Thanks for chiming in. I think that they key phrase in your comment is about the personalization that kids are “beginning to demand”. It will be interesting to see how quickly that grows, and I wonder if they even know how to demand anything about their own learning. (We’ve turned them into passive learners, as Chris alluded to at Boot Camp.)

Let us know what you think about the book.

I had dinner with Jenny and others just last night, in fact, and she’s been a great leader in our Powerful Learning Practice work here in Australia.

I worry about that too, and, having spent a week down here in Melbourne learning about their 1-1 initiatives (which aren’t perfect, btw) it saddens me to see so little effort to put technology into the hands of kids in the States. We’re spending ungodly money on white boards when we could be targeting ways to help kids get access. Makes no sense.

As a Boot Camp participant, I can attest that we did converse about and struggle with not only this concept of teachers as leaders (and leaders as learners), but also with the need to be transparent with that learning process. Which leads me to my greater point about school, the root of this transformation for me is the shift from what is being taught, to what is being learned. So often, we as educators focus on the instruction side of the equation. We review the curriculum, we develop strategies, we plan our lessons and we even assess our students, but how often do we plan for learning? How often do we stop and assess what is learned for purposes other than to determine a grade for the student?

Schlecty’s quote about changing from “platforms of instructions” to “platforms of learning” hits the to the core of personalization. Our monolithic (Christensen’s term) structure for public schools doesn’t allow for the personalization and customization that students deserve and are beginning to demand. As long as we continue to be monoliths we will continue to focus on the most efficient model, which is based on instruction – we are going to teach this and you are going to learn this and whether you have learned it or not, we are going to move on to this. Once we focus on the learning and truly assessing what kids know and can do, then designing customized instruction and learning plans will allow us to shift from instruction to learning.

I bought the book upon my return from Boot Camp (finished Christensen on the plane home) and am stoked to read it.

Tony

I think your comments express some understandable, common concerns and an anxiety about technology that is very prevalent among teachers. Among my own students I find a much higher comfort level with technology than adults, but a wide, wide spectrum of skills.

As far as the anxiety about the “speed of advancing technology” goes I find that colleagues make remarkable progress with technology when they focus one project at a time, looking for simple, straightforward new tools to make one part of your classroom experience better for your students. People at my end of the building really took off using Google Docs or Blogger for example. They didn’t try to learn how to do everything at once, but in significant ways they began encouraging more collaboration and student generated course content. Not utopia, but pretty cool by my standards.

But I wish to throw in a caution about speaking of “technologies that make our lives simpler” being insufficient. Absolutely, its our schools’ cultures that need to changed in order to adopt the kind of connected, personalized learning that we want. But many educators are completely intimidated by the “challenge” of technology tools and are anxious about being so far behind. From a practical point of view I think one needs to argue that it’s easier to jump into the Read/Write Web than ever. The tools have been popularized and moving from one to another does not require a computer engineering degree.

We CAN also insist to our friends and peers that the important tools which will make learning easier for our students, even if we have to stretch ourselves a bit. Most teachers care enough about the kids to be concerned about giving them the best. At this point, in most schools the best we can hope for is an environment where experimentation and innovation is encouraged “at the fringes”, providing successful models for enticing other teachers.

Leaders must work to support (and model) this kind of exploration. Laying out guilt-trips is also quick and easy (and won’t accomplish change).