(Cross posted to the PLP Blog.)

To me, at least, one of the most interesting phrases used in the new National Educational Technology Plan was this: “…using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching.” Obviously, this implies much more than being “connected” in the we-all-have-access sense. As the plan goes on to say, it means that “teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners” and that “connection replaces isolation.” And if you really want the money quote, here it is:

In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their schools, libraries, and afterschool programs; professional experts in various disciplines around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education (6).

All of this ties in neatly with the overall theme of the plan, that learning is no longer “one size fits all” for students or teachers. There is an interesting expectation here that the adults in the room will be able to navigate these online communities in ways that will then inform their own curriculum and classroom teaching. And there is also the expectation that in this connected environment, we’re willing to see ourselves differently, not as the only one responsible for what happens with student learning but as the director of many actors in that goal. It’s a role that is much more complex, I think, much more difficult that simply delivering the curriculum, keeping control over the process, and making sure that our students get over the traditional assessments.

Connected teaching as defined here and as we talk about it in PLP is not easy by any stretch. To complicate matters even more, I would suggest that connected teaching requires a level of participation and sharing within these learning communities that may not be articulated very clearly above. And, it also suggests pretty strongly that teachers own their own learning first, that they see themselves as learners in the classroom alongside of their students. Nothing earth-shatteringly new there, but it sounds like we’re finally starting to look at professional learning differently as well:

Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration.

The second half of that sentence is all about self-directed, social learning, not about the painful PowerPoint workshops that we offer to our teachers. I’ve recently been working with a district that over the last two years has given over 300 workshops on various tools, but when I asked them to talk about what significant, real change had come about because of those workshops, there was basically silence in the room. I’ve started saying that the only workshop we should offer our teachers is one titled something like “How to Learn Online,” one that gives teachers some context and some strategy for directing their own learning but places the expectation for DIYPD squarely on their shoulders.

That’s what I find really compelling about PLP, that it supports teachers in developing their own learning goals and strategies, yet at the same time gives them a great sense of potential of these online communities as well. Ultimately, this still is about us, about the decisions we make as “solo practitioners.” But we have to have a different frame, a different context for those decisions now, one that helps us understand our roles as truly connected educators as well.

What I find interesting about this longish, “the-Web-causes-all-sorts-of-problems” article in the New York Times  titled “Texts Without Context” is a) that a lot of it resonates, but b) that there aren’t any solutions offered. Basically, if you pick through the many references and quotes in the article, you can make a long list of what’s wrong with the whole social media/Interent thing, bullet points like:

• Copyright and intellectual property are no longer respected
• Plagiarism is rampant
• Originality and imagination are being lost
• We are losing our ability to think deeply and creatively
• We now just want immediate gratification
• Information overload
• Further polarization of political views
• A loss of the ability to read extended texts
• An impatience with nuance
• A loss of focus in a world of distraction
• The sense of immature entitlement on the part of social media users
• Decrease in overall quality of work
• “Cyberbalkanization” or a growing comfort in the echo chamber
• Loss of serendipity
• Loss of an objective reality (i.e. the debate over climate change)
• The end of authorship
• Groupthink
• Etc.

As I said, I really can get to much of this, though I’m not sure these shifts are necessarily worse as much as they represent simply a different way of doing things. But it seems that while we lament all of these “problems” we offer few if any solutions. Are we to pull the plug on the Web? Should we just treat it like some dangerous drug and “Just Say No”? What do we do?

I’m thinking none of this stuff is going away any time soon, and that if we are really concerned about these perceived negative shifts, we’d better start teaching kids to deal with them, right? All the hand-wringing in the world isn’t going to make them better or make them go away. Maybe we can use these as starting points for developing skills and literacies and habits in kids that they’ll need to maintain a healthy relationship with the Web, the same types of skills and habits we need to develop in ourselves. If we do that, we have to start early, with our youngest kids, and we have to make it a part of every curriculum, not just a unit in English class.

Wondering what on that list resonates with you, feels most challenging to you, and what you think we should do (if anything) about it.

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 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.

• Personalized learning
• Learning that is “lifelong and life-wide and available on demand.”
• A device and ubiquitous access for every student and teacher.
• Professional development that focuses on “connected teaching” in “online learning communities” (Sounds familiar.)
• Professional learning that is “collaborative, coherent, and continuous.”
• Learning that is “always on”
• Learning that is no longer “one size fits all.”
• Student work on the cloud
• Student managed electronic learning portfolios
• Students as “networked learners”
• Broadband everywhere
• Open educational resources
• Creative Commons licenses
• Changes to CIPA and FERPA to open up access
• Rethinking the “basic assumptions” of schooling

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.

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.