What’s the Problem that Schools Solve?
Came across this quote from Clay Shirky in a Tweet by Jay Rosen:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
What are the problems that schools still solve that they are engaged in preserving? What are the new problems that schools don’t solve that they don’t want to deal with?
Just wondering.
I’ve been reading Linda Darling-Hammond’s new book The Flat World and Education, and while I’m finding it rich with detail about everything that’s troubling about the US education system (and the potential fixes), I’m also struck by the fact that there is very little here in terms of a meaningful discussion around what role technology plays in educating for a “flat world.” Kind of ironic.
Anyway, I’ve been particularly interested in her section on professional development and the huge disparity she writes about in terms of the time that teachers in other countries get for both individual and collaborative learning and planning as opposed to the US. She writes, “the landscape of supports for quality teaching looks like Swiss cheese.” In short, we spend more, much more time in the classroom than in other countries, we get only a fraction of the time for professional learning, and there is a huge disparity in the quality and types of professional development that teachers in the states receive. (Not to mention a huge disparity in the amount of pre-service education and on the job training we get before even entering a classroom.) And even more troubling, according to Darling-Hammond, is just the general inconsistency in the delivery of professional development. Here are a couple of extended snips that paint the picture pretty compellingly:
No high-achieving country approaches teaching in this way. These nations realized that, without a comprehensive framework for developing strong teaching, new resources in the system are less effective than they otherwise would be.: Reforms are poorly implemented where faculty and leaders lack the capacity to put them into action; districts and schools are often unable to develop and maintain comprehensive training opportunities at scale, and scarce professional development dollars are wasted where teachers turn over regularly. Furthermore, when a profession’s knowledge is not organized and made available to the practitioners who need it most, advances in the state of both knowledge and practice are slowed (195).
If teachers, principals, superintendents, and other professionals do not share up-to-date knowledge about effective practices, the field runs around in circles: Curriculum and teaching practices are inconsistent, many poor decisions are made, and the efforts of those who are successful are continually undermined and counteracted by the activities of those who are uninformed and unskilled. The American educational landscape is littered with examples of successful programs and schools that were later undone by newly arrived superintendents and school boards marching to a less well-informed drummer. Equally common are successful initiatives that were not sustained when the teachers and principals who made them succeed moved on to be replaced by others with less skill. Good teachers create little oases for themselves, while others who are less well prepared adopt approaches that are ineffective or even sometimes harmful. Some seek knowledge that is not readily available to them; others batten down the hatches and eventually become impermeable to better ideas. Schools are vulnerable to vendors selling educational snake oils when educators and school boards lack sufficient shared knowledge of learning, curriculum, instruction, and research to make sound decisions about programs and materials. Students experience an instructional hodgepodge caused by the failure of the system to provide the knowledge and tools needed by the educators who serve them (196).
And in terms of the effectiveness of the professional development we deliver when do make time for it?
Short workshops of the sort generally found to trigger little change in practice are the most common learning opportunity for US teachers…A summary of experimental research found that short-term professional development experiences of 14 hours or less appear to have no effect on teachers’ effectiveness, while a variety of well-designed content-specific learning opportunities averaging about 49 hours over a 6- to 12-month period of time were associated with sizable gains: students of participating teachers gained about 21 percentile points more than other students on the achievement tests used to evaluate student learning (205).
I know there is nothing earth-shatteringly new with any of this, but what is particularly daunting is coming up with a solution. I know in the work that Sheryl and I have done with PLP has attempted to change the model to at least give teachers an extended period of time in an immersive environment, one that addresses most of the issues that Darling-Hammond cites. But even with 6-7 months to learn deeply, we know that many of our participants struggle with time. A few schools actually give their teams release time on a regular basis to talk about and reflect on their experience, and there’s no question those teams get further down the road than most others. Most who participate have to make or find the time on their own, and those that do walk away with a deeper personal and practical understanding of what’s changing.
Darling-Hammond advocates for state and federal intervention in much of this, writing that “ultimately, a well-designed state and national infrastructure that ensures that schools have access to well-prepared teachers and knowledge about best practices is absolutely essential.” I’m not optimistic that will happen anytime soon. We can’t seem to agree on much in this country these days. I’m wondering instead when we’ll get to the point where a major part of teacher preparation is teaching teachers how to teach themselves, how to be transparent, networked and “do it yourself” learners. Not that there still wouldn’t be a need for structured professional learning, but that we’d be a lot further down the road, I think, if the culture of teaching moved toward a more open, collaborative, shared enterprise than it is today.
Recently a school administrator shared a story that reminded me why I need to spend more time talking to more people outside of the echo chamber.
She said that a group of parents had requested a meeting to discuss the methods of a particular teacher and his use of technology. It seemed this teacher had decided to forgo the textbook and have students write their own on a wiki, that he published a great deal of his students’ work online, that he taught them and encouraged them to use Skype to interview people who they had researched and identified as valuable voices in their learning, and that he shared all of his lectures and classwork online for anyone, not just the students in his class, could access them and use them under a Creative Commons license.
When the administrator got the phone call from the parent who wanted to set up the meeting, she asked for some sense of what the problem was. The reply?
“Our students don’t need to be a part of a classroom experiment with all this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with real textbooks and real tests.”
Sigh.
The New National Ed Tech Plan…Pinch Me
The first thing I want to say to the authors of the new National Ed Tech Plan (pdf) is this: DON’T TEASE ME.
Please.
I’m trying not to get overly optimistic here, but suffice to say, if the rhetoric is any indication of the direction, we may have actually turned a corner.
And more.
Sure, there’s some stuff not to like, and a lot of vagueness as to how we get there, but I’m giving this an A-. Read it.
But here’s the thing…anyone else see a big disconnect between this vision and RTTT? Are these folks really in the same administration?
The words make me optimistic. The deeds so far? Not so much.
So, what do we do about that?
So here’s a 5:30 am brain dump because I woke up thinking about all of the minds on fire at TEDxNYED yesterday and there’s no way I’m going back to sleep, not with the brilliant voices the likes of Andy Carvin teaching me how social media can save people’s lives, saying “voluteerism has been redefined, and we’re the ones redefining it;” and Michael Wesch, saying “there is no opting out of new media,” making the point that we’re going to be living in a world of almost ubiquitous networks, almost ubiquitous computing, almost ubiquitous information at almost unlimited speed, about almost everything, almost everywhere, from almost anywhere, on almost all kinds of devices, but that “almost” is “the site of all of our battles,” and that to fight those battles we need “open, daring, caring, collabortarive and voracious learners;” and Lawrence Lessig, my hero, who once again challenged us to challenge the staus quo and change the world; and David Wiley, who blew me away with more than one line but especially this one, that “if there is no sharing, there is no education;” and Jay Rosen who made me think deeply about the potential at our fingertips when we participate in the crowdsourced compilation of information to change the world, wondering as he spoke, how do we teach this to our kids, (Jay, whose self-description as “an introvert who has learned to fake conviviality” rang really true, and how when I Tweeted that out a whole bunch of people replied with “me too”); and Jeff Jarvis who pretty much threw education under the bus but made a pretty compelling comparison between our current state and the current turmoil in journalism, (seeing him being interviewed in the hallway afterward, Flip video camera in his face, saying “the things that are happening to journalism right now are going to happen to education sooner than we think”); and George Siemens, who after throwing Jeff under the bus, echoed David, saying “when we learn transparently, we become teachers”, me going “Yes!” inside, and then George adding “The solutions to the problems of education concern me more than the problems themselves” which occupied most of my time during my 75-minute drive home; and Amy Bruckman who talked about how we need to be active managers of our own learning; and Dan Meyer, the very tall Dan Meyer who so eloquently articulated the need for and showed how to get to “patient problem solving” for our kids, me thinking about my own kids’ impatience, and, in turn, my own when I was a kid (and to some extent, still as an adult…wondering if having Dan as a teacher might have changed that); and, finally Chris Lehmann, amped up on about 38 hours straight without sleep, making the articulate and compelling and passionate case that we need schools, we want schools, but we want them to be places of inquiry, of love, and of compassion, not places of standardization, thinking about all of these ideas and the conversations at the breaks with Sylvia Martinez and Christian Long and Alex Ragone and Amy Bowllan and many others, and for the most part wanting to spend every day like this, steeped in the ideas and the interactions and the passion, but all the while, in the back of my brain, wondering, “what now?”…what’s going to change?…a few hundred people in the room, a few thousand more online, and a few thousand more soon to be watching the archives, but still, wondering…how much further does this get us?…and wondering, feeling the discomfort of the lack of diversity in the room, lack of real diversity in the opinions, the fear of spending yet another day in the echo chamber which, no doubt has me energized and has my brain buzzing and has me thinking and reflecting but also has me wondering “so what?”…wondering how many of these conversations are going to be required to push education in a meaningfully different direction, wondering if our “solutions” are any better than our problems, wondering if we’re seeking one solution when we should be seeking many, that we’re moving away from an easy “one size fits all” vision of education to a much messier, more difficult to imagine “many sizes for many learners” vision, and wondering, finally, how we make sense of that for our kids.
Time for Action: The Big Questions
Apologies for not getting back to this last week as promised. As sometimes happens, life got in the way of blogging. Not regretting it at all, btw. ;0)
So, whaddaya say we actually try to do something with these Big Questions, as in turn them into a document that schools can use to frame their own conversations around change? Based on your comments and conversations, I threw together a wiki with a plan of action. Rather than bore you with the details here, why not go and check it out and start contributing your ideas?
Looking forward to learning along with you.
As we continue to have conversations around change with the 800 or so practitioners were working with in PLP, I continue to be struck by the frustration I’m feeling at the seeming separation between teaching and learning. I know that this isn’t new; I’ve been writing about teachers’ difficulties with being learners first here for a long time. When presented with the concept of building learning networks for themselves through the use of social learning tools, of making connections with other learners around the world who share their passions, many just cannot seem to break through the teacher lens and be “selfish” about it, to make it a personal shift before making a professional shift in the classroom. We want to teach with these tools first, many times at the expense, it seems, of making any real change in the way we see that learning interaction for our students because we don’t experience that change for ourselves.
More and more, though, as I look at my own kids and try to make sense what’s going to make them successful, I care less and less about a particular teacher’s content expertise and more about whether that person is a master learner, one from whom Tess or Tucker can get the skills and literacies to make sense of learning in every context, new and old. What I want are master learners, not master teachers, learners who see my kids as their apprentices for learning. Before public schooling, apprenticeship learning was the way kids were educated. They learned a trade or a skill from masters. When we moved to compulsory schooling, kids began to learn not from master doers so much as from master knowers, because we decided there were certain things that every child needed to know in order to be “educated.” And we looked for adults who could impart that knowledge, who could teach it in ways that every child could learn it.
My sense is that we need to rethink the role of those adults once again, and that we’re coming full circle. George Siemens had a great post last week about “Teaching in Social and Technological Networks” and he asked the same question that we had asked at Educon: What is the role of the teacher? It changes:
Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher. Networks thin classroom walls. Experts are no longer “out there” or “over there”. Skype brings anyone, from anywhere, into a classroom. Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
George goes on to suggest a totally different way of thinking about “teaching” one where “instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.” And he discusses seven different roles that teachers will play, all of which are worth the read. The one that sticks out for me at least is the role of modelling, where he writes:
Modelling has its roots in apprenticeship. Learning is a multi-faceted process, involving cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions. Knowledge is similarly multi-faceted, involving declarative, procedural, and academic dimensions. It is unreasonable to expect a class environment to capture the richness of these dimensions. Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.
But I would argue it goes further than that, that apprenticeship for every student in our classrooms these days is not so much grounded in a trade or a profession as much as it is grounded in the process of becoming a learner. Chris Lehmann likes to say that we don’t teach subjects, we teach kids. And I’ll add to that: we teach kids to learn. We can’t teach kids to learn unless we are learners ourselves, and our understanding of learning has to encompass the rich, passion-based interactions that take place in these social learning spaces online. Sure, I expect my daughter’s science teacher to have some content expertise around science, no doubt. But more, I expect him to be able to show her how to learn more about science on her own, without him, to give her the mindset and the skills to create new science, not just know old science.
How we change that mindset in teachers is another story, however, and I know it has a lot to do with expectations, traditional definitions, outcomes, culture and a whole lot more. But we need to change it to more of what Zac Chase from SLA talks about in this snip I Jinged from the “What is Educon?” video posted by Joseph Conroy. (Apologies for the audio and the stupid pop up ads.)
We still need to be teachers, but kids need to see us learning at every turn, using traditional methods of experimentation as well as social technologies that more and more are going to be their personal classrooms. How do we make more of that happen?
First of all, thanks to all of you who chimed in as to how to go about crowdsourcing this idea. Some great ideas that I’m going to try to navigate here in an attempt to offer a consensus plan. And just for the record, I’m struggling a bit with what the role of “Manager of a Crowdsourced Project” is since I don’t want to be the final arbiter or any of the decisions made by the participants but also feel like we’ll be spinning our wheels without some attempt and creating a process. There is also the danger of taking an eternity to agree on a process. So, with that said, and with the knowledge that not everyone is going to be happy, here are some suggested next steps:
Idea 1: A couple of people floated the idea of asking for “lead” editors for each of the questions, setting up a separate space each of those questions, and opening it up to having people come in and add their thoughts. The “leads” would then make a concerted effort to fashion those thoughts and ideas into a coherent draft, and then put that draft up for review. At that point, people could revise, edit, etc., and we could also add a space for dissent or at least a conversation around competing ideas.
Idea 2: A number of folks noted that most of this flows from the really big question of “What is the purpose of school?”Perhaps we should tackle that one first and then set up pages for the other questions?
Idea 3: A few people suggested a combining or re-ordering of the questions. I do think that, for example, that questions 1, 2 and 9 could be merged into one, which would allow for some of the runner-ups to be included. I’ll throw in my own personal bias here: I think there has to be a discussion around assessment somewhere in here. I don’t want to open up a whole ‘nother round of voting on questions, however, so if it’s easier, we can just go with what we have.
Some other random ideas to consider:
Seems people are pretty interested in seeing this turn into some type of “real” document that schools can use as a starting point for conversations. At some point, we’ll have to get really clear on our intents as well, and we’ll have to define some process for the actual crowdsourcing piece. But I’m thinking we can move this forward without too much delay.
Thoughts?
For those who may have missed it, or anyone who wants to relive the experience, here is the Elluminate session archive for the interview with Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, authors of Rethinking Education in an Era of Technology. The mind bending sometimes thought provoking chat is here.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and apologies to those who were shut out when we maxed out our seats. You’ll have to get there earlier when we continue this conversation with Jon Becker on March 4 at 8 pm.
So as of today, 220 of you were kind enough to vote on what you thought were the 10 most important questions from the list that we generated at Educon. Here are the “winners” at the moment:
And here were the next three that didn’t quite make the cut:
You can see the complete results here. I think it’s kind of interesting what didn’t get many votes. Obviously, few of us think physical space schools are going away anytime soon. And there doesn’t seem to be too much worry about the level of commitment schools have to kids. No doubt, the wording of some of these could probably have been better, I’m sure, but I think these 10 capture the challenges pretty well.
So what next?
The “plan” I proposed for this last week was to tackle each of these questions individually in a blog post and ask for comments to extend whatever thin thinking I threw at it with the eventual goal of “crowdsourcing” or collaboratively writing a response to each one. (And let me be clear, I’m talking crowdsourcing the response in the way Wikipedia does it.) If we’re really game, we might put this together in some form that could serve as a conversation starter for schools willing to tackle some of these “big” questions in their own planning for change process. Maybe even publish it as a book on Lulu.
So I’m wondering two things: First, what your reactions are to this list, and second, what are your thoughts on how we can turn this into something more “actionable?”
“Re-Thinking Education” Interview Monday Night
Just wanted to give a quick heads up that I’ll be interviewing Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, authors of Rethinking Education in an Age of Technology, this upcoming Monday night at 8 pm EST. More than any other in the past year, this book has really been pushing my thinking about the urgency of the shift and the potential outcomes if we don’t begin to address them. I used quotes from the book to frame my Educon conversation and to start the crowdsource project that we’re trying to undertake. (More on that in a bit.)
It would be great if you would add some questions for Allan and Rich in the comments below. It will be a quick hour, I’m sure, but one that I hope might start and or further some conversations in the network or in your schools. Here’s the link for the Elluminate room and we’ve got a hundred seats. Hope you can join us.
Continuing the Educon Conversation
(Note: Your participation is requested below…)
So it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get to this reflection on the conversation I led at Educon. I hope those in attendance and online feel as I do that it was a pretty compelling session, and I like the fact that we had a tangible albeit undeveloped takeaway. I’m hoping maybe we can dive more deeply into it here.
Just as a reminder, here’s a link to the session description. We had about 100 people in the room and another 40 or so online grappling with the question “What are the ‘big’ conversations that schools should be having in relation to the ‘tectonic’ shifts that are occuring with social learning online?” After some small and large group discussion, here is the list we came up with in no particular order:
- What does an educated person look like today?
- What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?
- If some percentage of schooling is socialization and relationship building, how would that happen outside of school?
- How are we going to shift the expectations for schools from all of our constituents?
- How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?
- How does our thinking of the physical space change?How do we support the changing role of teacher?
- What is the role of the teacher?Do we really need a physical space?
- How do K-12 and higher ed have this conversation about change together?
- What is the purpose of school?How do we teach kids ethics and citizenship?
- How do we continue to make school available to everyone?
- Is school a resource or it something we do?
- How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?
- How do we ensure that every child has access to learning opportunities outside of school?
- How do we make school fun?
- What should be compulsory about school?
- How do we make sure that the weakest forms of traditional schooling don’t get amplified by technology?
- How do we avoid the social justice implications of an elitist model of education?
- How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?
- How do we become better equipped, both as individuals and as systems, to deal with change?
- What is preventing us from being adaptable to change?
- How do we rethink the reallocation of resources to support individualized instruction?
- We will be creating a new class of marginalized people with these shifts?
- What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?
- How do public schools prove that they are commtted to education all children?
- What risks are we willing to accept?
- What is our obligation to collaborate with other systems going through similar changes?
- How do we measure or assess the effectiveness of individualized self-directed learning outside of school?
- How do you validate or evaluate informal learning?
- How do we help students discover their passions?
- Who is going to pay for equity of access to these environments?
- How can we use our best resources more effectively for our students?
May just be me, but that’s a pretty impressive list. And pretty daunting in some respects. I think many of these are worth delving into further, and I’m hoping you might be willing to help narrow these down to the “top 10″ of these and then start a conversation on each one of them through a series of blog posts.
I’ve added all of these to a Google form where you can check off the 10 that you think might be most worth diving into. (I would embed it, but it’s not rendering very well in the blog.) If we could get a bunch of people to chime in over the next couple of days, then perhaps we could really crowdsource some responses. Heck, maybe we can even collectively write a book around these ideas that might work as a guide to starting these conversations in schools. Dream big.)
Anyone game?
Transformative Technology? Really?
So I ran across this Smart Ease of Use video in the course of one of our threads in a PLP cohort and I have to say, I can’t seem to shake it. I mean, maybe I’m missing something here, but if this is a vision of “transformative” technology, we’re in some serious trouble. Worse, if this marketing piece actually does the job and creates sales of Smart boards, we’re in even bigger trouble.
Is this really a vision of classrooms and learning that we aspire to? Is it all about being “easy”? And what does it say when the manufacturer of one of the most popular pieces of technologies in schools presents this picture for what teachers and students should be doing in schools?
Help me…what am I missing?
If I could put in a few phrases what I took away from this year’s Educon experience it was this:
Stop complaining. Be the change. Love your students and do well by them. If that includes technology, so be it.
And it was those first two that stood out, for me at least. I heard variations on those themes more in the last two days than the first two Educons combined. Maybe it was because there were more people this year. Maybe because we’re finally getting tired of talking about change, about waiting for something or someone else to change. Or maybe because when you get into a room of people who are seriously reflecting on their own practice and their own schools, getting fired up and committed to action is just easier to do. I kept thinking during the sessions I attended that if I could start a school picking my teachers from those who were in the room, it could be a pretty amazing place.
But while most in attendance want to change the classrooms and the schools they work in, that vision of change is still amorphous. Jon Becker wrote about that fact pre Educon, and I hope he follows up with more thoughts post. I mean David Warlick and others were talking about creating a new story for education like four years ago and we still don’t seem to have a handle on it. It’s the tease of having the conference at SLA where you get to spend a couple days in a school that probably comes as close to what most of want our schools to be. All sorts of tweets along the lines of “I’d kill to work here” were popping up in the stream, as if SLA were out of reach at their own schools.
But do we all want an SLA? I know that I would want the culture of learning and the singular focus on kids, something that I don’t see very much in my travels. I mean I’m sure that SLA teachers have their complaints, but their good fortune is to work in a culture of teaching and learning that represents no new vision of schooling as much as it does leadership that can successfully navigate the current minefields that work against that vision. What I’m finding more and more as I visit schools that are getting more serious about “change” is that they have someone at the top who is willing to focus on the learning and not on the other crap. And you can pick these people out in a heartbeat; they are leaders AND learners, and they’re not ashamed to share the driving questions they have about their schools with those around them. They have a passion not for making AYP or top schools lists as much as they do supporting their teachers to be learners, allowing them to look at their own teaching as a deep learning experience and share that learning with others. I see those types of leaders very rarely. But more and more this year I heard, “so what?” I heard “you [teachers] have more power than you know.” I heard “It’s too important to wait for permission.” Create your own vision for change that you think is best for your students and implement it. Love the struggle. Love your kids. Lead. What choice do you have?
One of the things that makes Educon special is the structure: these really are conversations, not presentations. I don’t go to sessions to learn as much as I do to think, to contribute, because that’s where the best learning takes place. But I’m wondering if (and I hope to talk more about this later in the context of my own session) if next year we can call the sessions “conversations/actions” or some other phrase or term that captures that “be the change” idea. We’ve been talking about this stuff for so long; maybe 2010 can be the year we really start creating a clearer 2020 vision for our schools with more of a roadmap of how to get there.
(Cross posted to the PLP Network blog)
One of my favorite things that Sheryl says when she talks about the challenges that schools face right now is that this generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology. Most of us grew up in a time when technology was an add on, and for many of us, we still see it as a choice, especially in education. (Just the other day I was at a meeting of about 25 school leaders and teachers to discuss how social learning tools can be infused into an inquiry based curriculum and only one person was using technology to take notes…me.) I look at my own kids and I know that technology will be a huge part of their learning lives because a) they want it to be and b) they’ll be expected to be savvy users of the devices of their day to communicate, create and collaborate (among other things.) They’re not going to be able to “opt out.”
That no choice theme is borne out by a new Kaiser Foundation report that came out this week. The title sums things up pretty well: “Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago”. And here is the money quote:
Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.
Anyway you slice that, kids are immersed in media, and that immersion is having huge effect on the way they see the world and on the way they learn. And while most of that media consumption is still tied to more “traditional” forms like television, the computer now takes up, on average, almost 1.5 hours and it is the fastest growing medium on the list. It lead the director of the study to say:
The bottom line is that all these advances in media technologies are making it even easier for young people to spend more and more time with media. It’s more important than ever that researchers, policymakers and parents stay on top of the impact it’s having on their lives.
It’s interesting to me that she didn’t mention educators in that list of folks who need to be paying attention, because more than parents and policymakers, we’re the ones who need to help kids make learning sense of their time with media of all types. And I emphasize that learning piece of it because all too often those opportunities and being blocked and filtered away in schools instead of made a basic part of the curriculum. Right now, most schools are making what I think is a bad choice by not immersing their students into these online learning environments which are creating all sorts of opportunities for us to learn. In doing so, they’re implicitly saying that technology is an option. It’s not.
Probably my favorite quote from Seth Godin’s book Tribes is this:
Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice not to do nothing.
We may not feel comfortable in a world filled with technology. We may not like the way it’s changing things and, even more, how fast it’s changing things. We may not like the way it pushes against much of what we’ve been doing in schools for eons. But our kids don’t have a choice. And if we’re going to fulfill our roles as teachers in our kids lives, neither do we.
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