All Participants:

1) Who will really own the entire curriculum process moving it from the start to the finish in the classroom?
2) Who will own and guide the professional learning community being formed via this process?

Classroom Teachers, Support Teachers (ESL, Instructional Technologist, Librarian, Learning Resource, GATE, etc.) and Elective/Arts Teachers:

3) How ready are teams/departments to divide up the units to be developed/reviewed by one or two grade level, team or department members but not by the whole group?
4) What specific roles should they fulfill in the reviewing process (e.g., facilitator, scribe, etc.)?
5) How far along is the curriculum in being differentiated to meet learning needs of all the students?
6) Which teachers are needed to help design the content, process and products for those different needs?
7) Who can help integrate the technology and information & communication literacies?
How interdisciplinary are your units?
9) What steps do you want to take to make them more interdisciplinary? How can the curriculum process help you do this? Who needs to lead out in this effort?

Administration:

10) What do you need from your building principal? What is his/her role in the process?
11) How can the Curriculum Director support you and the entire process?
12) Which other administrators need to be involved in the curriculum development process? What are their roles in this process?

What other questions come to mind?

• How to infuse information literacy skills across the curriculum?
• Where does the use of technology fit into the information literacy picture?
• How does a modern library media specialist fit into the shifting process?

The possible answers to these questions start with the library media specialist trained in using digital information tools as well as generative technologies for student sharing of their research. This individual is a leader in his/her school working with the instructional technologist as designers and collaborators in the curriculum review process to embed the various information & communication literacy (ICL) skills throughout the curriculum.

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

]]> http://lessonslearned.edublogs.org/2008/10/21/where-do-you-start-the-shift-sos-episode-15/feed/ 2 http://lessonslearned.edublogs.org/2008/09/24/the-big-picture-how-to-create-a-collaborative-systematic-process-for-curriculum-development-and-review/ http://lessonslearned.edublogs.org/2008/09/24/the-big-picture-how-to-create-a-collaborative-systematic-process-for-curriculum-development-and-review/#comments Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:53:11 +0000 David Carpenter http://lessonslearned.edublogs.org/?p=91 What a mouthful for a post title.

I have spent my years as an instructional technologist working through the curriculum development and review process to help shift my schools towards becoming what we call School 2.0. We were able to construct a workable system at my last school that really made a difference in how and what we taught in our classrooms.

We are now developing a curriculum development system at my current school that will involve working with our school culture and unique needs. Hsinchu International School is very different than the very large school I worked at before. We will be using a series of questions around specific categories to help us through this creation process. The questions come from a workshop I developed to help guide school communities to either refine their current curriculum review system or to start a new one. I will be sharing these categories and questions in a series of posts.

This is the first one and it covers the big picture when school wide leaders come together to start the conversation.

1) What would be an effective way to manage school-wide subject area meetings to review the standards/benchmarks for scope/sequencing (i.e., facilitation, time of year, one or several meetings by division, etc.)?

2) How do discussions take place about the big picture and developing ownership of the curriculum?

3) Who overseas this process of creating this process?

4) Who will be the leaders in each division to support this effort and gain support for it?

5) Who would be involved in curriculum development in each division? What would be their roles? Is there a place for students and/or parents at some point in the curriculum review process?

6) How would you ensure follow through on action items (to do’s) as you create your curriculum development system?

7) What big picture topics (i.e., each school year’s goals, student learning results, differentiation, etc.) would you want to integrate into your curriculum other than alignment of standards and benchmarks?

What are your priorities in either refining your current curriculum review system (or in starting one from scratch)? In other words, how much can you take on and still be effective in this process?

9) What ultimately do you want your curriculum to do?

10) How will you provide your participants the time and coaching to learn the skills needed to develop curriculum?

11) How will you get “buy in” from your participants to be curriculum designers?

12) How will you get buy in from all of your educators to actively use the curriculum?

13) How do you share the curriculum? To whom?

14) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

Image Source: Adopted from Johneric Advento’s revised version of Margaret Carpenter’s original diagram

Our Shifting Our Schools podcast as well as Jeff’s and my blogs along with countless other podcasts and blogs share ways to help educators make the shift from traditional style, teacher-directed classrooms to what we call the Learning or School 2.0 model. This “shift” with all its edublogger advocates is all about the change process which we know is quite difficult to manage and is not happening very quickly.

While I enjoy discussing the big picture and the big ideas, my practice as an instructional technologist is on the practical, in the classroom instruction and assessment strategies that help transform classrooms into 21st century learning communities.

My belief for bringing about this transformation is that schools must develop a curriculum and collaborative systematic model that becomes the mechanism for shifting our classrooms and our schools to the School 2.0 model. Sadly curriculum development carries an uncomfortable connotation for many educators. The reality is that the curriculum should be the driving force that guides so much of what we do to affect the learning for our students. If handled well, curriculum development as a part of an engaged and thriving learning community, can be an exciting process that shifts and transforms our schools. Obvious information but sadly we often put little thought into how we develop or follow through with our curriculum.

We often spoke about this on our SOS podcast with one show centered on the work of the International School Bangkok’s team of technology resource coordinators and literacy specialist. The ISB team constructed a curriculum development model and recently Kim Cofino created a collaboration flow chart that together nicely presents a model for other schools to review and possibly adopt and individualize to meet their needs.

Back to the practical… Kim will be presenting at the Learning 2.008 conference next week about the importance of curriculum and collaboration in bringing about the shift in our schools. After watching Kim’s slide show for her presentation, I remembered a workshop that I started to put together for another conference. It dealt with how a school learning community begins the process of designing their own curriculum and collaboration system. As I am not able to attend the Learning 2.008 conference, it makes sense to get the components for my workshop out there as a practical way to help support Kim’s and others’ efforts. Each school is different and whether one looks at the ISB model or the one we created at HKIS, the process for developing the model needs to start by engaging all the stakeholders in the discussion.

My next several posts will share the questions that teachers and administrators can use to start their discussion as they work to develop their own systematic way to review curriculum that integrates the instructional strategies, content, assessments and 21st century learning skills that will shift their schools to the Learning 2.0 model.

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 discussing this question in the SOS podcast this week. As an Instructional Technologist much of my work deals with the integration of technology into instruction and assessments. The integration process begins from the big picture (Macro) by looking at the needs of the students and teachers as we design the curriculum as well as when we create a learning and technology plan focused on student learning. The other approach is when we collaborate working on individual lessons (Micro) to reach the stated learning objectives.

The Macro:  Learning and Technology Plan || The Curriculum Development Process

We recently formed a committee and are working on our “Learning and Technology” plan right now at Hsinchu International School. The process centers upon how we work to have our students reach the five learning outcomes. The Learning Outcomes are:

• Effective Communicators
• Critical Thinkers & Problem Solvers
• Persons of High Character
• Active Learners
• Community Contributors

There are three main ways we work to help our students reach these learning goals:

1. Instructional Models
2. Assessment Techniques
3. Learning Communities

We are using Mindmeister to map out and collaborate as we develop our plan. The screen shot above is our initial effort to prime the committee work. As one can see, there is no listing of any technology tools at the primary level. It is all about teaching and learning.

Looking closer at the mind map, one category is “Instructional Models”. Two models that we use frequently at HIS are project-based and inquiry. Our next step is to define what each of these models looks like in our classrooms and then look for ways that technology and Information & Communication Literacy (ICL) can support and enhance each approach.  If we were using a multi-level concept-mapping tool like Smart Ideas, the technology tools would begin to appear on the third level. The technology infrastructure is down at the fourth level, way in the background, providing the foundation for the technology tools that support the learning at the upper two levels.

We will use the Learning and Technology plan to design our professional development goals for the coming school year. The focus will be on improving instructional and assessment techniques while expanding the learning community. We will provide the PD to help educators learn the technology and ICL tools/skills that our plan shows as needed to support the 3 main categories that support our 5 student learning outcomes at the center of our plan and school.

The curriculum development process is a part of our plan in the Learning Community category. We use the Understanding by Design process to create our units of study that also involves the integration of technology and ICL skills.

The Micro: When working with teachers one on one or in small groups, we again use the UbD approach to determine what the learning will look like and how we will assess it to then work backwards in creating the instruction and content. As the collaboration progresses, we discuss possible ways that technology and/or research skills can support and enhance the learning. Just as with the broad, school-wide approach of the Learning and Technology plan, the technology does not enter the picture until we are far along in designing how to meet the learning objectives.

The learning determines the technology. Not the other way around.

On a side note, a terrific book that reviews studies of efforts to go into communities around the world to bring about change by groups like the Peace Corps, UN agencies, etc. is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It was a textbook in one of my graduate courses that consistently reminds the reader just how difficult it is to bring about change and have it diffuse through a community.

As an instructional technologist working with teachers to design curriculum, I follow a model similar to Sachs’ that starts with Understanding. I work to understand the teacher and students’ needs and the specific learning outcomes the teacher is aiming for. The next step after gathering the needs information which sometimes includes observation and working with the students by teaching the Information and Communication Literacy (ICL) curriculum, is to Analyze the information from an instructional and assessment viewpoint. Research comes into play by seeing what other teachers did with the lesson in the past and by checking my Web resources to see how lessons posted there could be helpful in designing this one. I then Develop the lesson with the teacher or adapt what he/she already has in place. The lesson is then Implemented by the teacher or we team teach it if ICL skills are involved and the teacher wants the support.  We then Evaluate and Refine the lesson for future use. I remember this process, Understand-Analyze-Research-Develop-Implement-Evaluate-Refine (UARDIER), by appreciating my teaching partner with the phrase “You are dear!”.

Sach’s model, Research-Develop-Demonstrate-Diffusion (RDDD), adds the final “D” for Diffusion which is what also happens when classroom lessons are designed where the assessment data shows real student learning taking place. Word gets out to fellow teachers and the instructional and assessment strategies spread from one classroom to another.

Looking at the bigger picture of planning professional development programs, the key word is plan. This means getting instructional leaders on the PD development team who know how to design programs that originate from the needs of the teachers and students. As I have posted before, PD that really works happens consistently week after week one on one and in small collaborate grade level or departmenta teams once a learning community is created. One shot quarterly PD days, non-differentiated for all the teachers at once usually involving just direct instruction, can at times even do more harm than good especially when it comes to learning technology skills. Throwing various software and Web 2.0 tools scattershot at a weary group of teachers on a Friday afternoon can lead to their feeling confused and inadequate which can move into frustration and potentially to anger.

Adult learners need to bring new learning into the context of their experiences while having the time to practice the new skills to gain comfort and to see if they have practical value. Dr. Sach’s model starts with “Research” which means connecting to the users and getting to know what their needs are. While Dr. Sach’s acronym might be shorter than the one I follow, I think our two models have a lot in common.

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.

The following are some notes that Jeff took after our last call with my responses.

Jeff- The notion of the “Digital Divide” (in educational / social context) has been transformed in radical ways, ways that make it more subtle and difficult to detect. It is no longer about access / boxes / wires…its about making meaning on the web. Its about organizing the open web in ways that make it a meaningful learning environment. To me this means understanding how to connect, create and participate in meaningful ways with others on the web…it is about participation, exchange and social interaction. This is NOT a given…I contend that students need to learn how to do this. If they don’t get it at home, and they don’t get it at school….they don’t get it….EVER. The divide is subtle and I fear…expanding.

David- Jamie McKenzie termed the over purchasing of computers and then leaving them with limited teacher training or instructional technology support as “screen saver disease” as that is what one often viewed in empty computer labs in American public schools. It was one thing to simply not use the hardware and newly connected Internet, it is now the case as Jeff points out that some students are gaining rich learning experiences via teachers and whole schools supporting the building of online learning communities. Others are not.

Beside the learning that takes place in well-structured forums and wikis, online journaling with one’s teacher, blogging on current events, there is the whole world of various literacies as connected students access online databases, search for visuals to support their ideas, concept map Essential Questions, storyboard learning projects with their teams, choose the right tool to meet their needs- the list goes on and on of what a learning 2.0 environment can offer a student. The skills gained in this environment are transferable to the ones the will be using as employers look for students with 21st century skills.

Jeff- School administrative leaders must be centrally involved, knowledgeable and concerned about the educational value of the web. My view is that if you are a school principal you MUST be one of the most savvy web researchers at your school. This means having many of the fundamental understandings that you and I routinely take for granted.

David- Jeff and I spoke a little about the pre-service teacher training that takes place at UVA. It was recently celebrated as an innovative program be the George Lucas Educational Foundation. I asked Jeff about what is happening at the Ed Leadership program at VCU as he we reacted to a recent post by Jeff Utecht on adminstrators realizing the value of hiring networked educators. We had the same reaction of administrators probably having limited experience in the blogosphere and not really understanding what a well-connected teacher blogger can bring to a school. Jeff clearly hit it on the head that administrators need to be the instructional leaders of their schools which in today’s world means being networked into the benefits of the read/write Web.

Jeff- I think the conversation needs to include school level leaders (principals, admins.), and I don’t see where this is happening. There is a lot of focus on preparing the individual classroom teacher, however I do not see Educational Leadership programs in schools of education engaging school leaders in the kind of dialogue / inquiry that results in them taking seriously the radical transformations we are witnessing. I am wondering what the question is that needs to be asked the answer to which results in them saying: “I must engage my faculty and students in this process us understanding, creating and participating on the web because it is fundamentally transforming all aspects of society…if my students don’t get this here they will emerge form my school disadvantaged.”

David- Jeff really ties all our points together very nicely in the statement above.

Jeff- I really enjoy the dialogue I’ve seen unfold on the Edu-blogger playing field. However, much of the talk about technology focuses on tools that are cool and their potential uses in the classroom. I think this kind of stuff is interesting, and of value to some classroom teachers, and those of us who promote it and try to make sense of it. At the same time I think this stuff is often at too fine a level of granularity to be of central interest to school admins. It rolls off of them like – as my father was fond of saying – “water off a duck’s ass.” There needs to be a more fundamental experience – in their preparation as school leaders – that helps them make the tough decisions about where they stand in relation to education technology. I don’t think they are ever really encouraged / forced to ask the questions.

David- I will add that I am finding too much “tool talk” in the posts I follow. I realize that the leaders in the field need to speak in broad terms to try and entice teachers in professional development settings to try something new. From an instructional technologist’s perspective, our training is to focus on the individual needs of the teacher or group of teachers working towards some learning goals for their students. As we partner and work from the teachers’ expertise, our learning community often becomes a rich environment for creativity and new strategies to support student understanding. The tools slowly work their way into the process. I can say that it certainly would make a big difference if administrators are sitting in on those conversations asking questions about learning outcomes and the best ways to build personal learning environments for the children.

Jeff- When they get into a leadership position, where do principals look for guidance about the role IT should play in the school? How should it be used? Who is in charge? Who decides? I think more often than not they off-load this decision to the system admins. (or maybe worse they really have no say). Managing boxes and wires, and securing the network – have little to nothing to do with decisions about the meaningful and powerful uses of technology in education…yet at the same time this has everything to do with it. Locked down networks become the mental model for understanding how technology should be viewed. They succumb…

David- great point, Jeff. I think you point to the next step in the evolution of the instructional/educational technologist. I consistently find in my reading of journal articles and blogs that the IT/ET is present in many schools in the US and in international schools. However, I have yet to hear of a Director of Educational Technology position until recently. Some schools try to combine the educational role with that of the technology infrastructure upkeep just as schools once tried to do the same with computer and printer repairs for the Technology Coordinator and hope he/she had some time to work on the educational side.

The International School of Bangkok is advertising a Director of Educational Technology now. I would think this individual will be the go to person at that school along with the Curriculum Director when the administrator needs big picture advice and guidance to support learning in the school. One can only hope that more schools follow ISB’s leadership to separate the need for leadership in educational technology and infrastructure into two positions.