Edu-Innovation is Becoming The Same Old Song & That's a Good Thing!

After I returned from last week's North American Jewish Day School Conference in Philadelphia, I felt, as I often feel after a high-energy conference, excited and overwhelmed.

• I heard some incredible speakers, including Grant Lichtman, Dr. William Isaacs, and Rae Ringel. 
• I had the chance to visit Science Leadership Academy. 
• I presented a session on the tremendous impact, power and disruption of social media. 
• I connected and reconnected, talked with and listened to, many thoughtful, caring, visionary, and brilliant educators leading all types of Jewish day schools. It was intense!

The conference theme was "Uncommon Connections: Schools, Systems and Success" which referred to the idea of systems intelligence. As a big-picture thinker (who sometimes gets lost in the minutiae,) this theme really captured my attention and imagination. 

As I began to think about sharing my notes and thoughts, to reflect on what I learned and what I would do with that learning, I decided to try sketch-noting as a reflective practice. I am working on practicing this new way of making my thinking visible. I wonder if you can read my sketchnotes to understand my thinking. 

What stuck out in my mind was how overlapping and repetitive many of the themes were, or so it seemed to me. Not only am I starting to hear the same messages repeated (the same old song), but it appears that "everyone" is on-board. For example, instead of arguing against the "school should not be preparation for real life; school is real life" philosophy at SLA, it seems as if people agree completely. Of course, my observations are not scientific. There is no control group. The group who visited SLA chose to go to SLA. Does that make all the difference? 

Between the visit to SLA and Grant Lichtman's sessions on innovative schools (informed by the research from his book #Edjourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Innovation), I heard several recurring themes, outlined in my notes:

• Abolish Schooliness
• Passion Matters
• Keep Kids First
• Create a Culture of Learning
• Create a Culture of Risk-Taking/Fail Forward

 These are the same thoughts about school innovation that I have also written about (over and over again in different ways) on my blog. These are the same thoughts about school innovation that those of us who have, in the words of Alec Couros, "walked through the same door on the Internet so we could think together" have been trying out in our own schools for years!

So....why are we still stuck? Lichtman's response to this question was, "Fear and inertia." I would add lack of imagination. So....how do we vaporize (or at least minimize) fear, inertia and the lack of imagination that keeps our schools stuck in a time-warp? 

My answer is this: we do it one step at a time. We ARE doing it. We keep on doing it. We educators look into our own hearts and minds and weed out our own fears. We stay connected. 

Someday soon, everything will be different, and no one will know how hard we fought to get there. And that, I believe, is how it should be. 

5 Things I Wish Everyone Understood About Educational Technology

1. The technology isn't the point
Still….STILL….all these years later (it's 2014 and the internet is 25 years old) when we all know that technology isn't the point in education, there is still so much talk about the technology, the apps, the devices, the new shiny stuff. True, if it's new and shiny and cool it might enable me to redefine a task, that is if it's not too expensive or too difficult to learn or to manage.

2. The technology isn't the lesson
The students in my 4th/5th 1:1 iPad class do not need lessons on using their iPads. They are faster and more adept than I am at using most of the apps. However, they are young and still have a lot of learning to do when it comes to using these devices in a balanced, useful way. They have a lot to learn to become literate users of these powerful tools. They need guidance in understanding and creating work that represents quality in a time of anything goes.

3. The technology isn't the problem
When the kids use social media or chats in ways that hurt others, the technology is not the cause of their mean spirited behavior.

4. The technology isn't the answer
Technology is wonderful and amazing. I love my digital devices and appreciate all the ways they have changed my life for the better.  It's hard to imagine teaching without Google, Pinterest, Twitter, Wordpress, iPads, etc., and I believe that being a connected educator has helped me grow into a better teacher.
However, technology has its dark side. Many people are becoming distracted and unbalanced, spending less real time with real people. There are some serious human health, safety and environmental consequences caused by the manufacture, use and disposal of these devices we love so much.

5. The technology isn't going away
Whether you or I love or hate technology matters not one iota. The world is changing in ways we can barely imagine. Hang on for a wild ride!

Workbook Agita

Another school year has ended, and once again I am having agita (cool word from a book I am reading, blogger says no such word, but I like it)....anyway having agita as I go through my daughter's big bag of workbooks.

Here are my issues-

1. The workbooks are expensive. Parents are required to buy a workbook for every subject, including a series of workbooks for Hebrew.

2. The workbooks are by-and-large unused. Some of them have only a few pages that have been used.

3. I would prefer for my child to use more authentic tools and materials to learn many of the skills presented in these workbooks. (Boy it took a lot of restraint for me to write that nice sentence. I wanted to just write "Workbooks suck" but I held back.)

4. I hate waste. The books are just used enough that it's hard to find an incoming 3rd grade student who would take them. I certainly don't think my daughter will want to spend her summer answering contrived workbook questions about random paragraphs. I might as well just throw some dollar bills into the recycling bin at the start of each school year, and skip the whole charade.

Every year now I have questioned the reasoning behind having parents spend a lot of money buying workbooks that won't be used. I have not yet received an acceptable answer.

I wish the teachers would have the courage to order only the one or two workbooks they really plan to use. I am ok with my daughter practicing D'Nealian handwriting with a workbook (one of the only books that got used). Who knows if cursive writing will be of use to her in the future, but she enjoys it, and that is fine with me.

If each parent took half the money they would normally spend on workbooks and donated it to a class fund, the teacher could buy lots of real books for children to read and lots of other useful and authentic materials for the classroom.

After 3 years of buying school books, I have spent almost as much money as it would cost to buy my child a macbook, which she would love and could use for a long time, something that would kill those workbooks.

Our school seems to be moving in a new direction. We will be reading Curriculum 21 as a staff this summer and working on upgrading our content, curriculum and assessments. I particularly don't understand the decision to make parents purchase these wasteful and expensive books, year after year. We must not only talk the talk, we must walk the walk. We must take time, at the end of each day and the end of each year, to ask what is working and what is not?

We must have the courage to be real, to let go of the old and to change. If not now, when?

Seeds, Serendipity, Sustainability

Change.

It's the one constant in life, yes? And yet human nature seems to be such that many of us will cling to the old ways like a life raft in stormy waters. Why? I don't know. What I do know is that, my own issues with change aside, I have worked hard for change in schools. My twitter profile, until recently, read "wannabe change-agent." I changed that the other day, as I realize that I am no longer a wannabe. I am an agent of change.

Looking back, I realize that my school has changed. This is year 4 for me, and I am amazed at what is taking place. Are we firmly, solidly planted in 21st century, learner-centered, relevant education? No, not yet. Have we glimpsed the future and it is now? Yes.

I thought I would share my story in hopes of encouraging other wannabes out there. Keep

plugging away. Change does happen.

Seeds-

First, you plant the seeds. Do what you do. Talk to everyone about your ideas. Keep it upbeat. Don't expect people to get it. They won't. Keep learning. We are so lucky to have our online colleagues who do get it. Talk to them. Network, network, network. You need your network! You are planting seeds, and it will take time before you see growth. Keep planting and nurture whatever growth you see.

Serendipity-

This is when things begin happening of their own volition. You can't control the winds of change, and you can't do it all on your own. As one person you can only do so much. Hopefully, at some point, change itself takes over and helps you find the support you need. The way this happened for me seems amazing, but maybe it's really not. Maybe it's what happens when you plant the seeds and let nature run its course.

My personal story of serendipity started with a chance (and extremely short) meeting two years ago at FETC. Because of that meeting, the PLN, and a person with vision and leadership, a new position was created at my school this year for a 21st Century Learning Specialist. The position was created specifically for Silvia Tolisano, not as an abstract concept, as in "let's hire a 21st century learning specialist."

This, in itself, seems unusual to me, but correct. People make all the difference. The position was much less important than the fact that we recognized Silvia's skills, experience, passion and visionary leadership as something good, something worth having, something worth trusting.

Sustainability-

This is the chapter still to be written. Silvia's blog tagline "Langwitches -The Magic of Learning" says it all. She has worked magic, and she has done it by embedding PD into classroom teaching. Our students are engaged in global communications and other relevant, exciting learning, our school has a new website, teachers are blogging, we've implemented google apps for education. We have tasted the future, and there is no turning back.

My concern is that, while Silvia is truly an incredible teacher and we are extraordinarily lucky to have this time with her, I worry that we are putting all our eggs in her basket. Silvia is an agent of change, a support, someone to lead the way -- but the teachers MUST begin to develop their own PLNs, we must learn to be better at collaborating, sharing, supporting and teaching each other. That is the only way for these changes to be sustainable.

Image thanks: first seeds planted http://www.flickr.com/photos/pictoscribe/430716741/