Lessons Learned

I just read an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about education and technology. I often don’t find the mainstream press getting the story straight when they write about efforts to shift our schools to Learning 2.0 techniques and the value of using technology. Take a look at the following paragraph from the article to entice you to read the full article.

Ms. Herdman envisions such a transformation in North Kansas City. “It’s no longer going to be ‘Turn to page 10 and look at this,’ ” she says. “It’s more collaborative work, the learning style is inquiry-based, and the teacher is guiding, facilitating learning rather than lecturing. It’s about teaching the curriculum using technology as your vehicle.” (WSJ July 22, 2009)

Jeff and I concluded our second year of podcasting about shifting schools to the School/Learning 2.0 model. We would like to thank all of our guests who shared their insights and practical ideas to help students, teachers, administrators and parents work together in the shifting process.

You can listen to shows directly from the SOS Podcast page or subscribe through iTunes.

Here are the Essential Questions we discussed this past year:

How to shift when the administrators are not on board?
What prevents administrators from shifting?
What are some shifted practices in our schools?
How to recruit shifted teachers?
Once shifted, where do we go next?
How to make the shift systemic and sustainable in our schools?
Which comes first, shifted practices or 1:1 laptop program?
How to move students from being dependent to independent learners?
How are we preparing pre-service teachers to be shifted educators?
How to measure how shifted your school is?
How to do a school tech makeover on the cheap?
How can we help teachers take more risks in their teaching and learning?

The teaching of information, visual and design literacies across the curriculum is a task many of us are undertaking. One interesting possibility to teach all three together would be to look at the world financial crisis by having our students research the validity of the numbers being shared in the media, challenge them to visually represent the data and to then task them to communicate the information in a well-designed presentation. The folks at Flowing Data offer several examples of such an effort in their 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis post. While one cannot be sure about the validity of the numbers presented in the 27 infographics, they do offer a wonderful opportunity to engage students to think about data, cause & effect and the power of visuals to get a message across.

There are so many other topics and available tools that can be used to have our students produce similar learning products for our classrooms. It makes so much sense to use these literacies (and technology literacy by having students create their own graphics) to help reach our course learning outcomes.

As you review some of the 27 examples, what are some ideas that come to mind for your classroom?

I know I ramble but time is short and we have the podcast tonight. Here are some thoughts about the process of getting administrators onboard as we shift our schools…

Jeff has been running workshops on reviewing one’s school mission and I have been writing about how to integrate one’s mission and school-wide learning outcomes into everything you do in your school. So the first step is to work with one’s learning community to hire Jeff to come in and shake things up clearing off the table of outdated mission outcomes and opening up the discussion to what the community including students, parents and faculty believe in and value. Start with the basic questions of “what is learning and understanding?” and “What do our students need to learn?” and “How can we prepare them to be citizens skilled to handle a very changing world?”. I also like the idea of writing mission outcomes in the form of actions/skills/habits that are enduring and applicable to various situations. To say we want students to be “lifelong learners”, how about instead talking about the habits/skills of being critical thinkers and problem solvers that gives students the tools to be lifelong learners.  Hopefully one’s school will see the value of the the learning 2.0 constructs that folks are writing about and discussing in the edublogosphere to make them central to their vision statements.

Once the mission/vision is developed and action plans are created to integrate it into the school’s culture, the next step is develop curriculum, instruction and assessments that will get one’s students to learn the critical thinking, problem solving, cooperative and collaborative learning skills that are hopefully in the mission outcomes that also includes an inquiry driven approach to learning that engages the students in discussions and learning with individuals outside the school walls.

Really focus is on Stage 1 of McTigue and Wiggin’s UbD process for all the curriculum units. It all comes down to what the enduring understandings we are teaching to. Administrators must collaborate in the curriculum review process. The conversations and unpacking of the standards into the EUs is where we bring the administrators on board to constructivist, inquiry, student-centered learning. We have to be ready to have the critical conversations asking administrators how we are to reach our schools’ mission statements dedicated to teaching students critical thinking, problem solving and cooperative learning skills so that they can be global, information savvy citizens ready to adapt to the every changing world. If our administrators are charged to deliver the educational experience to reach the mission and habits for learning, get them to explain how we can do it in classrooms that where the curriculum being taught doesn’t support the schools’ new mission statement. As we move to Stage 2 to develop the assessments and Stage 3 to create the learning activities, the administrator in the curriculum meetings should start coming onboard as we come up with ways to use information literacy and technology to assess and teach the students.

So how does all of this happen without the administrator being on board? It doesn’t. The hope is that by going through this process that the reluctant or simply not getting the picture administrator buys into the process to support the mission that was created by the community. We also must take items off our adminstrators’ plates to allow them to be the instructional leaders in our schools. Less is more especially when it comes to empowering administrators to focus their time on decisions that support learning.

Everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. We work with early adopter teachers, students, interested parents, and administrators to build a learning community open to new ideas and practices. We don’t start with overwhelmed teachers or those not so comfortable with change. We return to collaborate with them individually honoring their contributions while working to adapt their practices when possible.

Working organically, we nurture our risk takers and spread their ideas by publically celebrating best practice instructional strategies and assessments. As is written all over the edublogosphere, we must do everything possible to bring the administrators on board to provide the leadership and modeling of the instructional strategies that lead to the skill and concept-based learning our students need.

A key location to start the shifting process is the meeting rooms where our curriculum reviews take place. This is followed up by team and department meetings where lessons are finalized for the classroom. We will talk a great deal more about his next week with our SOS guest Margaret Carpenter.

Margaret will go into detail about the “who” of the shifting equation. Two key leaders are your instructional technologist and library media specialist. They can be a big part of being in lots of places to make the shift happen.

Image Source

Chris O’Neal will join us this Monday for the SOS podcast. We will be discussing the Essential Question of whether or not we need standards for technology as a subject area. If technology integration is the process of finding of ways where technology can help teachers of math, science, music, etc. reach their own subject area standards, then the answer seems pretty clear.

Thus, on first glance, it doesn’t seem that we need standards for technology. Yet, we need to ask ourselves where are we hoping the technology will take us? As we speak about in our the SOS podcast, we want our schools to shift from a 20th century learning focus to what EduBloggers term “21st Century Learning”.

It is these 21st century learning skills that do need standards and benchmarks that just like the technology, need to be integrated in all curriculum areas of our schools.

Three years ago we went through the process of reviewing and defining our technology standards at my old school of HKIS. A team of teachers, instructional technologists, librarians and administrators from the start looked at learning and not technology tools to drive our committee work. After months of research and discussion, we came up with the “Information and Communication Literacy” standards and benchmarks that focused as the name implies totally on the handling and communication of various forms of information.

What really drove home the point that technology is just a tool to support learning is that we didn’t spend one moment in standard creation or the dreaded wordsmithing. We simply adopted the very forward thinking “Academic” standards and benchmark that another committee had previously created! They already had begun the process of bringing 21st century thinking skills into our curriculum by making them the learning outcomes for all our academic efforts.

We will be tackling the big “How to shift?” essential question this week in the Shifting Our School podcast. Our previous shows with other EQs delved into discussions that also connected to this overriding theme to our podcast. So now it is time to put some thoughts together from practical experience.

Brent Loken, the Director of Curriculum and Innovation, at Hsinchu International School (HIS) will be our guest for the show. He will offer details about one approach to helping schools make the shift to focusing on the learning of 21st century skills, constructivist learning instructional strategies and the variety of interpretations of what School 2.0 can look like. Brent and the leadership team of Grant Ruskovich, Ken Willis, and Catherine Chen were able to take a top down, leadership driven approach working with the school board, parents, students and faculty to define what they wanted their school to be about. This “about” just happens to be a very shifted school.

As a instructional technologist working under more “normal” conditions where their are pockets of shifted teachers and often non-committed leadership towards shifting to School 2.0, I will share some of the practices that I found helpful to move a school I previously worked at to being more shifted. While I list these practices as helpful towards guiding a school to Learning 2.0 outcomes, they obviously are accepted strategies that are not new to our schools and can be used as common practice in how we generally manage organizations.

Administrative Leadership: I have to say it even though there are numerous reasons why administrators can find it difficult to make a commitment to all the change and transition that goes with shifting a school. We must have the administrators at the helm if we are to shift our schools. Our last SOS podcast for the school year in June will look into what barriers administrators face in bringing about change in their schools. As this is a huge topic on its own, I won’t comment further and ask that if anyone is reading this post to tune into our podcast with Brent Loken to hear one leader provide the vision and action steps that administrators can take to shift their schools.

Conversation-Listening-Designing-Action-ASSESSMENT: The process of deciding where a school community wants to go should start with conversations around the question “What is learning?”.  Additional questions are: What does it look like? What skills will our graduating students have? What will they need to be able to do to be global citizens in an unpredictable world? What is teaching? We can then use the UbD backwards process to develop our program plan, action steps and accountability protocols. This gets down to a very personal discussion with educators about their teaching philosophy.

Time is needed along with care and attentive listening as we grow our learning community and validate one another. 

Most of us as educators have been involved in strategic or other program building plans. We worked with parents, teachers, administrators and sometimes students to decide what our mission should be as well as what outcomes we want our students to attain from our schools. These development processes have documented procedures so one can easily find the “how to” steps. I would add that I cannot value enough the importance of listening, real attentive listening, which can lead to true understanding and help move the process along.

Planning comes into play along with action steps to put all the hard work into action in our classrooms. The part of the process that I find left out for numerous reasons is accountability. This is another huge topic that deserves a great deal of attention. I will just say here that  if a school is to shift to whatever goals it sets, one needs to take all that energy at the start of the development process through to the action and assessment stages as well. We must answer the question “Are we reaching our goals?” and then adapt accordingly.

Defining, Discussing and Understanding of School/Learning 2.0: This practice clearly ties into the planning process of where a school community wants to go with their programs. There are plenty of charts, posts and articles that contrast what and how we teach with a 20th century approach to the potential 21st century version. The Framework for 21st Century Skills Web site lists the skills and now with the Route 21 education section provide a terrific place to start the education and understanding effort with one’s school community. The next step is to begin the process of defining what Web 2.0 tools with their strange names do for the learning community without any expectations for learning or using them. Simply work to take away the lack of understanding. As an instructional technology program is developed around individual and team (i.e., elementary grade level teams, middle school teams & high school departments) needs, you can then design a differentiated learning program based on those individual and group adult learning needs in your school’s learning network.

Time: This is usually a top of the list issue at any organization. We often don’t build in the time or the procedures to follow through on our plans making the work that goes with shifting our schools an additional task added to overloaded teachers’ workloads.  Time must be structured for the activities that go into the shifting process taking away other items from teachers’ plates and giving them time during the school day to focus on the shifting. And it goes without saying that the shifting process needs a great deal of time as in years to go from the conversation to the designing to the implementation to the assessment phase.

Focus: I wrote about this in a recent post. We put in a lot of time writing our strategic plans, missions statements, etc. but then stray from them leaving less time and energy to do what we say we will. My experience with international schools is that they sometimes lose their way and their focus on how they should be using their time. Check out the post as this also connects to administrative leadership.

Less is More Especially with Depth:  If we stay focused on what we say we want to do, there will be less on everyones’ plates thus we will have a better chance of reaching our goals. Common sense. Don’t try to be everything to everyone as a school. Shifted schools are guided by the mantra “how does any new program or initiative connect to our strategic plan and mission?” This gets back to administrative leadership. “No” is not a four letter word! Our leaders connected to our community learning networks gather lots of information, dialogue and then can make decisions that keep our plates less full and our lives more balanced. We will talk in a future SOS podcast about why such a common sense idea gets dropped by many schools.

Trained Change Agents & Designers: Todays library media specialists and instructional technologists receive very specific course work in designing new programs and implementing them. They also gain skill sets from their graduate programs that support their being able to be 21st century learners just like we want our students to be. By their staying on top of the latest research and by continually learning from their PLNs, they have the knowledge and skills to be the on the ground leaders who help guide our schools through the change and transition process. Support and empower them to do what they are trained to do.

It might be uncomfortable for some schools to face but old style technology coordinators with their focus on hardware and networks have been replaced with today’s instructional/educational technologists who are teachers first, grounded in instructional theory working to bridge the technology to the teachers and students in the classrooms. We have technicians and network engineers to take care of the hardware and repair issues.

The library media specialists with their training and skill sets guide our teachers and students in the multiple literacies that our 21st century learners (students, teachers and administrators) must work with and master to be adaptable and flexible learners. They cannot be the 20th century librarian focused just on reading literacy and the building of book collections. They must be leaders and partners in designing and implementing curriculum.

By working as partners with teachers and administrators in the curriculum development process, these two instructional leaders work to support the designing of curriculum to reach the learning goals for our 21st century focused schools. To see how the teachers of the HKIS Upper Primary school designed their curriculum review process, select the following hyperlink to download a copy of an article reviewing their work. HKIS Upper Primary Curriculum Review Model

Education, Communication, Ownership and Celebration Procedures: Schools need to use all of their communication channels to the community to share progress, build ownership and  celebrate everyone’s efforts as the school works towards its goals. Once schools start making the move to School 2.0, they need to use ongoing parent workshops, community coffees, student forums, newsletters, blogs, etc. to build out the community learning network with the focus on the shifting process. The school needs to be flexible and adaptable with two-way communication from the community. Along the way, celebrate the successes and shine the light on your risk takers! So often those willing to stick their necks out to try new things, offer differing opinions, and make the shift are isolated and made to feel devalued. Put these leaders’ efforts on your school Web sites, write about them in newsletters, get their ideas published in journals. These leaders will really “own” the process and share their passion for it. Ownership means accountability and follow through. Celebrate your early adopters and they will stick around instead of looking for more shifted pastures.

Get the Right Crew Onboard:  This is a biggie that can be one of the biggest storms to work your voyage through. Going back to the conversations that start the process, everyone will need to decide if they can make the commitment to the shift once they fully understand what it is all about. Administrators will need to work with their Human Resource staff to plan over a few years to give folks the opportunity to seek employment at other schools. As uncomfortable as this can be, we must face that organizations change and that it is better for everyone to move on if we cannot support the mission of our school.

The Curriculum Development Process: Being systematic is central for bringing about change. We must build in protocols that support a system that scaffolds our efforts to move towards our goals. Sadly, for so many schools, the curriculum review process can be a struggle and an unsupported effort that gets a bad name. A dynamic, well-managed system becomes a natural professional learning community that can drive how we do business in our schools. See the previous link to the HKIS Upper Primary model for more information.

Work with Your Successes: Students are already learning in our classrooms whether we are School 1.0 or 2.0. We as teachers use well thought out instructional and assessment strategies. Back to the conversations that start the shifting process, we need to assess what we are already doing well by asking questions like:

Which strategies are working really well? Which ones guide our students to our school-wide learning goals? Which ones can easily be enhanced using 2.0 strategies?

We need to remind ourselves as Rick Pierce points out that change leads to the much longer transition period that then takes us to our goals. This transition is a continuum that we all move along at different rates of speed and comfort levels. So create a collaborative team including your instructional technologist, library media specialist, administrators, curriculum coordinator and other interested parties to design an ongoing adult learning program centered on personal learning networks that start within each individual’s comfort zone and experience. Then take small steps along the continuum towards using shifted classroom instructional strategies and assessments that support your school’s shifted goals.

A quick example is that concept maps along with other graphic organizers are being used in classrooms around the world. Teachers are comfortable with them. Students learn making connections using HOTS as they map out their learning. The next step for some might be a desktop digital tool like Inspiration or Cmap while others might be ready to jump to 2.0 and the collaborative power of Mindmeister or Bubbl with 24/7 access to their work. As time moves on the next step is telecollaborative work where students and teachers make connections outside the school still using concept maps but sharing them with learners in projects like The Flat Classroom. Just remember to start with your current successes and honor the innovative work that is already getting results as you design each teacher’s shifting experience.

Also, another obvious point, make your professional development program connect to your shifting school outcomes in an ongoing, structured learning community that periodically gives learning and connection time during the school day while avoiding the end of quarter one shot, one size fits all PD days. Adult learners deserve and need differentiated instruction, time to make meaning from their experiences as well as the opportunity to apply their new learning to really give them half a chance for success. And look to work with the professionals within your school who have attended conferences, read leading educational books, and are on top of the edublogosphere who will be with you everyday as opposed to the weekend visit of a consultant.

Yet, you might go the extra step adding the depth of an experienced consultant to partner with your on site shifted teachers by having him/her stay for weeks or months at a time. Both Hong Kong International School and Hsinchu International School are using this model.

Stick To Your Guns:  So much of what I am writing here is accepted, practical knowledge. If a school community does all of these listed strategies and more, they can feel confident in that they are inclusive, transparent, systematic and clearly focused in their shift. There will still be difficulties and uncomfortable feelings at times but that is what LEARNING is all about.

Everyone from the administrator at the helm to the crew and passengers must work together to stay the course showing the courage to stand by their planning and initial goals. It is this courage that sometimes fails especially when the dreaded “Well, the parents say …” and we as educators forget we are the professionals hired to do the job of teaching the students and running the school.

Final Note:  As stated at the start, my experience is from working at a non-shifted school without a school-wide initiative or committed leadership to make the shift. We dug in and did out best as a group of educators working within the system. Brent Loken and Grant Ruskovich took a very different tack with their work at the helm of HIS. Download the SOS podcast later in the week to hear of their efforts.

Kim Cofino continues to add to the discussion in the blogosphere on a variety of topics. She recently posted about Making the Shift Happen and I added made the following comment. Kim will be a guest on this week’s Shifting Our School Podcast: SOS. We will be discussing the EQ “How to connect?”. In a few weeks we will be looking at the big question of how to make the shift with Brent Loken of Hsinchu Internationa School as the featured guest.

Terrific insights here, Kim. Your points add to the growing discussion we have going at the Shifting Our Schools: SOS podcast as we work to answer our guiding question: “How to shift?”. We look forward to hearing from you in this week’s show.

The discussion on the podcast has brought up some other points that can be added to your work here. The process of shifting with its focus on the curriculum development process, guiding professional development around the formation of learning communities and the need for leadership must be validated by the appropriation of time during the school day to do the work to change how we do business in our schools.

Shifting cannot be set aside as an after school meeting activity.

As you point out the leadership must come from the administrative team to build the vision and the framework to make the shift. The SOS team would add that a trained instructional/educational technologist and library media specialist must be hired in each of the school’s divisions to drive the efforts in the curriculum and PD processes. We must have our point people to follow through and make the vision a reality in our classrooms.

As for the curriculum review process, it should also have the administrators onboard to the point of attending the meetings especially the end of unit reflection gatherings where everyone is held accountable when reviewing the common assessments. Your point of celebrating and publicizing successes comes into play very nicely during these meetings.

I would add that a big part of the paradigm shift is again making the time for ongoing discussions as school leaders “seek to understand” where individual staff members are when it comes to learning 2.0 instructional and assessment strategies. I have experienced that the process of understanding how to construct essential understandings/questions and learning what concept-based curriculum looks like takes time and understanding as we work with our adult learners. We don’t learn in the same way as our students.

As much as we think about how to shift, we also need to think about what the barriers are to moving our schools to become 21st century learning communities. Your 3 bullet points really hit home on this point and as other commenters are saying, need to be presented to our school administrators to start the discussion as we look to change the cultures of our schools and begin the process of shifting our schools.

After making the comment at Kim’s blog an additional thought came to mind. I would add another question to Kim’s 3 bullet points. My question is what are administrators doing to hire teachers with the skill set for constructivist, concept-focused instruction and assessments who are passionate about helping our students learn 21st century skills?

Jeff Utecht and I will be starting our “Shift Our Schools” podcast this week. Our bi-monthly discussion involving guests, blog posts and other assorted topics will focus on a guiding question each show. Our hope for the netcast is to further the discussion among educators (especially those in Asia) about moving their instruction, assessment, communication efforts, professional development, etc. towards a second generation of the way we teach and manage our schools. We call this version of learning and schools “learning 2.0″ and “school 2.0″.

My focus for the podcast will be to interest teachers and administrators to listen to the podcast and to add to the discussion. As an instructional technologist, my work has always centered around working with teachers one to one and in small groups to design instruction, create content and assessments that bring about real understanding for our students. While Jeff has a world following of many already “shifted”educators, I am hoping that the two of us will be able to provide information that reaches both the shifted and those wondering what “shifting” is all about. As I remind teachers, it isn’t about the technology. It is about the way we facilitate the learning starting with the sound, best practices the teachers are already using. The technology and innovative instructional strategies just help us do a better job.

A big part of the task in education is to prepare our students to be citizens who have the skills to participate, contribute to and work in our society.  So just looking at the “work” portion of this outcome, let’s assess what employers want as far as skills for their current and future employees so that they will be ready to do their jobs effectively. The answer to this one doesn’t call on anyone’s best guess or judgement. A consortium of American companies came together to compile a list of the skills they want us in the education field to teach to our students.

These “21st century skills” are well-documented and discussed on the Web. Here are some links to provide more information.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills
What is 21st Century Learning?

Following the Understanding by Design (UbD) model for curriculum development, we start with the end in mind which are these 21st century skills as we go about designing our instruction, developing content and creating assessments.

Let’s look at some of these 21st century student learning results:

• being creative and innovative
• to think critically and problem solve
• to be a good communicator
• to collaborate, work effectively with teams

Yikes! Handing out worksheets, reading from textbooks and direct instruction (try telling students to be creative, be innovative and work well with others) won’t get us very far in helping our students develop, practice and use these skills in real world situations. So how are we going to change our schools (which in many cases are focused backwards on early 20th century job skills) to reach these new outcomes?

We shift. We come up with a whole new way to approach learning that connects learners (students, educators, parents/adults) to a networked world community where individuals have more control over their learning. This shift to the new learning is being called “learning 2.0″. Much of what defines it has been around for a long time (e.g., John Dewey) and their are plenty of educators, writers, innovators who have been writing and blogging about it for some time. One of my favorite articles written on the topic is by Thomas Carroll entitled If We Didn’t Have The Schools We Have Today, Would We Create The Schools We Have Today? 

You can find additional resources at our del.icio.us SOS podcast site that gets into a further description of Learning 2.0.

What are some reasons to make the shift?

1)  We agree that learning and true understanding comes from reflection, discussion with others, sharing and building ideas together forming networks of shared intelligence. Our brains are natural networks connecting our constructed learning so that we not only remember but have information from which to create new ideas. Learning 2.0 starts with good teaching practice that doesn’t depend upon technology use. We make the learning much richer when we offer new ways to reflect, discuss, share and create by using technology and information literacy skills to expand our learning communities.

2)  So many schools already say they are doing it. So how can we argue with them? Here are just a few examples from around Asia.

•  HKIS Academic SLRs that mirror the 21st century skills
•  TAS TIE job ad saying it is a school that “integrates technology and information literacy across the grades…” and a mission statement saying it is “an innovative 21st century learning community”.
•  WAB shares that is wants the following characteristics in its new hires: “skilled in IT”, “experience in and knowledge of inquiry based learning”, “flexible and adaptable” among many other requested characteristics.

3)  When comparing the technology rich and connected world of our students outside of school to what goes on inside school, we see quite a difference. Take a few moments to ask your students how they communicate and learn outside of the classroom. Web 2.0 is Life 2.0 for our students. Relevancy is pretty powerful! Various technologies and communication networks have transformed the fields of medicine, engineering, real estate, banking, etc. Why do we put up so many barriers to this transformation coming to our schools?

4) For schools that are not tied to the No Child Left Behind knowledge-based assessments and are working towards higher level concepts in the form of Essential Questions, we need to ask how they are doing in reaching those understandings. Are these schools willing to try some new instructional strategies and assessment techniques to reach their goals? If the schools work with their instructional technologists and library media specialist to pilot some new approaches and then review the student assessments, they will find that Learning 2.0 technology tools do enhance student learning.

5) Learning 2.0 means going deeper into the concepts and skills that support them. We hear so much of American style curriculum being so wide in what it tries to cover. This leads to a quickening of our teaching pace which often means more direct instruction and less facilitation of learning that pushes students to use higher level thinking (as opposed to pour it in knowledge/facts). Few teachers will argue with having to cover less but with more depth so that their students really learn.

6) Art Costa’s Habits of Mind connect nicely to 21st century skills.  The 16th habit that we  “remain open to continuous learning” which I would adapt to also say “while continually learning how to learn” hits a homeroom on why we need to shift to Learning 2.0 in our schools.  With so many new fields of work and study being constantly created, we as educators cannot teach all the specific skills needed for these future skill sets. What we can do is teach our students how to be learners. Learning 2.0 instructional strategies that empower students and adults to learn together naturally empower members of our learning communities to desire the skills that make their self-learning possible.

The list of reasons to shift goes on and on in the educational blogosphere…it seems to me that the question should really be “why not shift?” I would be interested to hear someone try and take the opposite view. I think a strong argument against shifting would not be about what it means for student learning. It would be about the tendency in our schools to not properly pilot initiatives and then not build a systematic program for change that gives teachers time and support to really learn and practice their craft.

For a nice explanation of Learning 2.0 that demonstrates how a learning community can be formed using online tools (i.e., blog and reader comments), check out Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach’s post on the topic.

Kim Cofino is the 21st Century Learning Specialist at the International School of Bangkok. She recently posted the standards/outcomes of what the 21st century literacy and technology outcomes are for the school. I shared at her site that they are very clear and easily understandable for the school community to process and then act upon. As change agents, one of our main tasks is to explain why we need to make changes. Well-written and sometimes obvious explanations to us ICL leaders are not so obvious to the community. The ISB team did a nice job.

The next step is to communicate the new ICL outcomes to the community. This will involve buy in and involvement by the administrators as well as real support from the teachers. This education phase first for teachers then to students and parents is very important. They then become supporters as your innovator teachers try new instructional strategies and assessments that lead their students to the ICL understandings.

As I look at look around the Web at international school sites, I am find more and more mention of “21st Century Skills”, “information literacy” and “technology skills” in mission statements and skill sets for potential hires. Having sat in committee meetings wordsmithing statements with all the buzzwords, I can say that we often leave out the most important steps of then communicating and then creating the mechanisms to move us into action mode. The way to move the 21st Century ICL skills into the classroom is through the curriculum development process.

This becomes much easier after the communication has taken place and members of the community really understand the value of good design in presentations, the importance of reflection in all aspects of student learning but especially in their information sources, the place of bias in information coming in and going out, etc. Again, check out the list the ISB team put together or see the HKIS ICL Standards & Benchmarks.

One thing to note about the HKIS ICL standards is that they are the same as the school’s academic student learning results. This makes sense in that shouldn’t the skills for 21st century learning naturally be what all our teachers are building a portion of their lessons around? Much of our teaching involves skills and we want to be teaching about ones in the present century, correct?

On a side note, Kim has a very interesting job title. Looking back at my previous posts on job titles, I like the one she is using. However, as I just mentioned that ICL standards should really be a part of the school’s student learning outcomes, is there a need to designate a learning support teacher working towards those outcomes with “21st century” or “technologist” as part of the job title? Well, as I concluded in my post, we need to use those terms for the time being until ICL becomes totally integrated into a school’s learning systems. One day folks like Kim and myself might just be called “learning specialists” collaborating to design curriculum that is differentiated and focused on reaching the school’s academic student learning outcomes which naturally contain the ICL outcomes.