Complain, Quit, or Innovate

Another of my favorite educational bloggers, and one whose work appears all over current technology education publications is edublogger Will Richardson. One of his recent posts captures the dire need for change in educators. I wanted to select a meaningful quote to include from his post, but thought the entire thing was necessary to share:

Owning the Teaching…and the Learning
I’ve been growing more frustrated lately and I’m feeling more pessimistic about the prospects for any serious change in how we as an education system see teaching and learning, and I think I’ve figured out why. I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students. Many will say that they understand to varying degrees the changes that are occurring, that the Web is in many ways rewriting the rules of communication and socialization, that the world our students enter when they leave us will be much different from the ones we ourselves were prepared for. But it feels like there is this unspoken belief among most that we can deal with these changes without changing ourselves. And that’s is a huge problem.
Lots of teachers I talk to want blogs and podcasts and wikis. Without question, there are thousands of teachers, tens of thousands in fact, who are already using the tools with their students. I see new examples every day. But I’m still bothered by the fact that very, very rarely do I see new pedagogies to go along with them that prepare students for the creation of their own learning networks. That allow them to take some ownership (or at least envision the possibility of it) over their learning. That help them learn self-direction and get them to stop waiting for someone else to initiate the learning. And even rarer is to find one of those teachers exploring his or her own learning through the tools.
More than anything else, I think, teaching is modeling. As a writing teacher, I wrote with my students. As a journalism teacher, I wrote for publication with my students. As a literature teacher, I practiced and modeled reading for my students. Modeling is teaching, and never has that been made more apparent to me than when my own children act out and reflect my own bad behavior back to me. (It happens more than I like to admit.) My own kids, it has become clear, learn less when I talk, more when I do. And so it is with me.
We go back and forth in this community about whether teachers who use blogs should blog, or podcast or read RSS feeds. I’ve always hesitated to come down on one side or the other in that debate for a variety of reasons. But it’s become clear to me that the answer has to be yes. If you are an educator, I think you have little choice but to choose option 3 in the Marco Torres mantra: “You can complain, quit or innovate.” I know in many ways it stinks to have to be an educator at a moment in history when things are changing on a glacial scale. But what you signed up for is preparing kids for their futures. You have little choice but to deal.
Why won’t our kids be as well served if we don’t change ourselves? I mean we’re all products of the system, right? We all did ok. Things were changing when we went through school, right? Um, no. Not like this.
Our students will by and large have the ability to learn anything, anywhere, anytime (if they can’t already.) The level of their collaboration and connections with colleagues and peers in online environments will be of a type that is hard for most of us to imagine (myself included.) The information and knowledge that they will be awash in will require skills and literacies that most of us simply do not have. Their futures (and to some extent their “presents”) look very little like our vision of what it means to be educated. (And if you don’t believe that, spend some time reading “The Education Map of the Decade.”)
And so here is the friction: Recently, I had a teacher tell me that she spent about 10 minutes a day online and that frankly, that was quite enough. She said that she’s not going to sacrifice the other things that she already does in her life to spend more time on the Internet. I wanted to say, as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks, you have the “greatest library in human history” at your fingertips. You have a billion potential teachers. You have an opportunity to learn in ways that you or I could not even have dreamed of when we were in school. And you have an opportunity to shepherd your students into a much more complex, much messier, and much more profound world of learning in ways that will help prepare them more powerfully for the world they face.
Many of our kids are already doing this without us. Many of them have much more of a clue of what it means to learn using these tools than we do. Imagine if we could teach them to leverage their connections even more powerfully, if we could show them how powerful they are in our own learning. That we are not just engaged teachers but engaged learners. That we’re not afraid of what’s ahead because we know how to learn.
Surely, that’s worth more than 10 minutes a day.
But the litany of reasons why this can’t happen are on the tips of too many tongues. Today, in our parent conferences, I asked my daughter’s teacher if there were opportunities for her class to work on extended projects, projects that in the end would have a purpose beyond the grade and the classroom. Projects that, to quote Marco again, would “have wings.” The response I got was this: with all of the objectives that must be met for the state tests coming up in the spring, there just isn’t time for it. When I asked my son’s teacher whether she had read his blog, her answer was that blogs were blocked at school and so, no, she hadn’t.
And so I am frustrated, and I am wondering what will it take to make our classrooms places of learning rather than places of teaching. And I’m wondering if teaching really is dead. And I’m wondering, like the survey question from a few days ago, what classrooms might look like 10 years from now, if they will be fundamentally different from what they are today.
My guess right now is not much.
Listen to this podcast

However, I refuse to give up! At the NC Science conference last week I attended a session by a very dynamic science teacher who uses technology in his classes and for his own learning every day, in one form or another. He made the audience take a pledge that the next time we are in a conversation with a pessimistic nay-saying teacher who is either complaining about the kids, about the school, or about teaching, we would make the statement, "We are not going to have this conversation". That by interacting with that negative karma, we would only be draining our positive forward-looking, dream-providing selves! The kids we serve deserve positive, forward-looking, dream-providing teachers! So, complain, quit, or innovate? I choose to innovate! How about you??

Skipping the Pity Party

It's been a busy week, but one of my favorites! Since changing roles in the world of education, I have been homesick for the individual conversations with students and the daily rush of watching them enjoy learning in the classroom. Thankfully many of the teachers here have invited me into their classrooms to co-teach several lessons integrating the SMARTboard and Smart Notebook lessons we've been working on! FUN, FUN, FUN! So, today's quote from another of my favorite bloggers Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher) is very timely! She writes:

"Educating children and teens requires passion. I believe that a good teacher has one thing undergirding everything in their classroom... an honest, genuine love for their students. Because students see frigid indifference and they tune it out. They see enough frigidity in this tough, cold world. What they want to see are warm bodies with open arms who will push them to excellence beyond what they realize that they can do. Teachers and administrators who will push their own envelope of knowledge before they ask students to do the same. Teachers who don't just "bide their time," call in sick to staff development, and complain. I'm sorry, folks, but if somebody invited me to a pity party ... I'd skip. No one wants to be around the hopeless, indifferent frigidity of a person who has given up the dream of making a difference! Educating is truly the greatest calling on earth. Instead of just putting money in the bank, you are carving meaning into the lives of students and leaving a mark on your own soul. If you truly love your students. If you truly give them all you have and come home at the end of the day used up on your quota of words and wondering how you will even move from one room to the next. If you teach with all you have and all you are. If you care so much that you lay awake at night thinking and praying about how to reach that one student who is not just getting it...then you have achieved greatness."

LearnNC Conference

Today we attended the preconferences for LearnNC. The first 2 hours were spent exploring the LearnNC site, including some new applications they've added. There is a great new section for ESL curriculum, links, and assistance. I could spend hours playing with the thousands of great links they have collected. There are several new search strategies I was unaware of to find lesson plans and sites for specific grade levels and topics. Can't wait to show the River!

A Must Read!

As we approach one of the most hectic times of the quarter, I want to pass along a blog entry from another of my favorite education bloggers, Vicki A. Davis (AKA Cool Cat Teacher). Unfortunately, you'll have to read it from home due to the county blocking of blogspot. This post is a must-read for stressed out teachers! AMEN!

Never Underestimate the Power of a Teacher!

I have recently read two articles that have impressed me as far as their attitude concerning the importance of the classroom teacher. Although, as good 21st Century educators, we should be actively moving toward more of the "Guide on the Side" as opposed to the "Sage on the Stage", we are important Guides! If we were to invest in a tour of the Grand Canyon, and our guide was not knowledgeable, could not answer our questions, and took a "Well, you'll figure it out" attitude we would want our money back. And more importantly, we would have missed the opportunity to learn about a wonderful national treasure! How true for classroom educators infusing technology as well. In his article, "What We're Here For", in the October issue of Teacher Magazine, Doug Noon sums it up like this:

"There’s a myth out there that goes something like this: When it comes to technology, children need no teachers. Show them any high-tech gadget and they seem instinctively to know how it works, even if they’ve never seen it before. This instant familiarity has convinced many educators that, when the topic is computer instruction, we teachers should simply provide the hardware and get out of the way. But if we did that, our students would learn very little."

He goes on to say:

"If the job of a teacher is to help students orient themselves to the world, then that responsibility has to include the world of computers. Proficiency on a video football game doesn’t make kids Web-savvy any more than it qualifies them for the NFL. Even though students dive right into technology, they still need to be taught how to swim. "

The other article that has stayed at the forefront of my thoughts lately is entitled, "An Open Letter to Elementary School Teachers" by Kenneth J. Willers, an article written for techLEARNING. It is a wonderfully empowering piece in which he states:

Students don't need a $50,000 computer lab to learn how to create a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation. Students may not even need a computer teacher to teach them these skills. Imagine if we created pencil labs so we could teach all the students how to use a pencil. We laugh at this image, but we have done the same thing with computer labs. Students need to learn to write, so we give them a pencil, we demonstrate how to hold and move the object, but we do it in the context of writing the alphabet, words, sentences, or paragraphs. The pencil is merely a tool used to advance the language arts curriculum and/or learning of the student. The emphasis is never placed on the tool (pencil). When it came to technology, rather than providing access to the tool, schools got caught up in teaching the tool. The structure of technology placed too much emphasis on the tool, as if teaching students "computers" was the goal. Students may have acquired the skills to use a computer, but skills taught outside of instruction defeat the goal of curriculum integration. Besides, we don't teach computers, we teach language arts, math, science, social studies, religion, etc…"

So, here's to teaching "literacy" (as David Warlick would say) using technology tools seemlessly in our classrooms!

Interesting Thoughts on Rigor

Another one of my favorite blogs to read is that of Wesley Fryer! In a recent post he comments on the need for "messy assessment" as opposed to the multiple choice, one-moment-in-time testing that is the source of a great deal of stress in our classrooms today. He comments:

"Time remains one of the biggest obstacles and challenges to improving the quality of education in many places, I think. We don’t need more testing and more rigor– we need more instructional flexibility and support for our teachers, combined with high expectations for student achievement measured in “messy ways” as well as traditional tests. We need to encourage teachers and administrators to embrace complexity and messy assessment– rather than force-feeding students content under a false, transmission-model of education which flogs students instead of empowering them. Testing and standards alone can’t improve education– we need to address the problems with rigid and traditional curriculum and empower teachers to teach with passion and creativity."

Interesting....

Interesting Reading

After meeting today with our Superintendent, Dr. Jim McCormick, concerning our desire to become a successful School of Technology, I came back to my room only to notice several interesting headlines, both on line and on paper. Someone (thank you!) had tucked today's issue of The News and Observer into my mailbox earlier. The headline? "After landing PC maker Lenovo, N.C. chases more China deals". And below the crease? "NCSU pulls plug on pay-per-lecture" The world is filled with new challenges and new decisions concerning technology use and understanding! So how do the kids feel about it? As I caught up on some of my favorite blogs, I read a recent post by David Warlick (2 cents worth) concerning a study addressing just that! We know what teachers desire (tools and support to integrate technology successfully!), we know what politians want (test scores that prove technology works!), and we know what the corporate world wants (tech savvy employees who can make crucial, data-driven decisions quickly!). But what about the kids? What is their interest in technology? The crucial ingredient, find out here!