EdTechTrek

Imagine a national search for the very best teachers, Idol-syle… minus the media hype. This unique charter school’s founder, Zeke Vanderhoek, pared down over 600 applications and personally interviewed one hundred of them. He then visited the top 35 applicants and observed them teaching in their classrooms – whatever they happened to be. The Equity School will open with the final 8 faculty and 120 low academic performing fifth graders with plans to expand after that.

What were some of the attributes that got applicants hired?
- Passion
- Excitement & contagious enthusiasm
- Skillfulness
- Expertise
- Practice that matched the “golden résumé”

To cut costs, the school will have no deans, substitute teachers, assistants, and teachers will work longer hours, more days, as well as have more students. There will be no job security and teachers can be “fired at will”.

Teachers will be paid… wait for it … … $125,000/yr. – not to mention up to $25,000 in performance-based bonuses in the second year.

I love this quotation from one of the hired teachers though:

“This could be unsettling were it not for the excitement of working with a team of master teachers, all of whom are motivated to help every student succeed, with no excuses and no blame.”

So, would you want to work in such an environment where passion, enthusiasm, creativity, skillfulness, expertise, personal accountability, and a love of learning permeated everything that takes place?

It will be interesting to see what transpires here, but there are certainly some key ingredients here for a wonderful school. The salary is certainly eye-catching, but notice the money is not being spent on interactive white boards and other “high-tech” accoutrements… yet. The initial investment is in the teachers themselves.

I like that.

I love how the following statement along with one of the conclusions of Higher Education in a Web2.0 World is worded:

…

Are you seeing your students as an impetus for change? I’m not seeing it all that much yet with my students, but I am salivating for the day when it happens on a grand scale! Bring it [them] on!

So, as your life becomes more and more digital…

…and the lives of your students, and perhaps children, become more and more digital…

it becomes increasingly imperative that we all understand the implications, and yes, the ramifications of the digital tracks that we leave behind. To me, in one sense, this becomes a fantastic challenge… as the image below communicates. When we begin to understand the power that we hold and the reach that our online

activities have, the challenge becomes to live up to that potential. The students that we teach need to get this. Many adults need to get this. I am still working on getting this.

Yes, we all make mistakes and realize just how easy it is to mess up. But as I told one of my students the other day as we discussed these messy issues, if one lives with integrity, any messups are largely recoverable. If one lives recklessly, the dirty footprints that we leave on-line will end up haunting us potentially forever. Sure, you can hire one of the new companies that have emerged, online reputation managers, but they can’t work magic.

So, what better challenge than to publish worthy and quality intellectual property… to leave digital footprints that reflect, as the image above states, “good stuff”. Being “googleable” can mean searching oneself and finding nothing, mediocre to bad “stuff”, or excellence. In our present digital landscape, the first two results are not desirable in the least. For our students, this concept is quickly becoming imperative.

For many, this becomes problematic on school time, as completed worsheets are going to impress no one if published on-line. Publishing school fights, pranks, or other acts of lunacy on YouTube fills the void.

And beware… repercussions can be just a tweet away.

Who made the following statement? How long ago?

Pedagogical leaders are calling upon the schools to free themselves from tradition and subject matter. Whatever students learn should be relevant to their future lives and work. It is it foolish to saturate them with a mass of knowledge that can have little application for the lives which most of them must inevitably lead. They are sure to become disappointed and discontented, and who knows where all this discontent might lead. Abandon your antiquated academic ideals and instead adapt education to the real life and real needs of your students.

So, who’s making such claims?

Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of the education school at Stanford…

….. 1911!

(Adapted from Diane Ravitch’s post, 21st Century Skills: An Old Familiar Song

To quote Ravitch some more:

“The problem with skills-driven approaches to learning is that there are so many things we need to know that cannot be learned by hand-on experiences. The educated person learns not only from his or her own experience, but from the hard-earned experience of others. We do not restart the world anew in each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the learned capacity to understand the lessons of history, to engage in the adventures of literature, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them. Through literature, for example, we have the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of another person, to walk in their shoes, to experience life as it was lived in another century and another culture, to live vicariously beyond the bounds of our own time and family and place. What a gift! How sad to refuse it!

Until we teach our teachers and our students to love knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well.“

I could quote it all, but instead, go read Diane Ravitch’s entire statement. It is time well spent.

(Disclaimer: This post is not meant to be critical of the democratic party nominee per se… only critical of empty rhetoric)

There have been a number of critics (here, here, here) who have critiqued the commonly used term, “21st century skills” to represent a new skillset that students and workers must possess in this global and highly digital society and economy.

But from this article, it is pretty clear that Obama does not have a clue what 21st century skills really entails. In ths Eschoolnews article, he is quoted as saying (my thoughts in red):

“Without a workforce trained in math, science and technology, and the other skills of the 21st century (so now math and science are skills of the 21st century?), our companies will innovate less, our economy will grow less, and our nation will be less competitive. If we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, we must out-educate (test?) the world today,” Obama said. He added: “While technology has transformed just about every aspect of our lives–from the way we travel, to the way we communicate, to the way we look after our health–one of the places where we’ve failed to seize its full potential is in the classroom. (This is quite true. I have no problem with this statement.)

“Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren’t just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens (So, simply replacing chalkboards…(they aren’t all black these days, senator) with digital whiteboards will revolutionize education. Huh.); where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk; where [students] don’t just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations (Great! Let’s spend all of that money on technology infrastructure, software, and hardware so students can do PowerPoint book report presentations from their laptops. There’s innovation for you!) ; where they don’t just write papers, but they build web sites (with text copied and pasted from the Internet and from textbooks?); where research isn’t done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field (Okay…that’s actually a great idea.); and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge(Again, a great idea, but not new in the 21st century either.). By fostering innovation (But what’s the innovation in all of this?), we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future.

“And that’s what we’re going to do when I’m president. We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum, so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st-century economy. We’ll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills (I hate to be a party pooper here, but these are not new in the 21st century.), because that’s how we’ll make sure they’re prepared for today’s workplace.”

So, what are we left with here? A plug for digital whiteboards, laptops, authoring websites, PowerPoint ad nauseum, and a little constructivist philosophy thrown in the mix. Oh yes, math and science is important. This is not the stuff that great speeches are made of. This is not the rhetoric of an informed politician. And the biggest slap is the subheading to the article: “GOP largely silent on 21st-century skills”. I guess they need to throw some of these terms around as well to make us all happy. Well, I certainly am not happy about what I read. I hope you are not, either. We have been struggling with these learning issues for decades now. Throwing technology into the mix is not the silver bullet. We know that. And funny, but there is no mention of any (with the exception of math and science and the hint of technology-based standardized testing) of this on his webpage regarding educational policy.

So, Mr. Obama (you should read through this), what really needs to happen to see teaching and learning innovation in our nation’s schools? Unless you have that figured out, all of the money you allocate to your “plan for change” will just be more of the same. At least we can use a digital white board to project PowerPoint presentations, right?