A Purposeful Use of Twitter for Global Connectivity

Social Media

Moments after I made the districtwide robocall canceling school during a nasty Nor’easter, my favorite student tweet of all time popped into my Twittersphere: “Dr. Brady rocks! This woman should drop a record cuz her voice is music to my ears!”

Thanks to Twitter, I could “hear” the invisible cheer of students on a late snowy evening and join in the active Twitter exchanges as the good news of a snow day raced across the Dobbs Ferry community. It wasn’t exactly a global moment, but it was pretty important in our little corner of the world.

It has been more than 10 years since I joined Twitter as an active user. I relish my connections with current and former students, staff and parents from three school districts and a universe of people and professionals who share my world.

As a superintendent for 14 years, I have a lot to say. With the amplification of my voice using social media, I am able to speak up and speak out — not necessarily as superintendent in Dobbs Ferry but as an educational thought leader.

Forum of Ideas

An important point for superintendents to consider: Are you acting as the voice of your district or the voice of yourself

As a superintendent, my time is compressed. The days of reading a professional journal from cover to cover are gone. Yet each day, with a login to Twitter, I discover a trove of interesting posts, photos and links to articles, blogs, videos and resources I can skim and decide whether to dive deeper. My teachers and community appreciate that I am out there in Twitter world at an unexpected hour “liking” their own posts, sometimes retweeting with an encouraging comment or thoughts of my own.

It is hard to imagine the narrow opportunities of the past where I was only able to communicate with whoever was in the room. Every day, I leverage Twitter to challenge others to consider new ideas. My administrators and teachers do a great job of using Twitter to share photos and information about activities in our schools, so I leave this task to them. I use Twitter to take a big-picture view of the landscape.

I share the edgy perspectives that shape my approach to leadership. Twitter provides a window into my thinking and an invitation to discover extraordinary people, educators and non-educators, who push and inspire me. Through Twitter, I can lead from within the community, not from the top.

Provocative Notions

As the leader of a school district with an International Baccalaureate program, I find Twitter enables me to model IB concepts such as international mindedness. Connecting with educational thinkers globally in real time is uniquely Twitter. I rarely turn to television or print media for breaking news. I can create a network of news instead of being a passive consumer.

When Netflix aired the controversial series “13 Reasons Why,” a drama about a teenage girl who commits suicide and leaves behind audio tapes for 13 people whom she considers responsible for her actions, I weighed in on this topic. I wanted to start the conversation by looking at both sides and retweeted an article from MindShift, “Is ‘13 Reasons Why’ Dangerous for Kids or a Way to Talk about Difficult Topics?” This tweet led to my appearance on public radio WNYC to discuss the issue and how families might best approach their children about this difficult subject.

I follow fewer than 300 people on Twitter. Some are great thinkers (Giselle Martin-Kniep @GiselleLCI), education rebels (Will Richardson @willrich45), out-of-the-box marketers (Seth Godin @ThisIsSethsBlog), authors (Adam Grant @AdamMGrant) and education gurus (Carol Dweck @MindsetWorks). I’ve tweeted about schools promoting civic engagement, student anxiety, homework, mindfulness, innovative classrooms and an article titled “Leadership: Fear Based or Future Focused.”

You, too, can be an education provocateur on Twitter.