Thinking Allowed.

Also posted as a guest blogger on Dangerously Irrelevant

When Scott put out his initial request for guest bloggers on school leadership, Justin Medved and I considered whether we fit the bill. We are not school heads or principals, but rather a different kind of leadership that is emerging in this current era of technological change and efforts in education to use this change positively.

We are Technology and Learning Coordinators at International School Bangkok. Our primary role is to lead teachers toward embedded technology use, enhancing learning opportunities in the classroom and beyond.

More and more however, we find that school leadership looks to us to guide and inform on all sorts of decision-making, ranging from curriculum to hiring practice to processes involved in running the school. This defines a new kind of leadership in schools – one that breaks down typical hierarchical set-ups into one of collaboration and deferred expertise. One that is less top down and one that is more shared – at least in some areas. Ultimately, the buck continues to stop at the top, but input and influence seems to be growing from the “middle”.

Currently, many school administrators and curricular leaders are not “up-to-date” or savvy on current ed tech thinking or even on current technology tools. They lead from an understanding of traditional schools attached to isolated IT classes with computer labs for student use. They don’t grasp the possibilities of a participatory web or realize the true potential of the “network” (social and hardware).

For the most part, this is not because they don’t want to change, but because they don’t know what’s possible. This speaks less to their skills as an administrator and more to their backgrounds as educators. It is a credit to those administrators who recognize a changing landscape and ask for guidance from those in the know.

So they come to us.

We work in this dual role, convincing administration of directions we need to move, while at the same time working for teacher buy in. Administration defers to our expertise in these matters.

Both may be considered the jobs of the administrators, yet both jobs fall on the guys with the ideas and the people skills to get it done.

Do you have a similar situation in your schools? If you are reading this as a technology-type, what is your role in this alternative leadership? How much responsibility/say do you have?

Justin and I often tackle the question,

what does it take to bring administration on board to make significant change in schools, curricular or otherwise?“

This week we’d like to share with you the process that we went through from both a leadership side as well as a curricular side. We are in the process now, because we are trusted to do so, in moving ISB forward into a model of embedded technology founded on the Essential Questions of the 21st Century Learner. This curricular model has come directly from us rather than the curriculum office because we see a need for a different way to approach learning with technology.

In the coming posts, Justin and I will take you through our thinking on this curricular model with two purposes:

1. To get feedback from you and to push our thinking forward.
2. To hopefully inspire thinking at your own schools about how to best “embed” technology into classrooms so that is accessible to teachers and agrees with the way children live with technology.

This is a terrific opportunity to speak to a different audience than the readers we have already have at our own blogs (and those who have seen us present), so thanks, Scott. We are looking forward to the week.

with Justin Medved

Tomorrow’s Post: “Birth of a question and a concept” – How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century?

Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Dangerously Irrelevant

It’s a new look for Thinking Allowed (for those 15 regular visitors). No real love for the current theme – simply the old theme was not interacting well with Firefox, which many (most?) of you use. Sidebars were going haywire.

Anyway, let me know what you think of this one. Basically, I like having two columns for the widgets and the text on the left. Maybe I’m a creature of habit – regardless, it limited my choices.

On another note, I haven’t posted in ages – so much for my holiday plans – but I have been out there commenting recently, only I forgot to turn on my CoComment extension, so the comments I made are not appearing on the right in my RSS feed of comments elsewhere.

So, to direct your attention to the posts that drew my attention, check out the post and comments of these two solid posts. In particular, read through the comments (not just because mine is there). Some interesting thinking out there.

• Jeff Utecht’s Thinking Stick post on Interview Questions
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed post on the Curriculum of Politics (which busts into a conversation on media coverage)

Commenting is the stuff that makes the blogsophere work, because it becomes a conversation instead of an article, yet I find often that readers digest a post and leave or even leave a comment without reading the other comments. Not sure why that is.

In a related vein, today, I was talking (in person!) with Jeff and Kim (Always Learning) about how there is a real sense of negativity out there.

Is the holiday season getting on everyone’s nerves?

Is the conversation getting tired and repetitive?

Are techies getting frustrated by lack of action?

Do we need more outside voices, chiming in and questioning?

Is the economy just making us depressed?

No answers, just thinking aloud.

It’s been a while since my last post.

What can I tell you? It’s been busy.

There always seems to be this guilt that hangs over me when I don’t post for extended periods of time. Like I am letting down subscribers…luckily I don’t have too many (thank you, those of you who are here!).

But not having posted does not mean that I haven’t been involved and getting stuck in. (I also post tech how-to’s on another blog, Talking Tech.)

I truly enjoyed a geek session with colleagues, listening to the Warlick keynote from the K12 Online Conference. We, like many, were active in the live chat which was very rewarding.

Even got a little mention on the 2 cents blog, which was pretty cool. Though, appropriately, it was for something a student said to me, rather than any epiphany I’ve offered.

Figures.

In that same chat online I shared a cool NYTimes opinion piece on Facebook from the students’ perspective. Paraphrasing:

We adults take this networking thing too seriously…it’s all supposed to be fun with our friends.

Definitely a good read.

Then working at home last week, I was twittering at the right time to catch Chris Lehmann’s invite to join his class at SLA in a UStream conversation – a terrific experience that Chris posted about. His students are articulate and offered the best description of the difference between a project assessment vs a test.

Paraphrasing:

Tests are what the teachers thinks you’ve learned based on what they covered, but a project is based on what you need to learn.

(Only more eloquent than that.)

The point was well-made. Students own the learning they do in authentic, open-ended projects. For tests they do what they need to, in order to get a good grade.

And all of this got me thinking…

I worry about getting too far removed from the classroom as an Ed Tech guy or as an administrator. Away from the classroom, we lose touch with the wisdom of our students – the insights into how they see the world and the openings for us to be their educators.

We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.

I think that ALL educators in and out of the classroom need to remember and embrace that they are more than “content delivery devices” or even information facilitators. There is a human connection that must be made with students.

Years ago, I heard or read that so much of teen difficulties come from the fact that they are undervalued in society. In pre-Industrial Revolution days, they were working the farm, contributing to the family. Valued. But now, they have little to nothing to make them feel “of worth”. This was a main argument for Service Learning in schools and I am all for that.

I also think that educators have the power to make students feel valued and worthwhile EVERY DAY. In the way we treat them, the way we listen to them, and the way we ask them what they think.

Chris did this with the students on UStream for us, but I imagine he and the SLA faculty do this all the time with their students. When asked what they valued about being at SLA, these students did not speak of the technology or the technological prowess of their faculty. They spoke of the connectedness and self-worth they felt with their teachers, who genuinely cared about their learning and their well-being.

I can’t say it any better than that.

Technorati Tags: k12online07 warlick practicaltheory education ustream

Will Richardson has a much larger readership than I do, so if you find his post through me, something is amiss. I loved what he said at the end of his post on a recent cover story from Business Week on “The Future of Work” which he shares highlights from.

I wonder how many teachers are getting ready for the new school year by developing a deeply collaborative curriculum, one in which they model for their students not just connections with other teacher/learners but co-creation of knowledge, in whatever forms that takes. I wonder how many of them are being supported in that effort. We have the capability to create these types of environments; what we need is to provide more and more opportunities for teachers to connect and learn with other educators and professionals from around the globe.

Amen.

Is anyone someone asking their students to co-create knowledge? Where is the support coming from? When will our curriculum not focus on content knowledge, but rather on the co-creation of new knowledge?

Thanks, Will.

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Every now and then you get lucky. And then even more rarely, you get professionally lucky. And then, if all the planets align and you have your lucky socks on, and you eat the right breakfast something happens that fills you up with professional optimism.

In Ed Tech blogging, we tend (not always) to blog about similar ideas. About the need for change and about the power of the change we see coming for learning. And sometimes we ask each other about how to change. Because change is not easy. It is particularly “not easy” in education where the professionals who do the job have a great deal of autonomy and often are resistant to change. So we ask ourselves, “what do we need to do to affect change?”

How do we convince the teachers and administrators at our schools that what we see as NECESSARY, fundamental change needs to happen and it needs to happen soon?

What is the Tipping Point for this change to happen?

Lucky little me might be about to find out.

You see, last year, when I took the technology facilitator job, I was lucky. I joined a technology director whose focus is on learning. He makes his decisions for technology spending on learning and he still has conversations about learning. And he’s supported by a School Head and CFO who also focus first on learning.

Then this year, Justin showed up. Suddenly, I had a NextGen leader pushing my thinking. We bounce ideas off of each other and share in our efforts to create something new, dynamic and effective in educational technology and learning. Well, that’s pretty lucky.

But how lucky would you be if you then are joined by ANOTHER NextGen teacher next year? Yup, that’s happening. Along comes Kim, always learning, to join as an information specialist. Are you kidding me?!? I am not.

Well, that’s just unfair lucky.

It gets better. (now I’m just bragging!)

Our administrators are embracing this thinking about thinking – the focus on thinking as curriculum in itself. This is awesome and it makes me think that I may be seeing the beginnings of real change possibilities. And that’s pretty exciting.

The previously mentioned voices, you’ve been reading, or if you haven’t you should be: Justin at Medagogy and Kim at always learning. But now add a new, different voice to that mix. Our ES Principal, Annelies has begun to blog about “Thinking” in her blog In-tu-it-think and what she’s come to realize in her own growth as a school leader.

What we can do together is more than what I can do.

There is so much that I like about her first post, but that line is my favorite. You have to love a blog from a Principal that has the tag line, “How does education meet the needs of the 21st century learner?”

Certainly a welcome new voice to the discussion!

And as fortunate as it’s become for me professionally here, I am pretty psyched about “what we can do together” in the coming years.
Lucky me.

Day 2 of the conference brought us another wonderful student keynote who spoke on the Chinese tale of the Frog in the Well. The frog only has a limited view of the sky through the top of the well, and until she is moved and shown the true nature of things, her horizons and her perspective are never changed. A fine start to the day for teachers to think about and to consider international education.

Then, the ever dynamic, Ian Jukes came on to speak. With excellent supporting visuals, Ian spoke on the dire need for our schools to address the thinking skills needed to prepare students for the world that outside of education has changed and continues to change so rapidly. Great quote from Woodrow Wilson, “it’s easier to move a cemetery, than it is to change a curriculum.” He makes a terrific point that the main difficulty is that the change we are dealing with is hard to comprehend and so it is hard to make our own changes when we are dealing with the “tyranny of the urgent.”

Kids today are different – Jukes spoke on how the visual cortex of the brain is larger, more developed than kids of 20 years ago. “Screenagers”, he called them, citing two Time Magazine articles. Interestingly, he talked about how current research seems to indicate that our brains continue to adapt and make new connections. But the brain needs regular exposure to the “change-maker” to make this change. So does this have implications on our schools? (rhetorical)

Jukes talked a fair amount on games and their impact on kids. He encouraged us to learn about these games, to play them with kids and to get our “asses kicked” by kids. They are hard-wiring themselves through these technologies. We should need to tap into this.

I saw a lot of Ian Jukes this week. And the message is clear. Change is here…change is fast (exponential) and getting faster. And predicting the future? Impossible. So what does that mean for us? It means that we need schools to be different. I haven’t had “my own” class in a few years now and I do think about how I would do things differently if I were in the classroom again. But my need for change in education is even greater now. As the tech-guy, this stuff seems to fall under my umbrella for change. And I need to work out how to convince a curriculum office to dump content and adopt thinking skills, a faculty to include me in their lesson planning, and an administration to hire and evaluate based on a willingness to adapt to these ideas and change the way schools work.

Is this overstepping my bounds? Probably. But the need seems to strong to ignore. Education really seems to be failing kids. They seem to be learning in spite of us, not with us. Maybe that’s too harsh, but I liken it to the exact opposite of wikipedia. Wikipedia is accurate at the macro-level, but could be inaccurate at the micro. I think real learning is possibly working in individual rooms with individual teachers, but we are failing miserably on the school-wide education-as-a-whole level in preparing kids for futures requiring 21st century skills. (speaking of which, I attended a workshop on these skills that set us back on moving forward more than anything I’ve seen….good presentation is good presentation and when it isn’t good…ouch. Until I get up and start presenting myself in that forum, I suppose I should not judge).

Luckily, I am spoiled. I work with a forward thinking leader colleague and am about to be joined by another in the ES. I saw many faces from my school at the various Jukes sessions. The tide could start changing at ISB and I think that those who are interested is as good a place to start as any. Let’s see how many come to school on Monday wanting to be committed.

(originally posted on harterlearning on Feb 19,2007)

Too much traveling and catching up with my first job lately. Been catching up on my feeds, but not enough time to ponder to sort through my thoughts.

Two great posts though recently that I commented on that I’d like to share though.

1) Dangerously Irrelevant just hit its 6 month birthday. This is incredible to me, since I find Scott’s blog has a large reader list. It just goes to show what you can accomplish with meaningful posts and thought-provoking ideas. The post is a particularly good one in that Scott talks about what he reads and how he makes those choices – very useful for a blogger trying to increase his readership to get more conversations going.

In particular, Scott brings a focus on leadership in education which I find refreshing and important. I worry at times, that we (the ed tech bloggers) get caught up in our 2.0’s (web, school, student) and we become victims of our own group think. Scott’s D.I. blog keeps an eye on the other sides of the argument. Recently he has also shared other leadership blogs worth keeping an eye on. Only 6 months…incredible.

2) Another frequent read for me is Chris Lehmann’s Practical Theory. He recently posted a poignant reminder of how the students that we teach affect us as much as we affect them. Reminded me of some of my own fortune in becoming peer/colleagues with many of the teachers who were inspiring to me as a student. Anyway…as always, another great post from Chris.

Just had dinner with an old friend from those days actually. Hadn’t seen her in at least 12 years…and yet we fell back into it. Good people are good people. Common ground is common ground. Doesn’t matter how long you don’t see them for…those two things keep relationships going. (okay, that’s a random aside…but it was nice catching up).

(originally posted on harterlearning on Jan 17, 2007)

Some Thoughts About School 2.0 — Part 1 – Practical Theory: “It’s about the pedagogy. Too much educational software just attempts to turn these really powerful devices into the next version of the workbook. That’s criminal…

School 2.0 recognizes that our walls have broken down — and that’s a good thing. Our knowledge, our ideas, our communication is no longer bound by the walls of our school or the hours of our school day.

School 2.0 believes deeply in the old Dewey quote: ‘If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.’ “

This post was a terrific summary/introduction to what we need to recognize about the changing face of education that seems to be coming from a group led by Ed. Tech people. What most teachers and administrators are missing is that it is not a “tech-thing” and it’s not about the computers. It’s about learning and it’s about teaching kids in the best way for them to learn.

But also, it’s about what they are learning. And we can’t keep robbing these kids by teaching them the way that worked for us (and let’s not even argue whether it actually did ‘work’ for us). They need us to recognize that they need more…and they need US.

Let’s not let them down.