Lessons Learned

With the Blogosphere and Twitterverse filled with discussions about how to shift schools, focus on 21st century skills, create and promote learning communities, provide PD, etc., it seems like an opportune time to revisit the roles of the instructional technologist and teacher librarian as leaders and change agents in our schools. We were planning on making this a topic in an upcoming EdTech Co-op podcast but a blog post is leading me to share some ideas now.

Tim Holt’s recent post about the role of professional trainers and speakers definitely hit a nerve for many folks and has lead to lots of discussions about how to bring about change in our schools. My response is to put forth the instructional technologist and librarian as two of the key leaders in schools who should follow up on professional development (PD) activities to facilitate the action steps to make the learning from the PD connect to the learning in our classrooms. As for the huge topic of shifting our schools, Jeff Utecht and I produced a podcast all about Shifting Our Schools. Take a look at the show notes as our guests brought forth many helpful ideas. Only the latest podcasts are still accessible via iTunes.

While Tim argues that the educational gurus should offer us the how to’s on how to shift our schools, the push back is that each school is different and the road maps must be individualized for each school. I agree with this and do see that there are many ways to offer professional development for our learning communities but the key is the follow up after the PD which is not the responsibility of PD providers. Whether one brings in educational trainers, sends staff off to conferences, runs book discussions, has teachers take courses, the bottom line is that there are many choices and that each educator should be empowered to design and build their own professional learning network as so many in the blogosphere promote.

It is then up to the leadership of the school to create the mechanism involving use of time and support to empower the staff to come up with the “how to’s” to take the PD learning into the classrooms. Obviously administrators provide this key leadership but it is the instructional technologist and teacher librarian who often are the doers who either working via the curriculum review process or collaborating individually or with groups of teachers who turn the PD into action.

Whether you call your school instructional technologist a technology integration specialist, educational technologist, learning coach or whatever, it is important to realize what this well-skilled leader can do for your school. One can review the posts and articles by library leaders to paint the picture of the modern teacher librarian or you could review the skill set and 21st century vision of my wife who is the library media specialist at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

To paint the picture of an instructional technologist, here is a Mindmeister mind map that I created several years ago for a conference in China where the participants helped build out the IT/ET job description including experience and skill set for a 21st century instructional technologist. Hopefully it provides a discussion point whether you have an instructional technologist or want to hire one but need a job description.

We will soon being discussing this topic further in the Edtech Co-op podcast.