Thinking Allowed.

In returning from the Learning 2.008 Conference, I have had a lot on my mind.  The conference brought together educators new to all of this “shift happens” talk and those that were on board - our “converted” that echo in the blogosphere, sometimes too much.  And the conference continues to succeed in bringing an enthusiasm and energy to those new to these ideas - getting more people “on the bus”.  If that’s happening, then the conference is doing its job.

But I wonder where the rest of us our going.

Sifting through my RSS reader, reading through the blog posts of my Personal Learning Network, commenting and being commented upon, I find myself questionning where we stand.

How much change are we affecting?

How much “shift” is happening in our schools?

In isoloated projects or classrooms, some incredible stuff is happening.  Kids are collaborating.  They’re networked, wired, savvy, and being prepared to succeed.

But in those same schools and throughout education, we still that the majority are not on the bus - they didn’t even know that there was somewhere to go.

What is going to be the tipping point of this shift?

Will schools resist changing and render themselves obsolete? And at what stage does this become unethical to allow?

Real widespread change is going to have to come from administration.

In schools, we find ourselves clinging to proven pedagogy and content curriculum, because they have worked in the past and it’s what we know.

Now however, we also recognize that students need more different learning.  They’ve always needed the skills of communication, collaboration, and meta-cognition.  We’ve always valued Gardner’s disciplined and ethical minds (and other Five Minds).  But the context for which they need these skills and minds has changed, sped up, and arguably gained in importance.  As a result, students need different learning experiences to ensure their participation and success in a rapidly changing world.

So, here I go again, joining the echo chamber, preaching to the converted.  Where am I going with this?

Educators who get this idea, are on one side of a chasm from the rest of education still rooted in old practice (with best intentions).

In trying to lead change, educators are trying to manage this gap between what we’ve done and what we need to do.  It needs to be school administrators who lead this shift, by bridging the gap between the tried-and-true and the bold-and-new.

The edublogosphere made up of consultants and librarians, technology facilitators and teachers are doing their best and making headway, but the fog is still thick and they are navigating through it with a flashlight.

It will take school administrators who see the need for educational change (reform is too intimidating a word) to take isolated innovation and make it practice.

Truly make it the way we do business.

So, get to work on your administrators and get them on board.  Or better yet, become administrators yourselves.

Keep in mind that you lead a staff who are generally good teachers.  They have great intentions.  They care about student learning.  And all the good that they have done and can do is not yet obsolete (no matter how often we tell ourselves it is).

We find ourselves at a pivotal time, I believe, where a new wave of administrators could be coming through, grounded in traditional schooling, but also thriving in a wired world.  Educators who understand both sides of the gap.

It is these administrators who can bridge this gap.

You won’t find these educators satisfied getting on the bus - they’re ready to drive it.

Maybe one of these people is you.

Or me.

Photo by tread
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

Okay, it’s complete out-of-the-box thinking time.

Why do schools teach what they do? 

Really, that’s what I’m asking…what’s it good for?

How is the content curriculum that we teach kids helping them?

(And I am not accepting any version of “it prepares them for the next level of school.”)

In older posts on this blog, I’ve written that school curriculum NEEDS a major shift: (whole post here)

21st century learners need thinking skills. They need to be able to find, process, and evaluate information that is EVERYWHERE and always accessible. They need to be able to participate in an interconnected, wired world in effective and responsible ways. They NEED to be taught how to manage/handle/thrive amidst all of the information that is out there and continuing to grow.

Our allegiance to English, Science, Math, and Social Studies as core curricular ideals and the end-all-be-all in student learning needs to make room for higher order thinking, questioning, and information literacy.

And after sharing my thoughts on the NYTimes reported failure of a laptop program, I offered: (whole post here)

Our curricula of content mired in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies is not preparing students for anything but further education focused on these same subjects.

What students learn needs to be different and how they learn needs to be different.

These are not unique ideas.  Throughout the edublogosphere in varying degrees, educators are talking about the importance of a 21st Century Curriculum (for lack of a better name).

So I ask this question, in light of the shared belief that a 21st Century curriculum focused on thinking, communicating and collaborating skills is necessary for a world in which knowledge is so readily accessible.

What is the point of the way current curriculum is setup?

More specifically, break it down into the classic subjects:

• Why do we learn Language Arts (or English in HS)?
• Why do we learn Social Studies?
• Why do we learn Science?
• Why do we learn Math?
• Why do we learn Art (performing and visual)?

(note:  I stick to these subjects, because Language learning seems to have an obvious practicality, as does Health/PE.)

Is this too bold to ask?  Can we defend what we do as schools?

No more, “That’s the way we’ve always done it” defense.

Out of the box time.

Prove that what we say we value is useful.

Truly no offense intended to any of these subjects and the educators who teach them.  I just want to hear from the experts what the right answers are.

Please feel free to answer any and all in the comments.

Image: “Question!” by Bast, found at Flickr Creative Commons

Also posted as a guest blogger on Dangerously Irrelevant 

So where do Justin and I go from here?

Over the past week we have taken some time to reflect on our process of creating a meaningful and usable framework for embedding “21st century literacy” into our school curriculum. Part 1, 2, 3, 4 sought to guide you the reader through our thinking and seek out feedback and friendly criticism. Blogs are such a great venue for conversations like this.

Our final post asks for advice on how to make it a reality.

Our framework was designed with the International School of Bangkok and its teachers in mind. While we feel it could apply to any educational setting we are not bound by any external curricular limitations other than that which the International Baccalaureate sets out in grades 11 and 12. Our school is heavily invested in the UBD (Understanding by Design) approach to unit/curriculum planning and as a result we have chosen to use “essential questions” to guide our framework.

To quote from an earlier post:

Looking at Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big “essential questions” and “enduring understandings” had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same “best practice” approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom? If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different? What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in?

Best practices regarding meaningful technology integration vary world wide. As technology is a real and relevant teaching and learning tool, we felt that our approach should leverage internationally-recognized best practices and current research if it was to truly gain acceptance in our school. Whether you use the new NET Standards as a framework or something else, it is important that you meet your teachers where they are and stay consistent with what is accepted and established practice in your own school environments.

When we walk into school every day we are confident that kids are learning how to read, write, and do math. Our teachers are trained to teach these subjects. We trust in their professionalism and in the belief that these teachers want to prepare students for their futures.

In our embedded curriculum model, we have tried to ensure that the nature of “what teachers have to teach” seems accessible to them and just as importantly doable - that the conversations involving technology are conversations that teachers are already having about truth, safety, communication, and collaboration.

But theory is not practice.

• What are the best ways to get teachers not only on board and trained, but fundamentally believing in the importance of including this curriculum into “the way they do business”?
• How do we get to a place where we have the same confidence in students learning information literacy skills as we do in the other subject areas?
• If your school is on the right track and doing this, how have you made it happen?
• What has been the tipping point to go from talking about it, to doing it?

This is where we want to go. We would like your input. It’s time for the collective intelligence of the Web 2.0 world to kick in.

None of us is as good as all of us.

Please chime in.

Thanks for joining us this week. (In particular, thanks to Scott for lending us his audience.)

We’ve enjoyed the conversation.

with Justin Medved

Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Dangerously Irrelevant

Also posted as a guest blogger on Dangerously Irrelevant under the title, “Curriculum 2.0 - building buy-in and shared understanding”

In our last post, Justin and I shared with you our 5 essential questions for the 21st Century Learner as well as our thinking behind how and why we felt the need to re-shape the way “technology” curriculum is embedded into classroom learning. We built our work on our new literacy wiki - as a collaborative environment for us, but also in anticipation of wanting needing to share our work with a greater audience for feedback and ultimately contribution at a later date. The wiki was the perfect environment for this. By documenting the evolution of this curricular journey in a public venue we hope to garner feedback and critical friending that will hopefully lead to a better and stronger framework.

Besides isn’t this “shift” all about the power of sharing and networks?

While it’s focus is on making “technology integration” more accessible to teachers and more meaningful to students, it actually attempts to articulate an approach and create a through line that run beside all other subject curricula. Finally an answer to the question “who is going to teach these skills?”……….. Everyone is.

We called it Curriculum 2.0.

Once we finished the initial framework it was time to get some feedback.

Involving our Curriculum coordinators, Technology Director and our new colleague, Kim Cofino (how lucky were we?!), the conversations that emerged were awesome. We felt it important to shop the concept around to as many different people as possible in order to get a balanced perspective. Teachers ultimately want to know “what will this look like?” and “how will be it be supported?” and we had to have some answers ready. Through conversation, challenging questions, and true collaboration, we were able to fine tune our original 5 questions into three focused roles of technology in 21st century learning. More on this and the on the philosophy behind our structure in our next post, but until then you can ruminate on the diagram below.

In this post, we wanted to focus on the conversations that got us here.

In addition to working with key people at ISB, we presented our work at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai in mid September. The feedback was very positive. It was validating to see that other technology coordinators were experiencing the same sort of difficulties with past IT integration scope and sequences. And it was energizing to see that our work was striking a chord. [side note: Dennis will present the work further at the EARCOS Teachers' Conference in Kuala Lumpur in March. If you are there, it'd be great to see you at the session.]

With positive vibes flowing all around, the next step was to include our school leadership. As we mentioned in an earlier post, we work closely with our school Leadership Team in a distributed leadership model with them often looking to us for guidance - leadership in a different direction. Over the past year, we have been presenting various technology tools and ideas to the LT to give them a better sense of what to look for in classrooms and what to expect in educational change in the coming years.

Here in the edublogosphere, we often preach to the converted. In general, there is a lot of agreement on how education needs to change and technology’s role in that change. We recognize the shift that is happening and the impact that will have on our students and should have on their learning. We commiserate on how administration or faculty just don’t get it and celebrate together when they do.

We seldom talk about how important the process to bring them along is - that is a conversation that matters.

Our work with the LT brought this to light for us. To a large degree, they trust us. And that’s a great start, but to enact major curricular change, we had to first convince them of the need. We had to describe an inevitable world that required innovators, thinkers, collaborators, and communicators. One in which knowing something was less important than creating something and in which working in a group meant talking to people around the world and being able to communicate in more than one way.

We had to create a shared understanding of what 21st century learning is and why it’s important. We had to allow them to help frame the context in which this could work at ISB. With that individual, personal input, you can achieve buy-in. Then you can challenge them by asking, what are we going to do about it?

Our point: you can’t skip these conversations.

As other schools or technology folks begin to use our framework to develop their own integration plans, we remind them, make sure you have the conversations. Use our work as a starting point for conversations that encourage questioning and challenge thinking. If we can’t defend our rationale for a curricular model like this, then it isn’t worth doing. Give stake holders a chance to process, question, and understand. (sounds like good teaching!)

Whether it comes via top leadership or from another direction, in order for school change to happen, buy-in has to come from shared understanding. And that only comes from conversations that matter.

For us, the next steps are to flesh out our framework and bring it more formally to teachers, where again, conversation will lead to shared understanding. It’s what didn’t happen at T.C. Williams and why all the tech in the world isn’t improving student learning there.

No matter how “right” we know we are, you must get buy-in and shared understanding.

You can’t skip the conversations.

with Justin Medved

Tomorrow’s post: Refining the Idea

Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Dangerously Irrelevant