Sustainable Shift

          I am amazed and a little ashamed that my last blog post was the end of  September 2011, some four months ago!!  Sure I have all the usual excuses….too busy, the holidays, I forgot…but really, I think the reason is that I have not made a “sustainable shift” in the way I do business.  And I think that is the case with many in leadership positions in our schools, the very folks we are counting on to be the change agents we need for success in 21^st century teaching and learning.  It is well known that many of our educational leaders are nearing the end of their careers and that these “baby-boomers” are retiring in droves.  (well, at least that is still true in our profession, even though so many other boomers are working years longer). So I would guess that younger teachers and administrators, more tech-oriented, will be better at some of the tech-savvy things that are just not organically a part of us!! 

            So I started to think of ways I could make a “sustainable shift” and maybe help some other “oldie, but goodies” out there to make it as well.  Here are some ideas to get us started.  I guess this is a belated list of New Year’s resolutions!

•         Subscribe to an RSS feed.  There is way too much reading from journals, blogs, newspapers, research, etc. to keep up with so you need this Web 2.0 tool to help keep up!  If you don’t know how to go about it, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU  for a tutorial!
•          Get a Twitter account and start finding folks of like mind.  I actually have a great Twitter feed I have built which is entirely educational related.  I learn so much there….when I go to it!!  Again, go here for help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xbjIE8cPM
•          For school administrators, send a daily email to your staff with whatever highlights you want to share.  The key is to do it every day!!
•          Use Google docs for sharing curriculum and instruction ideas, lesson plans, school improvement plans, etc.  Google Docs is a great tool and some of your teachers probably already use it.  Ask them!

            I will be thinking of other ways we can make the shift into the 21^st century a sustainable one for those of us who have not been born into it!  Stay tuned, and please, share any ideas you may have with me!

21st Century Skill

Using the Smart Phone responsibly as a tool in school is a 21st century skill we should be teaching our students.  They have them in their pockets anyway, why not capture the power and use it to learn?


Here is link to a great article I read recently on "MindShift" titled "Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones and Use Them for Learning".

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/08/why-schools-should-stop-banning-cell-phones-and-use-them-for-learning241.html


Think about it!!

The Summer of Our Discontent

            Looming huge for school systems across the nation are unprecedented budget cuts.  Teacher assistants have been slashed, classroom sizes have increased and other key personnel have had to go.  In North Carolina, the legislature wants to cut pre-school and that is just plain stupid!  Ultra-conservatives the likes of Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, think that pre-school is a form of governmental brainwashing and that children should only be educated by their parents in the early years!!  I think anyone in public education knows without a doubt the importance of helping disadvantaged children early.  We will never eradicate the inevitable “gap” between the haves and have nots,  but early childhood programs have long been critical in at least helping to even the playing field.  Hopefully between “The Judge” and our governor, funding will be restored!

            The Teaching Fellows has been eliminated and this is so very shortsighted.  The Teaching Fellows program has provided a high-quality pipeline of teachers for schools in North Carolina for over 25 years!!!  Of course there are other cuts, but these seem to me to be the worst of the worst!

            Then there was the  “Save our Schools” rally in Washington, DC.  It was like the “Woodstock” of public education!!  Diane Ravitch, Jonothan Kozol and Deborah Meier, all of whom I have followed and considered to be among the best thinkers about education of my lifetime, were among the featured speakers.

            The platform of the rally centered on public schools as the cornerstone of our democracy and with the changing demographics of society we must become more inclusive.  It becomes imperative to differentiate education so ALL students can retain their right to free and appropriate education.  Much was discussed about poverty as the root of the achievement gap……period!  I could not agree more!

            At the rally, advocates for doing away with high stakes accountability as we know it, were in full force.

            Of course we need to be held accountable but we really have gone too far.

             Look at the testing scandals that have been uncovered this summer.  These blatant acts of cheating are a result of the culture of fear built by high stakes testing.  And now we have the US Secretary of Education unilaterally overriding the federal legislation No Child Left Behind due to the fact that so many schools are failing under the recently upped requirements?????   “The current law serves as a disincentive to higher standards, rather than as an incentive,” Mr. Duncan said.  Come on Arnie, when you play basketball and keep missing the basket, you don’t move the net!!  You must improve your shot!!!!  (Well, maybe in light of all the cheating problems, this is just as well.) But is it the best thing for our kids?  We are really jerking our teachers, kids and parents around in the midst of such political pandering.

            But ahhhhh……fall is coming!  Cooler temperatures and thinking may prevail!  School will begin anew and the summer of our discontent will be over. And then you begin to discover that “….the more things change, the more they stay the same”.   Sad, but true!

The Definition of 21st Century Literacies

     This graphic was created with a Web 2.0 tool I am learning at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation this week.  The tool is called "Tagul" for my teacher friends....it is really neat and much more useful than "Wordle" so I hope you will try it!

     More important than the tool is the review of the fact that the skill set needed to be successful in this century is changing.  The text was taken from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) who have published the definition of the "new literacy".  Included in that definition is the following:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

“…..forest for the trees.”

My grandparents and parents used the old adage “….can’t see the forest for the trees…”  quite regularly.  As someone who has recently retired from education, I am coming to realize that when you are in the public education system, you definitely cannot “…see the forest for the trees”!  So often “the system”, behemoth that it is, prevents that from happening.  For example, I know how much sense it makes in our 21^st century world to eliminate textbooks, a huge expense  for irrelevant material.  But how many times did I go through the adoption process and allocate precious resources toward textbooks?  Many, many times without thought to what we could have been doing with all those dollars to upgrade the technology our kids need to thrive in the global society. 

            Did you know that South Korean officials recently announced that students would not use textbooks after 2014?  Resources will be allocated to electronic tablets and e-learning systems.  They are seeing through “the trees” and realizing that this will contribute toward narrowing the achievement gap between the rich and poor and make learning more fun and effective.  It will take that leap of thinking on the part of “the system” to make it happen!!  It needs to happen in our country soon!  We just need to cut through the bureaucracy of textbook purchasing and see the bigger picture of the 21^st century!!

Attention Getter!

When I see a headline “Education? It’s no longer the answer”, it certainly gets my attention quickly!! That is the title given by the Charlotte Observer of March 9, 2011, to a rerun of a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times that ran on March 6, 2011 entitled “Degrees and Dollars”. Wonder why the Observer didn’t use the real title? Anyway, the gist of this op-ed piece is centered on Krugman’s contention that putting more kids through college is not the answer to restoring middle class America. He talks about the fact that a lot of “white-collar” work which is done by the well educated is on the way to computerization, i.e. legal analysis, medical diagnosis, etc. (think of “Watson”!) The menial, labor-intensive jobs such as custodial work and truck driving will require less-educated workers even in the face of technology.

When I was working on high school reform, we always said that college-prep was the default curriculum for all students. We were not naïve enough to think that all would go to college but raising he bar for all was supposed to help you no matter what path you chose. I still do not think that is a bad thing. We don’t know where technology will take us in the future so everyone needs to possess higher-order thinking skills to deal with the proliferation of knowledge.

I agree with Krugman when he states that we need to fix the inequalities that kids face from the start….where that loathed gap begins….as it is a waste of human potential. Yes!!! But to relegate people toward a lesser standard of education is not the answer. We need improved early programs accompanied by rigorous, relevant and personalized instruction for all to be successful in the 21st century.

On the other hand, maybe what we need to consider is what was discussed in the Pathways to Prosperity Project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education of February 2011. They discuss various European models and one I particularly like is from Finland and Denmark where they keep all students in a common, untracked comprehensive school up through grade 9 or 10, at which point students and their families, not the school, decide which kind of upper secondary education they will pursue. Some of those programs could include Project Lead The Way, a rigorous engineering curriculum, career academies or “schools within schools” or be modeled after SERB’s High Schools That Work. The main objective is to provide a smooth transition from adolescence to adulthood well supported by a sound, basic education for all in the earlier grades.  Give up tracking?  That's another topic for another time!!

Lot’s to think about…but surely education IS the answer!!!! 

Little and Personal

I like what Marc Prensky says in this short video clip of him talking with Stephen Heppell.  I have long thought we need to embrace what the kids already have!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cy1X-_CbFM&feature=player_embedded

Enjoy this clip and think about what it means for our classrooms.  Prensky is always ahead of the curve.....we need to listen!!