Teaching, within 5 Years

If you had the gift of foresight, what do you think our profession would look like in five year's time? Are the powers of change severe enough to move the field of education out of the rut it has settled so comfortably in, regardless of the myriad changes going on in the professional world around us? This post came to mind as I read the following from David Warlick:

I think that it’s part of the job. It is my job, as a teacher, to be able to teach today — to be skilled at using today’s information technologies within today’s information environments and apply pedagogies that reflect today’s information environments. We suffer from the myths of old world education, that you go to school so that you will be prepared for the next 30 or 35 years. But the teacher we are at graduation from college, is not necessarily the teacher we need to be five years later. Those days are long behind us — and I think that the job has become a whole lot more exciting as a result.

Formal staff development is important. We all need new ideas, new energy, new inspiration. Districts and service agencies should continue to make available any kind of professional development opportunities that are successful. But it’s still the job of the teacher to be competent to teach in the classrooms that today’s students need.

Certainly, the situation is far more complex than this. Teachers do not have nearly enough time, nor enough compensation. They do not have the resources, and many resources are actually blocked from access. They are expected to do so much more than teach, and they are held responsible within conditions that are often entirely beyond their control. I’ve often said that the very best thing we could do to improve teaching and learning is to give teachers the time. Every teacher should have one hour of on-the-job professional time for every hour they spend in instructional supervision.

Warlick, whose ideas are championed in many blogs more renowned than this one, had, in the past, spoke of teaching students to teach themselves in a post not too long ago. The generation of students that is graduating college today and will become teachers in the next few years should also not be allowed to escape this responsibility as well. We need learners as much as we need teachers. We need, I should say, those willing to unlearn and relearn much more than we need anything else.

My take on teaching technology applications.

Anyone for a think aloud? A lot of discussion, as much as I could glean from the limited access I have had over the last few weeks, has centered on the question that David Warlick originally asked:

“Are computer applications something that should be taught in a
class, or something that should be learned by the students, independent
of a class curriculum?“

This couldn't come at a more appropriate time for me because I recently began meeting with our computer applications teacher and with the curriculum director for our district There is a push to redesign the class from both sides. But where do we go? I responded on David's blog with the following:

Speaking from a personal standpoint, I would like to see a computer
applications class taught, but not from a Microsoft Office standpoint.
…Why not use the Comp Apps class to introduce the students to some of
the great data mashups out there, or some of the online office suites
that this generation might see in their work experiences? Instead of
doing away with it, we should use it as a vehicle for change, to teach
problem solving skills as they pertain to choosing the best application
for a specific endeavor. In this era of unknown problems and uncertain
solutions, demonstrating how to find the right app will be a useful
skill.

And this point was echoed on Chris Lehman's blog a few days later:

But I’ll take it one step further. We have to be careful about teaching
applications, because applications change. Let’s teach tech literacy,
and teach kids to do graphic manipulation where Photoshop is a tool,
not an end… we need to teach kids to use these tools, yes, but we need
to make sure the kids understand that the specific tool is merely a
means to an end, and merely one means to that end.

From my perspective, we look at this class as part of the business department, where the focus is on giving students the necessary skills to perform successfully in a business environment. For the last decade or so, the requisite skills barely deviated from the Microsoft Office suite. I can see this radically changing over the course of our students careers, from a desktop suite to an online, moveable, scaleable, and customizable platform in the form of OpenOffice, Zoho, Zimbra, or Coventi. In looking at these few examples over the last couple of days, what strikes me immediately is the Read/Write aspect of them that is missing currently from our Computer Applications curriculum.

My incomplete reading of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat has fortunately given me some insight into the nature of what we may see emerging as the future of work flow in the 21st Century: a project started in San Luis Obispo may be edited by a worker in San Antonio, signed off by a manager from his living room in San Sebastian and sent to printing in Macau. This idea is better stated by David Williamson Shaffer, via Padraig Nash at Epistemic Games

The United States is outsourcing standardized jobs, and will continue
to send them overseas until, in the very near future, the only good
jobs left will be for people who can do innovative and creative work.
Yet in the face of this dramatic economic change, our schools have been
spending more time on basic skills for standardized tests and less time
teaching children to solve challenging problems and think in innovative
ways.

What about giving the students the ability to see many applications then be given a problem, or series of problems and ask them to choose their application to solve the problem? At Science Leadership Academy, they attack the problem by coordinating their computer applications class with their subject area needs, so if the English department needs the students to know certain applications by a certain date, the computer applications teacher takes care of that. This could be my answer.

Lastly, I stumbled upon this "Unknown Quote" recently and I can't reconcile it. Does this fit our schools?

"School is the place where kids come to watch teachers work."

Not if I can help it.

Technorati Tags: education, curriculum, applications, SLA, warlick

School 2.0: Where I am

In response to David Warlick's post on School 2.0 (which deserves a reading), I left this comment more in response to some of the responses he generated. Specifically, two responders who pointed out that David was speaking to an already converted crowd, one that had already begun implementing School 2.0. But what about teachers who are in the classrooms who do not have the luxury of mining the internet in search of not only the tools, but also implementation strategies. As one of the lucky "miners," I take the responsibility of bringing these tools and strategies to my staff very seriously. Here are the responses (comments shortened): .

From Em:

I’m doing a seven-part series with my staff this year on Web 2.0 tools. Trust me, they are stunned and amazed at blogs, have never heard of wikis, assume that podcasts are the same as iTunes, and were blown away yesterday by my discussion of RSS and social bookmarking as tools for organizing. We are barely into the second wave of adopters. We’ve got quite a ways to go before these tools are familiar and comfortable with the majority of educators.

From Candace:

Em is right. They do NOT know what wikis are. They have heard the word “blog” but have no idea why it has anything to do with school, and have not heard the term “web 2.0.” Even attorneys and professors I meet professionally say, “what’s that.” ...I am not criticizing you, just pointing out the inevitable social nature of web 2.0 proponents– that you (we) do converse among ourselves so well that we forget about others who are not even in the room. We all need to be more aware of the LARGE group of teachers/general public who are not “there yet.”

My response:

Your post, I see has resonated in two ways: those who have adopted and are applying, and those who are adopting and trying to convert. I fall into the convert category, but let me just describe briefly my experience with Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, more specificially, wikispaces.

Since January 1st, I have helped 8 teachers begin their own wikis for class projects, and each of them, to the person, has responded with a gasp after the first night that their students were active on the site. One of the teachers termed it an “explosion” of student activity.

For Em and Candace from above: get the teachers on and let them play, then unleash the students. When your staff sees how much these technologies extend the classroom, they will want more of it. My advice is to publicize your successes as well. As a former teacher, I know that when I saw other teachers doing cool things, I wanted in as well. To be so bold, check out our district tech blog at http://techdossier.blogspot.com. You will find our teacher’s wikis there too.

As with many of the technology that we’ve brought into the classroom in the last 20 years, it will all become cliched, but what I like about David’s diagram’s are the ways in which they reflect “real” learning. Social learning, connectivism, and multiple intelligences all fit very well into the model of school 2.0 that David suggests here.

Transparency

Based on the sheer abundance of ideas that came out of today's session with Will Richardson at Science Leadership Academy, I apologize in advance if this post goes wildly off topic. The main reasons I traveled to Philadelphia for the day were inspiration and curiosity; both were pronouncedly satisfied and yet piqued beyond what I had expected.

A while ago, I had clipped some segments off of David Warlick's blog about the term "transparency" and how using Web 2.0 technologies allowed our schools to become open not only to the parents of the students involved in the learning, nor the community in which the school exists, but also the world at large.

The business world has always had some good examples of companies that were transparent and authentic with their customers, but there would likely be agreement these were too few and far between. ...There is no doubt that the technologies we call Web 2.0 have both required and produced transparency and authenticity. Blogging, especially, by its very nature, helps create transparency and authenticity--both for ourselves in our own thinking processes (see this thread on Will Richardson's blog), and for our organizations. This is why true blogging is so hard for companies that don't have an open culture.

What is it that we would want to hide in our schools? Making our schools transparent to the world at large will only serve, as Will discussed today, to allow our students and teachers alike access to more teachers. The world is full of "teachable moments" as we like to say in our profession, and we must seek them out in order to give students of the 21st Century the tools they need to succeed in the emerging economies.

I look at the staff I work with at both schools, and I can't wait to take what they do to the transparent level. Whether that is through blogging with them or whatever medium they become comfortable with, I don't really care yet. What challenges me is the idea that we are able to teach them the ways in which to bring their students into the realm where they already exist, yet I haven't started to make a dent yet.

Chris Sessum's blog recently included the following:

Many schools operate out of fear of their constituencies and stakeholders. Many schools are afraid what the public would say if they knew what was going on inside.

This, from my own experience, is not what is happening. Becoming open to the world involves some serious soul-searching and expiation, and the fear of revealing what is going on inside the walls of schools is not what is inhibiting. Rather, shifting the paradigm in which a school has forever existed, and further, in which a teacher has always existed, is a groundbreaking move. As much as we embrace it, we have to be mindful that people need to be reassured that they will not be hurt in some way in the process.

What we need is a BHAG.

The top-down nature of educational reform is a bad model. When reform is pushed upon schools by government agencies and Acts and laws, problems occur and resistance is the natural by-product.

Recently, my Bloglines account has been filling up with posts from some very great minds writing about this very topic. Where change should originate is from those of us here in the trenches, and that is what I am seeing more so than from the push from above. Although we are held accountable for our performance on state and national tests, the real "revolution" in educational philosophy and practice is coming from the rogue teachers who have embraced what Chris Lehmann, David Warlick and Scott McLoed have been talking about for a while, and they call it School 2.0.

Recently, speaking of McLoed, I came across this post on Dangerously Irrelevant concerning what that reform might be. Is it a story that leads us in a direction towards the 21st Century? Or should it be more of an idea or goal, something McLoed calls a BHAG, a big, hairy, bodacious goal. While I might have trouble with the combination of those adjectives in visualizing people (especially in European beach scenes), using such words to describe elements of change in education is exciting.

What I see the BHAG being for whatever we want to call it (School 2.0 is the most ubiquitous), this change must include features such as:

1. Individual access to technology, preferably wireless internet connections for every student that passes through a school, as well as every faculty member. What that piece of technology is, one cannot say. Laptops, iPhones, etc.
2. A huge shift in teacher confidence with technology, which would mean a huge shift in the practice of teacher training programs for new teachers and established teachers alike. What I see as the major stumbling block is a statement I have blogged about before that appeared in Christian Long's Future of Learning Manifesto: Get Comfy with the questions. Teachers need to be walked through the process of giving up control to harness the learning, becoming designers and delegators, instead of speakers and dictators.
   
3. Parental education regarding what their child is capable of--in a positive light. Too much negative information about internet security is bandied about in the current media. The BHAG needs to include a push for parental involvement in education on a level that has been heretofore unseen.

When this does come to fruition, I can only hope that it stays as a movement that is driven by genuine care for the students of tomorrow, and not by a need for comparative analysis between nations.