Changing Students Signal a Turning Point in Education (05/21/09)

Some experts predict school textbooks will be gone in five to ten years. In 1922 Thomas Edison boldly predicted that motion picture would replace textbooks in education and declared it the starting point of the history of media technologies for learning. Although Edison’s prediction has not exactly come to pass, distance learning, distance education, cyber education, remote classroom, and e-Learning have become similar concepts and fueled the controversial fire. Major publishers now offer electronic versions of textbooks and others are working with publishers to incorporate video into their planned electronic editions. However, speculating about books being eliminated from the classroom will not change our schools or decrease the achievement gap. But perhaps creating a discussion about a revolution in the way teachers instruct and a phenomenal change in the way students learn will. There is a great deal of tension inside our schools right now and understandable anxiety among parents about the digital culture, a seemingly chaotic world of unfiltered information. But this is a change issue. We’ve had five centuries of the printing press to get used to print culture. Compare that to twenty years of digital culture – and only a few years of real Internet connectivity with high-speed broadband. The Internet has changed virtually all aspects of human culture. The Internet has removed the invisible filter that formally standardized knowledge and has allowed anyone with broadband connectivity to put together their own versions of knowledge. Schools should be teaching students how to sort and evaluate the overwhelming volume of information properly by engaging their skills of creativity, innovation, critical thinking, and collaboration. Culture Shift This change in the framework of education can cause a generational mismatch, a clash of cultures between digitally literate kids and digitally challenged older adults. It is the digital natives versus the digital immigrants. This mismatch may not last very long. Within ten years many of the least computer literate teachers will retire, paving the way for young teachers who have grown up with the power of online technology. The first digital native or millennial is considered by most to be a child born in 1984 and beyond. The millennial entering our classroom today is extremely different from the child who entered our classrooms when most adults attended school. These children have a totally different way of thinking; it is difficult sometimes to understand their motivation toward learning because their life experiences so far have been vastly different from yours and even from your children. Changes in our schools will be very slow because of the high cost of equipment and shortages of teachers with skills. But, I believe human society is on the verge of turning full circle. The limits of print technology set just one person up as the knowledge maker, the author. Online, anyone can answer back, anyone can be the author. Billions of new conversations are starting online right now. We are going back to conversational learning, the way we understood the world before textbooks were invented. Today’s Learner The learner today wants to be a part of that conversation, wants to be in charge of their learning, wants to have a teacher deliver instruction to them just the way they want it. This type of learner is what I call the Starbucks student. When you go into a Starbucks, you don’t just order a cup of coffee. You order a venti decaf two pump mocha latte sugar free extra hot no foam cup of coffee. So too with the student; they don’t just want a cup of instruction with homework to go. They want a multimedia presentation on a large screen display with surround sound speakers from a personal computing device combined with Internet broadband capabilities. They want this lesson complete with rich and expansive URL links, and they want to be given the time to discover more than the lesson actually covers if they so choosing. The Coronado Community Our community understands this because they too use these same tools daily; they experience the same feelings of desiring individualized instruction and wanting to be in charge of their own learning. Parents are saying this to educators today by pulling their child from traditional schools and placing them into charter schools that specialize in this type of instruction. The students themselves will simply say to you that it is about time. Bottom line is that the delivery of education has to change and the teachers have to accept and be willing to recreate their delivery of curriculum to take advantage of the tools at their disposal and the changing student in the classroom. It is the right thing to do and it will work – but the classroom paradigm must change. The teacher must become a facilitator and the student must take charge of their own personal learning. Educational leaders must be prepared to provide leadership and equipment to guide this change with the proper timing and expertise necessary for strong implementation. Average Classroom The average person thinks of a classroom with an adult at the center of attention in front of a room full of silent, seated students. Student activity is usually limited to listening to the teacher lecture, answering some question the teacher posed, or working on some written exercise the teacher assigned. This technique seems to work best when the goal is to raise test scores of basic skills. Most people find it hard to imagine anything different. Future Classrooms – the future is now In knowledge construction classrooms, teacher-student interactions are less didactic, more collaborative. Students work together. Learning environments feel more like real workplaces. The emphasis is on the processes of inquiry and invention that lead to the discovery of facts. Discovering relationships from which students create a new order, a new pattern, or a new understanding is the teacher’s goal. Making sense from facts is an overriding value that student’s receive. Research Research findings seem to suggest that the overall effects of technology on student outcomes may be greater than previously thought. This same research suggests that teaching and technology processes either may directly impact student outcomes or may interact with technology features and indirectly impact outcomes. Next Steps The question is: do we have the leadership courage necessary to handle these deeply destabilizing and disruptive technologies and step up to the task of changing the way our teachers not only teach, but also how they think about the act of teaching? Achievement v. Gap Perhaps the reason we have not closed the achievement gap is because we focus on the gap and not the achievement. Perhaps we should think of the achievements that dedicated educators in isolated situations have accomplished using technology in a many to one or one to one mode of learning, forming individualized plans of instruction, and differentiated lessons. Perhaps we should begin to think of these achievements as a revolution in the classroom that we honor and bring to the light of day by encouraging collaboration with other educators. The resulting professional learning community will allow educators to look beyond the isolation normally found in schools. It will allow teachers to share successes in the classroom with each other creating a pyramid of new successes. It will finally allow us to talk about the achievements we experience with children instead of the gaps we struggle to close. I have started to form a relationship with the Coronado community of teachers who share my enthusiasm for 21st century learning. Our new group is called SC21, short for Superintendent’s Committee on 21st Century Learning. Our purpose is to collaborate on the proper steps to take for the future learning possibilities in Coronado. We meet to encourage each other, support best practices, and build on successes or share failures of instruction. Our goal is to build support systems to help students master the multiple skills required of them in their career or life in the 21st century. More information on 21st century learning can be found at http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/. New Vision We need to provide vision for this new method of instruction, for this new way of learning in our Coronado schools. We need to make sure our proud organization does not narrowly focus, does not simply stare incessantly at the pragmatic questions that haunt our daily lives. There are many teachers working overtime to create collaborative learning communities, to engage learners and produce motivating learning activities. However, these models are not sustainable over the long-term unless we change our way of thinking toward teaching. We need to place the power of a larger vision before the gaze of the educators in our schools.