Living the 7-Habits + Living Technology = Successful Classroom

To me, a habit is something that you do over and over again until the point that you don't even realize that you are doing it anymore....then you do it some more!  We develop habits at a very young age and continue those same habits, or new ones we pick up, throughout adulthood.  Every teacher in the district where I work has been trained in the 7-Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.   The idea is to develop these habits within ourselves so that we can help students develop them throughout their school days.  The Habits will be beneficial to students long after they graduate.  This year, every student in our district (PK-12) will receive some form of 7-Habits education.  These Habits are:

1. be proactive,
2. put first things first,
3. begin with the end in mind,
4. think win-win,
5. seek first to understand, then to be understood,
6. synergize,
7. sharpen the saw,
8. find your voice (not an error - this is the 8th Habit)

Along with the 7-Habits, we are also supposed to be incorporating more technology into our classrooms.  Every classroom has a SMART Board and we have all been trained on using it (thank you RecessTec!).  Later in the month, our Technology Director and I will be providing a Web 2.0 training to a group of our teachers.  We are also working on designing other professional development for this year based around technology integration (different media, creating a web-site, wikis, educational-social sites, etc). Both of us are excited about trying new things in the classroom and sharing it with others.

I'm sure a few teachers look at these two topics (7-Habits + Technology) as "two more things I have to do in my classroom," but most of us are excited and can't get enough of them.  We realize that the 7-Habits and technology aren't additional subjects to teach, but they are tools to help us teach our curriculum in more effective ways.  We also realize that we have to LIVE both of them to be successful in our endeavor.  You can't fake living the 7-Habits and you can't fake living technology.  Students will know if you are genuine with both of these things or if you're only mentioning it because your boss told you that you have to teach it, and his boss told him he has to make you teach it.  Students will know the same way that adults know.

Leaders will emerge in each of these areas, but I see the best leaders in our school district as being the people who live BOTH of these amazing tools.  A good leader doesn't just tell you what to do and how to do it, they LIVE it and they make you want to live it too.  We have to live the 7-Habits and we have to live technology.  This is what will make the integration of the 7-Habits and technology into our classrooms a success!