Someone asked me earlier today “if you were a principal of a new school and you were hiring teachers, what would you look for?” Once I got past my “What would Chris Lehmann answer?” moment, I connected back to a post I read yesterday titled “Never Read Another Resume” by Jason Fried, whose book “Rework” is sitting in my Kindle waiting for me. Aside from paying much more attention to cover letters than resumes (as in “can this candidate write?”) I loved this snip about the questions that get asked in interviews.
During interviews, we love when potential hires ask questions. But all questions aren’t equal. A red flag goes up when someone asks how. “How do I do that?” “How can I find out this or that?” You want people who ask why, not how. Why is good — it’s a sign of deep interest in a subject. It signals a healthy dose of curiosity. How is a sign that someone isn’t used to figuring things out for him- or herself. How is a sign that this person is going to be a drain on others. Avoid hows.
I think that’s one of the first things I’d look for, people who are asking why. Why are we using blogs in the classroom? Why is this in the curriculum? Why are we making this decision? So much of the “how” stuff is figure-outable on our own that I wonder why we spend time on it.
Why don’t we take the millions of hours that teachers sit in workshops asking “how” and instead let them learn that stuff on their own and spend those hours asking “why”?
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.
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?
So without bemoaning in the fact that I haven’t been able to find any time of late to get to this space to do some reading and thinking and synthesizing and extended writing and that I feel like a truly important part of my life is being slowly and painfully left behind and that there is a post that I really need to write about that at some point sooner rather than later…
Tom Hoffman has been bugging many of us to blog about the English Language Arts Standards that are being written by Core Standards group as an attempt to provide some national standardization for ELA (and Mathematics skills), standards which are open for comment for another five days or so, and ones that it appears will ultimately lead to the creation of a national assessment. Forty-eight states are participating in this effort, and Tom created a must-read FAQ on the initiative and has been doing some really thoughtful analysis in the past few weeks about what all of it means. I’m sorry to say that the whole process has been flying under my radar of late (as have many of the important conversations going on out there.) I’ll admit to a certain sense of “whatever” about these standards; there’s little doubt at this point they will be adopted pretty much as is, and they reflect even more a continuing, frustrating retrenchment of traditional thinking about education that seems to be permeating the conversation right now. When we hear that our kids’ performance on the Math NAEP is essentially flat, and the Secretary of Education’s response is that the results “underscore the need for “reforms that will accelerate student achievement,” and that those “reforms” include “opening more charter schools and linking teacher pay to performance,” you know that the way we assess kids isn’t going to change any time soon. At the end of the day, it still feels like the battle for sanity when it comes to the future of education won’t be won until there are enough people who understand that many of the traditional standards and assessments that “worked” for us won’t work for our kids. In other words, no time soon.
The Common Core ELA standards narrow the definition of what kids should know, and they do nothing to take into account the changing nature of reading and writing that this moment brings us. While the National Council Teachers of English espouses all sorts of new definitions for literate readers and writers in the 21st Century, very little of that shows up in any clear way in the proposed national standards. One look at the reading standards and you can’t help but be left with the impression that the authors have never “read” anything much beyond words on paper and that the idea of “remix” and even links are outside of their experience. There is nothing here about how reading and writing in online and digital spaces changes the interaction, nothing about the social interactions that readers and writers will have around texts that are changing rapidly and substantially. (Yet, it appears that NCTE hasn’t made much of a push against the initiative.) To that point, a really interesting “debate” in the New York Times appeared a couple of days ago “Does the Brain Look Like E-Books?” including this observation by Alan Liu, the chairman of English at U. C. Santa Barbara on how all of this is shifting:
My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.
The debate is a lively one, and the comments are worth reading through as well, but regardless of how you view the current landscape from a reading and writing literacy standpoint, it’s hard to see how the core standards being proposed come even close to capturing the complexity of the moment and, more importantly, reflect the flexibility needed to understand the moment. I doubt there was any of that much discussed.
Even more importantly, Chris Lehmann captures the reason why we should all feel unsettled by this, regardless of how we think about reading and writing:
This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.
In all of this, the thing that most frustrates me both in the talk about national standards and national assessments and the whole “Race to the Top” bunk that is coming out of the administration is just a total lack of vision, this sense that nothing has fundamentally changed, that this is the same old classroom with the same old expectations and the same old ways of proving them that we’ve had forever. I’m not saying we don’t need assessments, but there’s a lot of required learning right now that few if any standards are addressing.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post bemoaning the ways in which the system treats teachers when it comes to technology and I hinted at a different reality for one school I’ve been working with. Well, that school happens to be my old school, the place where I worked as a teacher and an administrator for 21 years before setting out for my current very different existence. And now, due to a somewhat sudden, imminent move to a new house, the place where in all likelihood my own kids will go to high school.
While I love what Chris Lehmann is doing at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the problem with the SLA story has always been that it’s hard to replicate. Chris is a visionary who was given the chance to build a school pretty much from the ground up, and I think just about everyone would agree that he has done an absolutely amazing job of it. If I could take SLA and clone it, I would. But that’s not possible. So, the tougher question has always been how do schools that have been around for 50 or 100 years begin to undertake the real shifts and real changes that are required if they are to move systemically to a point where inquiry-based, student-centered, socially and globally networked learning becomes just the way they do their business? In all honesty, I haven’t seen many schools that have fundamentally set out to redefine what they do in the classroom in light of the affordances and opportunities that social technologies create for learning. (If you know of any who have a plan to fundamentally redefine what they do, please let me know.) There is a great deal of “tinkering on the edges” when it comes to technology, districts that hope that if they incrementally add enough technology into the mix that somehow that equals change. I can’t tell you how many schools I’ve seen that have a whiteboard in every room yet have absolutely nothing different happening from a curriculum perspective. Old wine, new bottles.
That fundamental redefinition is hard. It takes an awareness on the part of leaders that the world is indeed changing and that current assessment regimes and requirements are becoming less and less relevant to the learning goals of the organization. It takes a vision to imagine what the change might look like, not to paint it with hard lines but to at least have the basic brushstrokes down. It takes a culture that celebrates learning not just among students but among teachers and front office personnel and administrators alike, what Phillip Schlechty calls a “learning organization.” It takes leadership that while admitting its own discomfort and uncertainty with these shifts is prescient and humble enough to know that the only way to deal with those uncertainties is to meet them full on and to support the messiness that will no doubt occur as the organization works through them. It takes time, years of time, maybe decades to effect these types of changes. It takes money and infrastructure. And I think, most importantly, it takes a plan that’s developed collaboratively with every constituency at the table, one that is constantly worked and reworked and adjusted in the process, but one that makes that long-term investment time well spent instead of time spinning wheels. And it takes more, even, than that.
I’m seeing a lot of that happening at Hunterdon Central, my old school. And you can take this perspective for what it’s worth since I feel like I played some small part in this process five years ago when we formulated a long-ish term plan for technology that started with piloting a teacher/classroom model for technology when I was there to today, when they are piloting a student 1-1 model (netbooks) for technology this fall. My good friend and former co-conspirator Rob Mancabelli is guiding the work, and he’s had amazing success in bringing teachers, supervisors, upper administration, community, students and others into a really “big” conversation about what teaching and learning looks like today, how global and collaborative and transparent it is, and what the implications are for the curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms. This is not tinkering on the edges; this, instead, is a deeply collaborative and reflective process for a small cohort of 30 or so teachers whose kids this fall will all have technology and a ubiquitous connection in hand, a process that encourages them to be creative, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to pursue their own personal learning as well. All of it as a first building block for the systemic, culture change that is hopefully to come in the next few years.
Tuesday, I had the chance to spend a few hours with a part of this group, and I came away just totally energized by the experience. The main reason? Lisa Brady, the superintendent. The cohort group had been meeting throughout the summer, focusing on learning about social networks, on making connections, reading blogs, trying Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about social tools in the context of their curriculum. The teachers come from every discipline, from math to special education to media specialists. And on Tuesday, now as the school year begins to loom large, Rob asked Lisa to address the group and make sure they understood their efforts would be supported. Lisa started by asking everyone to read Margaret Wheatley’s “Willing to be Disturbed.” I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but the first graph gives you the gist:
As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally–our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.
I hadn’t expected to try to capture any of what Lisa said next, but as she talked to the teachers, I started writing some of it down. And I started imaging what it would be like if every superintendent walked into a meeting of teachers who are engaged in reaching beyond their comfort zones and learning something new and said things like:
My question to you is how willing are you to be disturbed?…We have to be willing to examine our practice, to be disturbed about what we think we know about teaching and learning…We don’t really know what we’re doing; we’re teachers, we’re supposed to know, but we don’t know everything…I’m as unsure about all of this as you are unsure, but I believe we are doing the right thing. It is of critical importance to this organization, of critical importance to our kids…Your classrooms are learning labs; we want you be exploring, looking, analyzing…You are fully supported in this work; don’t be afraid of what you are doing…at this school, we don’t change easily, but we change well.
It was really powerful stuff, the superintendent of schools encouraging teachers to take risks, to think differently, to be okay with not knowing, and to know that it’s a process, that it’s not going to happen overnight. And this is the same type of message Lisa plans to deliver to the full faculty on the first day of school. (The Wheatley piece is being sent to all staff this week.) Already, Central has decided to end the practice of monthly full faculty meetings this year and instead engage in professional conversations around the question “What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century?” Since May, all of the supervisors have voluntarily been meeting on a regular basis to study and discuss the shifts around an inquiry/problem based curriculum delivered in networked learning environments. And the teachers in the cohort are archiving and communicating on a Ning site specifically for the work.
Now I know there are some caveats here and not all of this is replicable either. For the last two years, 99% of teachers at Central (3,200 students 9-12, btw) have had their own Tablet PC (for personal and professional use) with wireless connection to an LCD and wireless Internet in every classroom, part of the teacher model that Rob and I started before I left. I would defy anyone to show me a school that has a better customer service oriented technology support plan for teachers and classrooms to make sure everything works. The school has made a fairly substantial financial commitment to the work (with the support of the community…budgets pass). And, 99% of kids in the district have Internet access at home.
But despite all of that, what interests me more is the stuff that they’re doing that just about any school could do right now: have the conversations, begin to build a culture around change, encourage learning on the part of every segment in the school, and create a long term vision and plan that attempts at least to account for whatever deficiencies or roadblocks currently exist. I see so many schools (SO many) where huge sums of money are spent on technology without any thought of professional learning or thinking about what changes. It’s all haphazard, unplanned, unsupported. I talk to so many teachers who just roll their eyes at the newest initiative because a) they haven’t had a voice in the process and b) because they know the next initiative is right around the corner. There’s no thread that binds all of it together, that congeals into a fundamentally different vision of teaching and learning. As Chris often says (channeling Roger Schank) “Technology is not additive; it’s transformative.” But that transformation doesn’t come on its own. It comes only when the ground for transformation has been well plowed. Whether we have the budgets or the technology in hand right now, there is little externally, at least, that’s preventing these conversations to start, assuming we have real leaders who are willing to be disturbed at the helm.
I’m hoping to follow this story pretty closely this year, but I’m sure it’s not the only one. Would love to hear your take on what Central is doing and on other attempts at moving old schools systemically into new places of learning.
Sheryl and I are excited to announce the inaugural Powerful Learning Practice Visioning Boot Camp for Educational Leaders to be held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia this summer. You can get all of the details here, but the bottom line is we’ve put together a three-day event for a limited number (25) of participants that we think will help school principals and superintendents get a deep understanding of how the world is shifting, identify and articulate the challenges that we face, begin some serious conversations about long term change in personal and classroom practice, and create a foundation for long range planning.
We’re really pleased that Chris Lehmann will be our host for the three days and that he will be among a group of forward thinking leaders who will share their experiences and expertise with us. We hope you (or your school leader) will join us!
So, I’ve been telling everyone I see to come to EduCon 2.1 in Philly next month. After reading Chris’s info below, please register, and let me know if you’d like to help frame my discussion on “What Will Classroom Learning Look Like?”
Registration is now open for EduCon 2.1, the second annual conference and conversation on education and innovation hosted by Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy in conjunction with The Franklin Institute. We will be convening January 23-25, 2009. During the conference, educators from around the world will descend upon Philly to teach, to think and to learn how to improve their own practices and inform the larger dialogue on education as well. Aaron Sorkin wrote, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” It is time to show up.
EduCon is built on the Axioms:
1) Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
2) Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
3) Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4) Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5) Learning can — and must — be networked.
Visit the EduCon wiki to learn about the conversation schedule. Aside from the conversations, Friday night will feature a panel discussion where deep thinkers from various non-academic strata investigate the question, “What is the purpose of school?” While the need for a new educational course is clear, the path to that shift is not as obvious. Sunday’s panel will highlight those divergent paths as educational leaders for varying pedagogies engage each other in an attempt to make the case for how we should approach our educational evolution.
EduCon will also feature a pre-conference event on January 22nd this year - Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge - with participants Dr. David Thornburg, Dr. Gary Stager and more.
The stage is set for an amazing conference. No vendors. No sponsors. Simply - ideas, inquiry and pedagogy.
Show up.
General conference registration is $150 and $100 for School District of Philadelphia employees and includes Friday admittance to SLA’s partner museum The Franklin Institute and The National Constitution Center. Pre-Conference registration is $100.
If you have any questions, please contact Chris Lehmann.
Chris shook my brain awake this morning with his reflections on change and Shirky and I’m still trying to sort through some of his finer points. Suffice to say, that it’s among the best posts I’ve read this year because it articulates so clearly where much of this is at and, perhaps, where it needs to go.
The where it’s at stuff is easy to get to, but hard to accept. And, as Chris says, our collective fear of failure, both of our schools and of our kids, is at the crux of the problem. Most are content with “predictably mediocre” schools because the risks associated with change are simply not worth it at this moment. It’s this risk/reward equation that I keep getting drawn to as well, and I keep feeling more and more that schools will not change until the external expectations change, and that the expectations that matter most reside in parents. We need to reframe that lens, and we need to do it fast. And “predictably mediocre” as language may not be a bad starting point. (That’s not what I want for my kids’ school.) But until we can celebrate the successes of “riskier”, change oriented schools like SLA, until we can make a compelling case that not only are the risks a) not that risky and b) imperative for preparing our kids, those risks will continue to be unpalatable.
And then there’s Tom, who is helping me understand “The Role of Chris Lehmann in the Universe.” As Tom points out, there are other progressive schools that might fit that bill, but their efforts are not nearly as transparent as Chris’s in the context of the technologies and tools we use in this community. I love the exclamation point he adds when he suggests that there have been “whole books” written about these places! The idea!
Tom asks if this is a problem in any sense, the fact that these schools and their principals aren’t blogging and Twittering and going to NECC. I wonder in the context of Shirky’s larger point that group action is enhanced by the ability to connect online if it isn’t a problem on some level. I wonder if a transparent network of successful “high-risk” schools connected through social tools wouldn’t at this moment be a boon to the larger discussion of school reform. And this is one of the more interesting effects of all of this, that right now, connecting around books is simply not as easy as connecting around blogs.
Which brings things to the “where all this needs to go” part of Chris’s post which is easier to read but harder to get to. How do we, in Shirky’s parlance, act collectively? Chris offers up some great, concrete, starting points, all of which are daunting to think about on any number of different levels because they inexorably lead to that inherent friction between traditional organization and collaborative group effort. There are new models being built in this process as well. What structure would we build? To what extent can it be owned by the many and not the few? Wikipedia is struggling with this right now. Obama is. It would be an interesting, yet difficult road, one that, as Chris points out, would be easier today than it was 10 years ago. And it could be oh so amazing if we pulled it off.
Much to think about, no doubt.
One more thing: Yesterday, when I picked Tess up from shooting (basketball) camp, she was sporting a new t-shirt, on the back of which read: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Been trying to get my brain around last week’s NECC experience for a few days now, reading some of the other post mortems, thinking about what the lasting impressions are and will be for my own thinking and learning. For a variety of reasons, mostly personal, San Antonio was not a home run for me, not like last year in Atlanta when the energy and ideas seemed to be flowing more intently, more spontaneously. And before anyone starts throwing things at me, let me just say that was my experience; I’m sure that many, many others found this year’s event to be a celebration, perhaps a transformation in their thinking about teaching and learning and education. In that regard, I’m sincerely happy that more voices have been added to the chorus, and that more practitioners have entered the conversation. We need more voices. We need more good pedagogy and thinking.
I came to NECC in a bit of an edublogger funk, and that funk continues in some respects. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that’s not unusual. My interior monologue is fills with peaks and valleys, and right now, I’m once again struggling to define and focus where the best use of my time and thinking is. For the past two months, I have read very little from the education folder in my aggregator; simply, not much has been resonating. To be honest, very little in the last six months or so has felt new, a view that a couple of others at NECC seemed to share. I’ve been drawn to reading outside the usual suspects, thinking hard (once again) about the scope of this community and its reach. Thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems.
The good news is that the level of passion among those that count themselves in this community is, in a word, amazing. It was evident from the conversations I eavesdropped on in the Blogger’s Cafe to the late night debates on the River Walk, to the back channel chats, the sessions on how to put the tools to good work, to the collective efforts to capture as much of NECC as possible for those who couldn’t attend. I don’t think it was possible to sit in on the sessions or walk by the Cafe and not simply admire the level of engagement of both long standing and relatively new participants in this conversation. All of us, whether evangelists or practitioners or even the naysayers, are deeply invested in trying to make sense of these giant shifts that are occurring, and that is all good.
And there was an international flavor to NECC this year that seemed stronger than in years’ past. (BTW, I don’t count the Canadian contingent as international, thought I know I should.) It was great to see folks from Australia and the UK and many, many other far flung spots around the globe. We need more of their perspectives as well, and that seems to be happening.
But for me, at least, at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering, “what’s really changed?” And, where will we be a year from now?
NECC is the echo chamber writ large and in living color; more than any other conference, it’s where we feel “big.” But the reality of it is, as Dean suggests, the powerful learning that most of us experience in these online communities is still little more than a blip on the radar screen. (I wonder what percentage of the 8 million+ educators in this country are aware of these shifts on a basic level.) And this is a tech conference. As I read through some of the back channel conversations, some were asking about presenting to school boards or parents or even town councils. Others were talking about getting out to non-edtech conferences. Some were, again, searching for that elusive tipping point that will get the conversation jump started outside the chamber.
And I think it’s time we get serious about all of that. No doubt, the vendor floor in Washington will be filled with “Web 2.0 in a Box” and “Safe Social Networking” and control, control, control. And I’m going to guess that, like this year, “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts” will be “Hot Topics” as well as a few other new tools. And we’ll be talking once again about new standards and 21st Century Literacies and all of that. But while we as a community have no control over some of that, is that what we aspire to? Is that what we want the emphasis on NECC 09 to be, once again? Or do we want it to be more?
I hope it’s more. More about learning and figuring out what it means to be connected. More about what we can do to begin systemic change. More tangible, non-toolsy, results oriented thinking. More models that work, models that provide realistic options for educators to wrap their brains around.
More like what Chris Lehmann presented in his session, a session that since it had a “specific pedagogical focus” felt like it was “high stakes,” in an of itself a comment that should get us thinking. More like the conversations on leadership that Scott McLeod and Chris and others tried to have at EduBloggerCon on Saturday. More about ideas and connections.
And in general, without speaking for others, I again think I need to do more to try to get these ideas and these questions outside the walls of my learning community. I’m afraid we’re stalling because without some larger force or lever, these ideas have no where (or very limited routes) to go in a comprehensive discussion about what schools need to be and to do in response to the scale of change that is upon us. (That thinking is influenced heavily by Sir Ken Robinson’s latest presentation to the RSA, btw.) For me, at least, I think it’s time to start writing. (I know; I’ve said that before.)
Change on any level is not easy, and I’m not suggesting that there is one way to change or one thing that needs to be changed or that we all need to change in one particular way. It’s all incremental and personal, I know, but it’s also about doing what will create the most change, do the most good. I’ve been thinking about Lessig a lot and his attempt to attack the root cause of the smaller problems. I wonder what the root impediment for school change is? And, reffing Sir Ken again, we are at a moment where we all must change if we’re to sustain this existence. Along those lines, I’ve also, strangely, been thinking about all of the devoted carnivores that I hung around with last week in steak and barbecue land, thinking about how much healthier they would be and how much better off we’d all be if they and everyone else, for that matter, ate lower to the ground. But that is tough change as well.
Anyway, proposals for NECC ‘09 are only a couple of months away…
Like him or not, what Barack Obama did yesterday, in my opinion at least, epitomizes what we need our next president to be, namely a teacher. Agree with him or not, can there be any doubt that anyone listening to that speech yesterday is not thinking harder and more expansively about race in this country and in our lives today? Trust him or not, is there any question that he articulated a real truth about the state of race relations from both a black and a white perspective?
Right now, we are having a “teachable moment” about race in America. If you listen to conservative talk radio as I have been for the past few weeks, the issue is, no pun intended, black or white. If the candidate does not distance himself from his pastor and his church, then he is guilty by association of believing the invective that’s being dragged in front of us by the media or which we are choosing to consume on YouTube. If he does distance himself, then it’s simply politics as usual. It’s a simple equation.
But the reality is that this conversation, like most, is more nuanced. And it’s our collective lack of understanding of that nuance which bogs us down. We have little empathy for the experiences of those unlike us, and too many of us are afraid to ask. We need an education in this country about race. We need a starting point for the conversation, and we need someone to take on a teacherly role to guide it.
Seventy-five years ago, FDR gave the first of his “Fireside Chats” intended to educate (as well as sway) the American public about the issues of the day. By every measure, they were hugely successful in moving people to act in informed and collective ways. And the feedback that Roosevelt received in the form of millions of letters allowed him to tap into the pulse of the people and the nation in ways that few other presidents before or since have been able to. He guided, he taught my father’s generation about the realities of the world, enabling them to have more informed conversations about the state of their lives. Yes, I know, these were not balanced presentations, but at minimum they made the country think about the proposed solutions to the complexities of the time.
And while the world by its very nature is complex, this moment seems decidedly so. Not just because of race, but because of the litany of problems that Obama articulated and the fact that no one no matter what color or heritage is immune from them. (I don’t think climate change cares much about the color of your skin or your family heritage.) We need someone who will encourage and facilitate a broad ranging conversation about these issues. We need someone who can create some lesson plans for the millions of us who want to engage, want to contribute, want to work to solve the problems together. We need someone who I can hold up as a role model for my own children as a steward for the environment, as a peace maker, as a listener, as a deep thinker.
We need a teacher.
This is just one of many teachable moments that this world and this society will continue to throw at us. Rare has been the occasion when we as a country have been led to a deeper understanding of events. In what was without question the most teachable moment of my life six-and-a-half years ago, I was told to go to the mall and keep spending my money. That’s not what a teacher would have done.
Probably the most learning I’ve done since I hit the road full time almost two years ago now (dang…has it really been that long?) is around how diverse individual districts are in this country when it comes to access to technology, having a vision for its use, and understanding the transformative nature of what the Web is offering these days. And I’m not talking so much here about the real inner city schools that are struggling mightily just to make AYP. I’m talking about schools that “pass the test” so to speak. A couple of districts that I’ve worked with in recent months provide representative examples:
The first district is in a middle class suburb of a major city that serves about 6,000 students. Teachers and students have very limited access to technology. There is one LCD projector per school in the lower grades, computer labs are being disbanded to provide at least one station per classroom, and Internet service is not much better than dial up. (There is limited wireless.) In the last seven years, exactly zero dollars have been allocated for administrative professional development, and technology budgets have been capped at 1987 levels. A new administration is trying to start some conversations about technology, and the group I met with for a day was interested and worked hard to grasp the ideas and the tools, though many were reaching for the Advil before it was all over. (By the way, two of the administrators who were supposed to be at the session, however, took personal days rather than attend what I assume they felt would be a waste of their time. Oy.)
The second district is in an upper middle class suburb of a different major city and serves a much smaller K-8 population. Here, technology is ubiquitous. Every teacher has a MacBook as do all students 4th through 8th. The superintendent has a plan for technology integration that, despite feeling like he’d gotten “a wake-up call” the day I was there, calls for the deep integration of collaborative tools into the curriculum. The teacher workshops were filled with probing questions, creative ideas and conversation. It was a very different place, and it was a place where I just had the sense that technology was becoming simply a way they do their business. (Yet, here’s the rub: kids move from this district to a high school where there are no laptops and where an “anti-technology” faction in the community holds sway over much of what the school board does. Oy.)
These types of contrasts are everywhere I go and what I find most striking about all of this. There is just so much inconsistency from district to district, place to place. It’s really unsettling on some level to see the vast disparity that our kids have to deal with.
All of this, of course, is framed in the EduCon weekend sense where we saw something that I think most of us would agree we want for our own kids yet don’t quite know how to make happen in our own places. And I talked about this with Chris and Gary for over an hour right after the Sunday morning panel. What are the things that SLA does that are replicable? What needs to be in place for systemic cultural change to occur? I tried to use the domino metaphor (apparently without much success) as in what does the first domino have to be that tips all of the others? And what is the second domino and the third? If we had to create a general roadmap for change, a recipe of some type, I think we could probably do a good job of identifying the ingredients (and technology would be down the list.) But what would be the order? Is there one?
My own impression after visiting hundreds of schools is that the first, key ingredient is leadership, that nothing happens without someone who can inspire serious conversations about what can be, regardless of the roadblocks. (Yes, read Chris Lehmann.) But what after that? Money? Autonomy? Parental support? Technology?
I know that, as is my wont, I may be grasping for something that by it’s very nature resists a clear process. I’m also sure much has been written on this that maybe I haven’t read yet. (Links please.) Maybe we need a wiki…
Saw this at Chris Lehmann’s site. As he says “This is one science teacher’s attempt to influence the way we talk about the issue of climate change. Pass it on.” And also, take action.
Just a reminder that the first ever EduCon 2.0 will be happening in Philadelphia at Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy in two weeks starting on Friday, January 25th with a tour of the school and the Franklin Institute and running all day Saturday and Sunday with a wide ranging list of conversations. As Chris says:
EduCon 2.0 is both a conversation and a conference. And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is a School 2.0 conference. It is, hopefully innovation conference where we want to come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.
Last I heard, registrations were nearing a couple of hundred, which means this is going to be an awesome opportunity to wrap our collective brains around some of the most important questions facing us as educators (and to carry those conversations late into the Philadelphia night.) For me, I’m going to get to cross a few more names of my blogging life list, people like Konrad Glogowski and Arthus Erea and I’m sure a few others, to see a lot of good friends who have been on this journey for many years, and to meet and talk to potential new friends and connections in my network.
Really hope to see you there. (Oh…and don’t forget to bring your own refillable water bottles…)
I propose that learning to use blogs, wikis, digital storytelling, podcasts, and video as media of self-expression within a context of “public voice” should be introduced and evaluated in school curricula, after-school programs, and informal learning communities if today’s youth are to become effective citizens in the emerging era of networked publics. In the twenty-first century, participatory media education and civic education are inextricable.
The whole chapter is pretty interesting (as, it seems, are the other chapters in the collection at least looking at the titles…lots of holiday reading ahead), but I was especially struck by that last sentence especially in light of the blogging that’s been going on of late about digital citizenship and the like. (Dean has as good a round up as any.) While Rheingold is the first to admit that this is a thesis in need of testing, he does make a good case that we have an opportunity right now to engage our students in meaningful participation around the causes they are most interested in. And this is especially apparent as we enter the long stretch to the November presidential elections here in the US (as well as the compelling causes ongoing around the world that students might undertake.)
To be sure, Rheingold also identifies the big hump that we have to get over here, the one of making sure that our students’ public participation actually has a meaningful audience. While there are numerous examples of student initiated protest or action that has scaled well, many don’t. It’s one thing to participate simply for the sake of participating. It’s another all together to be able to have that participation actually create action. Which means, of course, that teachers have to have a deep understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of online activism, that it means more than simply signing a Facebook petition (in the words of Chris Lehmann) or putting up a wiki page todo list.
So here is the salient question, as asked in the chapter: “What if teachers could help students discover what they really care about, then show them how to use digital media to learn more and to persuade others?” The first part is almost (if not more) difficult than the last part these days. But that is a compelling question, I think, because inherent in it is the process of constructing and leveraging networks to learn and interact. As I said the other day, I want my own children to know how to participate effectively in the issues of their day using the way beyond local connections that are now possible. It would be great if they were being taught that in school.
There are moments in this most surreal life that I’m now leading when I’m standing in front of more than a few hundred educators in a large, dimly lit auditorium and this eerie, palpable feeling of discomfort settles in around me. Sometimes, I know, I feel like I push too many buttons. Other times, I feel like I don’t push enough. It depends on the place, the people, the purpose. But when it happens, when I’ve managed to say just enough to almost force those who are still listening to consider some of the (I think, at least) challenging questions I’m asking, this feeling presents itself in this kind of eerie quiet where the only sound I seem to hear is that of arms folding in defense or heads bending in despair. It’s that “digging in” moment where I know now from doing this over and over and over again that a good chunk of the audience is not happy.
I had one of those moments, one of those audiences recently, one where while I think the majority of people in the room walked away challenged in a good way, many also walked away angry in a not so good way. The “yeah, buts” were out in force. And I know that their anger isn’t directed so much at me as it is the reality of schools, the reality of the change, and the reality of the difficult conversations we need to start having. (I’m reminded of Chris Lehmann’s Tweet yesterday that read “When trying to explain how much has changed and how schools must change… where do we start?” Amen.) But in this case, that anger came out in some really remarkably interesting ways that challenged the message and the messenger.
Oy.
Yesterday’s Newsday had an article that said that a recent survey showed 61% of us “would prefer a “computer therapist” who is compassionate and easy to talk to” instead of the typical tech support person. And “52% said they felt “anger, sadness, alienation” when dealing with their most recent computer problem.” Or the most recent in-service technology speaker, I would guess. The new term is “innovation overload.” I feel that too.
But we as educators have to tackle this stuff. My own anger at times comes from the fact that I’m not talking to a room full of plumbers or software engineers or CEOs, people who aren’t working with kids every day helping them (I hope) become literate navigators of this increasingly challenging world. (Read yesterday’s New York Times article “An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers” if you want a sense of just how challenging.) We’re educators, for goodness sake. Educate! Innovate! Where is the innovation overload for schools???
In other news, the Times today reports “that all 6,063 [California] public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014″ when NCLB requires proficiency in math and reading.
Yeah. Let’s just dig in and stick with what we got.
Earlier this week, I 
Probably the most learning I’ve done since I hit the road full time almost two years ago now (dang…has it really been that long?) is around how diverse individual districts are in this country when it comes to access to technology, having a vision for its use, and understanding the transformative nature of what the Web is offering these days. And I’m not talking so much here about the real inner city schools that are struggling mightily just to make AYP. I’m talking about schools that “pass the test” so to speak. A couple of districts that I’ve worked with in recent months provide representative examples:
Just a reminder that the first ever