadership simulation software product, with the idea that practicing skills and techniques in the simulation will translate from the digital sim to real life situations. I was excited from the very beginning to explore simulation-based learning, as this is something I had read of but never really experienced firsthand. The product is called vLeader ("virtual leader," get it?) It has some technical limitations, for sure, but it is an interesting piece of software.

Teaching and Leading: Focusing on Our Strengths

One of the courses I'm taking this semester is about leadership in the field of Educational Technology. I'm very interested in this--it looks to be a great semester!

Our first assignment was to read the book Strengths Based Leadership, by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. It's a quick, easy read and give a good overview to the idea of leading with your strengths, rather than focusing on overcoming your weaknesses. Along with the reading, we were to take the StrengthsFinder assessment, created by the people at Gallup. (Yep, that Gallup.) They have a history of helping organizations and individuals understand their strengths.

This was an interesting assignment for me, but it wasn't the first time I'd taken the StrengthsFinder assessment. About six years ago, along with the rest of the staff at the school where I was teaching at that time I took the test as a part of reading Teach with Your Strengths. It was intended to be a team-building exercise, I think, but we never really did much with the results beyond a one-and-done "professional development" workshop. That might sound more cynical that it actually is; I found the exercise to be very helpful for me to understand my own strength areas.