A few months ago, a tech director for a fairly large school district looked me straight in the eye and said “I’m not giving teachers desktop overrides to anything on our filter ’cause I know damn well they’d abuse it by going to eBay or somesuch or taking their students to places they shouldn’t.” (And that’s a quote that I wrote down right after the conversation.)

Serious.

I don’t want to make this another post about how bad the general reputation of teachers is in some places, nor do I want to make it about how much filtering is going on under the guise of “we can’t trust the teachers.” Nor do I particularly want this to turn into a State of the Web in Education type post. But as school districts around the country start gearing up for the new year, there doesn’t appear to be much of a shift in terms of the perception that teachers can’t make good decisions about using the Web, and, more importantly, that teachers should be supported as learners themselves in the classroom.

Case in point: Chicago. Read the comments the Alexander Russo’s post “No Social Media for CPS Teachers” and you’ll get a sense of how much fun it is to be a teacher there under the new district guidelines regarding teacher and student technology use. In the post, he quotes one teacher as saying

The message to me is strong and clear – innovative, tech savvy teachers should look elsewhere for employment...I guess this means that the interactive website I’ve spent this summer designing for my students with open-source WordPress is off limits. I can’t share video we create on our own. I can’t ask them to compare and contrast two of our own videos, or one of our videos with someone else’s, or two videos from elsewhere. I can’t solicit student responses on core content. I can’t post accessible calendar information. I can’t post a contact form for students who forget or lose my e-mail address but know the website we’ll use on a weekly basis. I can’t host interactive Flash tools that my students use on a regular basis.

And in the comment thread, there’s this:

I use technology extensively in my curricula. I’m just going to stop using it. In addition to the patent absurdity of the Board’s policy, I’m just not willing to risk my job.

Sad.

But the worst part is captured, I think, in this op-ed piece in the Washington Post by former teacher Sarah Fine. It’s titled “Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can’t Stay.” Aside from talking about the difficulties of teaching in the inner city, she also brings up a more general perception:

There is yet another factor that played a part in my choice, something that I rarely mention. It has to do with the way that some people, mostly nonteachers, talk about the profession. “Why teach?” they ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it’s unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it’s not for the ambitious. “It’s just so nice,” was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: “When I tell people I want to do it, they’re like, ‘Really? You really still want to do that?’ ” Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. “I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them,” she says. “In the world we live in, teaching doesn’t cut it.”

I often feel the same way. Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it.

I know that’s not a universal impression, but there’s just no question that in many places across this country, teachers are not perceived as learners, as scholars, as leaders. They’re not supported in their own learning, and they’re not trusted to make good decisions about social Web media in the classroom. Without getting into a long drawn out discussion as to why that is, I’m wondering what we can do about it. Do social Web tools provide some opportunities for teachers to participate in ways that might raise the perception of the profession? If not in global ways at least in local ways? Just wondering…

The good news is that shortly I’ll be painting a picture of a district that really does get what it means to treat teachers as learners and support all the messiness that goes around that. Coming soon…I hope.

I finally got around to finishing up Sir Ken Robinson’s new book “The Element” which, for the most part, was a great read. He lays out a pretty compelling case for the power of passion in learning, and the absolute need for schools to help students identify their own passions through which they can learn just about anything they need. I’ve said in the past that the one thing I want from my own kids’ teachers is for them to help them find what they love to do more than anything else and then support them in their learning endeavors around that topic. Unfortunately, that is not something the current public school system was build for.

Toward the end of the book, Sir Ken lays out the case for personalizing our kids’ educations in the context of transforming (not reforming) schools:

The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of the each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions (238). The curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the  minds and souls of individuals–not in the databases of multiple-choice tests (248).

He argues that we should do away with the hierarchy of subjects and that we should work as hard as we can to customize, not standardize, each student’s experience of schooling. Oh, to dream.

As I thought about those points, I started thinking about how we treat teachers and their learning as well. So much of professional development is throwing everyone in a room and having them learn the same stuff. Maybe there is some choice in the offerings, but by and large there is very little attempt at creating a customized professional development curriculum for teachers. Yes, we have our PIPs, but those usually address deficiencies or weakensses, not passions.

The other day, I was having a conversation along these lines with a good friend who serves as the Director of Technology at a local school. We were talking about change, about how hard it is, and how long it takes. While he’s done a great deal to move his school forward in terms of open source and social tools and technology in general, from a pedagogy standpoint, he had been racking his brain trying to figure out how to support individual teachers in these shifts. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to create an individualized learning experience for each teacher, to take them where they are and mentor them, individually, to a different place. He’s in the process of surveying each teacher to determine what technologies they currently use, what their comfort levels are, and what they are most passionate about. Then, using those results, he and one other tech educator at the school are going to start going one by one, talking about change, looking at tools, making connections, and shifting the pedagogy.

Whoa.

It echoes Sir Ken:

Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof. The most successful systems in the world take the opposite view. They invest in teachers. The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities. This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many people’s lives. Great teachers have always understood that their real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students (249).

Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers. In a world where we can engage in our passions through the affordances of connective technologies online, we need to be thinking about how to personalize the learning of the adults in the room as well as the kids. This is not the easy route, by any stretch, but it’s the best route if we’re serious about moving the education of our kids to a different place.

(Photo “De Profundis” by Midnight-digital Not leaving! Just very busy)

The January issue of District Administration Magazine has a brief titled “Who’s Keeping Students Safe Online?” (at the bottom of the link) that states this:

Fewer than 25 percent of educators feel comfortable teaching students how to protect themselves from online predators, cyberbullies and identity thieves, says a new study from the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Educational Technology, Policy Research and Outreach (ET PRO).

I would say that’s a problem. You?