Lessons Learned

Many factors come into play to support an individual and/or school’s shift to Learning 2.0. The institutional shift is obviously much more complex. In either case, the shift starts by knowing where you want to go with your shift. My previous post and the discussion on the Shifting Our Schools podcast offers a few ideas on why to shift. Jeff and my arguments hopefully make sense for most teachers. While we spoke and wrote about the value of Information Literacy and Communication skills, we also focused on learning outcomes that place students at the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy in their learning. It isn’t about the technology, it is about the learning.

Many schools have mission statements and student learning outcomes that might not fit the world our students are heading out into. I would suggest that it is time for school communities to review their documents. With an eye on the ever changing nature of modern life and work, it makes sense to see how our school learning goals might need to be adapted for 21st century life and work skill sets. These discussions guide where the shift will take the school.

Using the UbD model, we can then work backwards to re-design how we teach and how our schools function so that we can really say students are learning according to the mission statements and student learning outcomes.  We all know that lots of time goes into wordsmithing the mission and learning outcome documents but we often forget to put in the time to construct the action plans to connect the goals to the classrooms. We also often leave the reflection and assessment of our efforts out of the picture as well so good leadership and accountability need to be applied to the review and follow up processes.

This brings me to the second of many hopeful solid, meaningful actions that need to take place to help individuals and schools make the shift. Thomas Hoerr wrote an article entitled “What Is Instructional Leadership?” in the Dec/Jan 2008 issue of Educational Leadership. (You can access the article yourself.) In it he points to the importance of administrators being the instructional leaders for their buildings. Hoerr writes that we all hear this phrase again and again but that it clearly makes so much sense. While our very busy principals are not always the top dogs of pedagogy and curriculum in their buildings when compared to many of their teachers, they still can be the instructional leader for their schools.

Hoerr shares that principals as leaders can facilitate “collegiality” among teachers which supports good communication, reflection, coaching, and learning from one another. Many of us use are more familiar with the term “learning community” as the basis for professional development and building a culture of learning for everyone in a school.

A second part of being the instructional leader is participating in and facilitating the reflection that takes place when teachers review their instruction and assessments.  Hoerr uses the following questions to start the discussion, to get teachers thinking and learning about their efforts in the classroom.

• How did this lesson address the needs of your three strongest and three weakest students?
• What would you do differently the next time you teach this lesson? Why?
• How will you know your students know?
• How will you create an assessment tool that would help you teach these concepts?

(Educational Leadership December/January 2008, page 85)

OK, so there you have it. The first plank laid out that will eventually be connected to many more as I hope to build the boat that will sail us to the promised land of a shifted school.   We start with the end in mind as Dr. Covey would remind us. We update our school learning goals to fit the times. And we take non-educational items off our principals plates so they can provide the vision and leadership to build learning communities within their schools while using the power of questions to guide us to be better teachers.