Many of you know me; I've been a science teacher at La Costa Canyon for the last 16 years, teaching Physics and Earth Science. This year, I'm serving as a Teacher on Special Assignment for Technology and Learning. As you know, this is a new position for our district, so it's an honor and a challenge for me to define exactly what this role is.
One way to think about this role is in the name itself. Many districts have a similar position, working with "Instructional Technology". Ours is "Technology and Learning". It's more than a semantic difference, it signals that our focus is on student learning and what students do, rather than focusing on what teachers do. Obviously, teachers influence what students do, so as Rick and Mike and I have defined my role, it has fallen into two categories: core technical skills, and 21st-century learning.
Most of the work I've done so far this year has been around providing support and professional development for teachers to improve their core technical skills. We've put together a short list of "what a technically competent teacher can do", including skills with Aeries.net, Gmail, Google Drive, websites, and instructional technology. We had all teachers respond to this survey, and I'm now working with the site administrators to plan and deliver professional development for teachers who need to get up to speed.
I've worked a lot with teachers at all sites to help them use their websites to communicate effectively with students and parents, and to use Blackboard, our online learning management system, as a complement to their in-class activities. I've supported teachers who are using Plato for the 9th grade health component of PE or for support and intervention classes for students performing below grade level in mathematics or who need extra help to pass the High School Exit Exam. I've also been working with teachers who are using electronic textbooks, as we begin to move in that direction, to make sure that the teachers and students can easily access their class materials.
The other side of my job at this point is to help our district to define what 21st-century learning looks like. Our current education system remains largely a 19th- and 20th-century creation; (and here I am speaking not just about our district but about our country as a whole). This system was designed for an age of information scarcity; in which knowledge was difficult to get, and largely held and disseminated by teachers to students.* We don't live in that era anymore; we are in an age of information glut; most students have access to more information than they know what to do with, and they can look it up on a powerful computer that they carry around in their pocket, unless we make them turn it off when they enter the classroom.
So if schools are no longer the holders and disseminators of information, then what is the role of schools and teachers? There are a number of groups who have been working on developing sets of 21st-century skills or 21st-century fluencies. It's a little bit unsettling that we are 13 years into the 21st century and are still discussing what 21st-century skills look like; probably educators will still be working on it for another 87 years. But there is a broad agreement that while students have access to all the information they could want, the role of schools and teachers needs to be to teach them what to do with it. So this is where the notion of skills comes in. The upcoming Common Core standards are much more about skills than about factual knowledge. Students need to be able to find information, curate information, evaluate information, combine information from different sources, work collaboratively with others, and then produce and present their own contributions to the world's knowledge.
Toward this end, I have been working with a small group of teachers from all sites and all disciplines who are interested in experimenting with instructional strategies that can be effective in moving students toward 21st century skills. We've got teachers who are using a strategy known as "flipped learning"; using videos of themselves (among other resources) to provide direct instruction to students who can watch it any time in any place, then using classroom time for interactive activities where the teacher's assistance can be of most use. It's called "flipped" because what was traditionally done in class (direct instruction) is now done at home, and "homework" is now done in class. But it's really about teachers making the best use of scare classroom time with students. There are teachers who are having students produce electronic portfolios to showcase and share what the students have been able to produce. We've got teachers who are using online communication tools like discussion boards and chat rooms to provide extra support for students outside of the school day. This nucleus of teachers is working to explore what kinds of instructional strategies can be effective in helping students to develop the skills they need to be successful in the world of the future.
Thanks for this opportunity to speak to you, and I look forward to continuing to work with the students and teachers all around this district.
*Obviously my thinking here has been heavily influenced by Will Richardson's books, including Why School? and Personal Learning Networks.
