This past week was a busy one and I haven’t been able to post very much about some very important issues and conversations that have been occurring in the Edublogosphere. I spent last night and this morning catching up on some blog reading and I’m going to take a few moments here to make some brief comments (with more to come later) on some posts that spoke very loudly to me.
Chris Lehmann at the Practical Theory blog posted some things to say to 49 Superintendents in response to a post by Will Richardson. As I was reading the comments posted by Chris I was struck with the thought that these are comments that we should be saying to all educators — from superintendents to principals to teachers (as well as to parents and the community.)
I especially agreed with the following comments:
Tell them that our schools have to change or die.
Tell them that there are more and more people arguing that the classroom… the very thing that we have spent our professional career in love with… is becoming obsolete.
Tell them that those people are right unless we learn to change.
Tell them that our kids already have changed.
Tell them that locking out the sites and tools of this new world our kids live in will render us irrelevant and useless when our students need us most.
Tell them that this new world means that teaching skills — cognitive and meta-cognitive — is now more important than memorizing content.
Tell them that multiple choice tests can’t possibly measure the new skills our kids must master.
Tell them that our students can be content producers now as much as content consumers.
Visit the original post for much more…
Will Richardson (weblogg-ed) shares with us some of the things he learned during his conversations with the superintendents and shares a story of one district that does “get it” — it’s nice to know that some education policy/decision-makers out there do understand the urgency that the rest of us are feeling/knowing.
Steve at teach42.com posted one example that speaks of the irrelevancy of traditional instruction and assessment methods. Memorization of facts should not be the goal of instruction in the 21st Century — our goal should be helping students to understand how to acquire, understand, and use information (sounds a bit like higher level Bloom’s doesn’t it?).
There is a nice list of Knowledge Behaviours at the anecdote blog that remind me of the Habits of Mind (see the Coalition of Essential Schools for more info). These, as learning objectives, are much more relevant for today’s learners (which includes all of us, right? Yes — if we promote the concept of “life-long learning”) than memorization and regurgitation of facts.
Susan (reflexions) references David Warlick (and one of his posts about technology and the nature of teaching and learning) in her post about “change” — which is related to everything above… I agree with her reference to Buckminster Fuller and his quote about “creating new models” instead of trying to fight the “existing reality”. The new models are already being created — we just need to push these new models into place so that they replace the old, irrelevant models for instruction and learning.
So how do we push these “new models”? We have two months, potentially, to build the “infrastructure” for creating a “critical mass” before the new school year starts. Beyond being a part of the online conversation through blogging — here are a few other places to start: (Thanks to Miguel and Vicki for posting and promoting these on their blogs)
What other ideas do you have for promoting the new models?
Technorati Tags: instruction, learning, web 2.0, instructional technology
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
There’s also http://teachersteachingteachers.org/. Maybe they can also be promoted through communities at http://elgg.net/.
I hope there won’t be overblown expectations, because that could demotivate people if they won’t come true. I think it should be stressed that doing your best is a good thing by itself.
I think teachers would be helped if there was also attention to how to persuade management. Tips to help them win arguments, for example.
Thanks for the link… for me, trying to create SLA, where the day has a unified field… where we look at questions across disciplines… where we use the tools at hand to find our own answers… that’s my new model, but hey, September should be an interesting month to see if we really can do it.
Meryn —
Thanks for posting those two links. You make a very good point about “doing your best is a good thing by itself.” That essentially a similar message to “Be the change you wish to see in the world” (Ghandi) — my favorite quote and along the lines of what Miguel has been saying in his blog.
Chris –
I’ll be anxious to see the success that you will have with SLA (I’m predicting success for you). I really believe that looking at questions across disciplines (and thematically) is much more effective that what we are doing right now. Our school started down the path of interdisciplinary work but our district culture is too entrenched in separate curriculum departments and now NCLB and increased testing pressure has pretty killed our cross-curriculum efforts.
I wish you the best and I’m certain that your students will benefit greatly.
Stephanie