January 2004

Braving the first major snowstorm of winter in early December, Dan Cherry and Jeff Spiegel spent sixty hours on interstate highways and two airlines while Charles Misakos and Christy Hammer sat in a plane on a runway for a flight that was eventually cancelled. They were all attempting to reach New Orleans for the annual National Staff Development Conference. Dan and Jeff finally got to their destination. Their presentation highlighting the NHSALT project as job embedded professional development for school leaders was well received by participants.

Demonstrating the LoTI as an innovative tool for assessing technology implementation and higher order thinking skill development, the workshop illustrated the integration of the three NHSALT project themes: instructional leadership, technology, and change. School administrators attending the presentation were particularly impressed with the comprehensive nature of the NHSALT project as it related to best practices in leadership development through applied and experiential learning. One superintendent summed up the daylong presentation this way: “Today for me was like putting together a puzzle. A puzzle that I had put together one way and found out the puzzle could be put together in a new and really a better way; namely, curriculum driving technology, not technology as a separate curriculum.”