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I’m very pleased to be a member of this new national organization, edleader21, a professional learning community for 21st century education leaders run by my friend and fellow Tucsonan, Ken Kay, the founder and longtime President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

In this new video, Ken explains that “we’ve been talking for years about the need to create 21st century skills for our young people, but we haven’t really talked about another critical element, and that is how important is it to have a generation of 21st century leaders.”

The video features a set of outstanding 21st century education leaders and superintendents, including my friend Pam Moran, the superintendent of Albermarle county, Virginia, and my until-recently fellow Tucson educational leader, Elizabeth Celenia-Fagen.

In the video, Pam Moran argues passionately for 21st century learning for our students:

the reality is that old style teaching, 20th century teaching, is really over.  In this day and age,  it is kids active, kids engaged, kids being able to find out whatever they need at any moment in time in order to be able to accomplish whatever jobs they want to accomplish, whether it is in school, out of school, in careers, or in college.

Liz Fagen goes directly to leadership, asking how do we bring these important changes to our schools?

Think Big, Start Small.  When you take those best people, those early adopters, those innovators, and you put resources behind them, they will develop, they will exceed your expectations, and then from there it spreads like wildfire.

I am especially taken with the comments from Jack Dale, Superintendent of Virginia’s Fairfax county:

the breakthrough we need to make in looking at 21st century skills is not looking at them in discrete units but looking at them holistically and how well they are interconnected: What you want is leaders who think that way as well.

This is among my great passions: to support and encourage fellow educators on our shared journey to become the 21st century leaders our students need us to be.  With this in mind, it is a great pleasure to be a part of edleader21.