Going to the Moon

Today I heard the news that the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, has died.  I've thought about the Apollo 11 mission quite a bit over the past few weeks, since the metaphor of going to the moon was one that was used by our Superintendent when he described the journey that ASB set off on last year to rethink education and what we are doing to turn those thoughts into reality.  This year we have 2 amazing new campuses and it seems we have "lift off", but there is still a long way to go between the launch and actually walking on the moon.  I'm new, and so obviously I wasn't involved in all the preparation for the lift off, but it's clear to see all the preparations that went on pre-launch that have set us on our way.

The school started by looking at the mission.  It was important to affirm that this was the right one and that we all still cared about making the mission come true.  At this time 2 more core values were added:

• Practice, perseverance and reflection are integral to a culture of excellence.  These are not just glib words like other mission statements I've read.  When this school talks about a culture of excellence they know what they are talking about and how to get there.  All coaches know that practice is important and that when you face setbacks you need to persevere.  Reflection ties the whole thing together.  A culture that does not value reflection, that does not value thinking critically about what you are doing in order to get better, is one that will never achieve excellence.
• We are the trustees of our environment.  I love this one because it goes beyond immediate achievement, because the focus is on the future.

I've already written about the 4 things that were identified as being really important in the roles of teachers:  learning, talent, advancement and resources.  If our metaphor is that "we are going to the moon", and going to the moon is something that has never been done before, then obviously it's important to think about how to do things differently.  One of the first things that was considered was curriculum.  I've been at schools that have considered curriculum before and this process has taken 4 or 5 years to review.  Teachers get frustrated in this process.  ASB decided that this traditional model was not going to work because people want to try something new and implement it - so what has been done is to capture this initiative and put it into a new curriculum review model so that everything is moving and everyone is revising their curriculum every year.  As Heidi Hayes Jacobs described in her book Curriculum 21, it's important to constantly consider what to keep, what to cut and what to create.  A good example of this is the way at ASB there has been a complete change in everyone's mindset for using technology in the best way.  Technology is completely embedded - I've heard it described as the DNA of learning here.

In the first few weeks of school I've been part of collaborative planning for the first unit of inquiry in each team.  We do consider what was done before, we look at the standards, we develop assessments that align with the standards and we look at instructional approaches.  We revisit these every year with every unit of inquiry, but this year we are committed to going further - we are looking at personalizing the learning.  The purpose and focus of our curriculum development is to come up with personalized learning for every child.

Just as in the Apollo missions, our R&D team is very strong here at ASB - it's the heart of every decision we make to move forward with teaching and learning.  We need to think differently - we need to consider people, teams, structures, roles and responsibilities, time, facilities, operations and processes, governance, policies and resources.  And all of these need to be considered in the light of the school's mission and core values.

Yesterday our Superintendent sent out a message to all parents.  This weekly briefing is called Vichar, which I looked up in a Hindi dictionary.  It has many meanings:  thought, idea, opinion, voice, consideration.   He wrote about how the building of the new campuses has been similar to a pregnancy and how on 13th August,  our first day of school, the baby was born.  As a parent myself, I know that the birth is the first step, sometimes compared to what comes later it can even be seen as an easy step.  After this comes the nurturing, the guidance, the times when you lie awake at night wondering, worrying.  Most new parents think in terms of having a baby - but in fact that period of time is over and done with quickly - then you have a child, and a teenager and then finally an adult.  That is what you really have.  You might choose to have a baby but what you get is an adult.  Both my children are adults now.  My daughter flies the nest next month to go to university.  It's a strange time for me, full of mixed feelings.  

So the baby has been born, the school is open, childhood approaches and possibly some rocky times with a lot of lessons to be learned.  But one thing is certain, I have no doubts about it at all.  This child is going to the moon.  

Photo Credit:  Once in a Blue Moon by Kuzeytac, 2008  

Give and Take

Because we are about to launch into our action research about blogging soon, I've been thinking some more about sharing.  As Silvia Tolisano writes on her blog, we are investigating the benefits of blogging on three different levels, for the teacher, for the student and for the curriculum.  The idea behind this action research is that we are all giving of our knowledge and experience, our time, our lessons, our comments and reflections but we are all going to take something out of it as well that hopefully will make us better educators and learners.  We  are setting ourselves high expectations and we are hoping that when the expectations in our community of bloggers is high, that our students will live up to these expectations.  To get the full learning benefits of this process we will need to give as much as we take.

Today I went and tool at look at the National Council of Teachers of English website where there is a definition of 21st century literacies.  There it states that "literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of  particular groups.  As society and technology changes, so does literacy.  Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the 21st century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies." I think that 5 of the 6 literacies outlined  by NCTE are particularly relevant to our Quad Blogging action research with primary students:

• develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• create, critique, analyze and evaluate multi-media texts
• attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

With just 4 more weeks to go before we start, I'm exciting and counting the days!

Rethinking Curriculum

Recently I was visiting some friends who are also teachers who got me thinking about the words "21st century skills".  It's interesting to question whether, at this point just 11 years into the 21st century, we really know what skills student will need to be successful in the future.  My friends asked me if 100 years ago, in 1911, teachers could have predicted the skills that their students would need to be successful at the end of the 20th century.  I thought that probably they could not have done this.  This year the oldest person in my family died at the age of 98.  She was born in 1913 and certainly wasn't given at school the skills that she developed in the last years of her life to use a computer or a smartphone.  Something else kept her going, however: curiosity, open-mindedness, adaptability and the courage to try new things.  These were the attributes she developed as a young person at school in the 1920s and these are  the same skills that nowadays we are labeling as "21st century"?

The first half of the 20th century was marked by a very fast pace of technological inventions.  People flew in the first airplanes and helicopters, they started to own their own cars.  Motion pictures, radio and television were invented.  New materials such as stainless steel, nylon, plastic and teflon became commonplace.  In the 1950s, just halfway through the century, televisions started to appear in many homes as the dominant media, which changed people's ideas of entertainment, and people started to go into space for the first time.  It's almost unbelievable to think that at the beginning of the century, when human flight was unthought of, anyone would have predicted that men would be able to walk on the moon or live in space.  In an age where many people's working lives were spent in local small businesses or factories, who could have predicted the rise of the multi-national corporation?

In the final chapter of Curriculum 21, Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick write:

Our students are in the 21st century and they are waiting for the teachers and the curriculum to catch up.

They refer to the changes that need to be made such as:

open-mindedness, flexibility, patience and courage.  Changing curriculum is about changing your mind first and then forming some new habits and routines as you abandon old ones.

21st century skills have been defined in many ways and include the following:

• critical thinking
• problem solving
• collaboration
• leadership
• agility and adaptability
• initiative and entrepreneurialism
• effective oral and written communication
• accessing and analyzing information
• curiosity and imagination

As I looked over this list I asked myself, were not these also the skills employed by the Wright brothers as they designed and tested their first airplane, or by Albert Einstein when he published the theory of relativity, or by Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history?

Costa and Kallick have defined 16 habits of mind necessary for success.  These are:

• persistence and perseverance
• managing impulsivity and thinking before acting
• listening with understanding and empathy - being able to perceive another's point of view
• thinking flexibly and being able to change perspectives
• metacognition - being aware of your own thoughts and actions and how they affect others
• striving for accuracy and precision
• questioning and problem posing
• applying past knowledge to novel situations - using what you have learnt
• thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
• gathering data through all the senses
• creating, imagining and innovating
• responding with wonderment and awe
• taking responsible risks - living on the edge of your competence
• humor - being able to laugh at yourself 
• thinking independently and being able to learn from others and work together
• learning from experience 

Costa and Kallick point out that these habits are never fully mastered, instead learners must continually practice, modify and refine them.

How does this impact on the 21st century curriculum?  Costa and Kallick write that today several mind shifts are needed:

• from knowing the right answers, to knowing how to behave when the answers are not readily apparent.  In curriculum terms this involves changing from valuing knowledge acquisition to valuing knowledge production.
• from transmitting meaning to constructing meaning.  Humans don't just get ideas, they make ideas, often collaborating with others to share knowledge.  The curriculum needs to change emphasis from having learners acquire our meanings to having their construct shared meanings which may not necessarily be the meanings we wanted them to construct.
• from external evaluation to self-assessment - if we are focus on the process then we cannot just measure the product.  The new purpose of evaluation is to have students learn how to become self-evaluative.

21st century teachers need to let go more.  They need to be comfortable with the uncomfortable.  As Costa and Kallick write:

Growth and change are found in disequilibrium, not balance.

Photo Credit:  Worlds Afloat by Michael Feist  

Questions -v- Answers

As today is a public holiday, I've spent several hours on skype catching up with an old friend of mine from NIST.  The amazing thing about this was that even though she is in a different continent, the hours that we spent talking cost us absolutely nothing.  We can connect across time and space in a way that has never been possible before and these connections bring us up-to-the-minute answers to the questions we are asking.

The ability to find information quickly is what is leading students to demand a change in the way we are teaching.  This was addressed by Bill Sheskey in Chapter 12 of Curriculum21, the current book we are reading in our professional reading group.  Sheskey writes:

It is the greatest time in history to be in a classroom because learning technology is changing at an exponential rate, and our students can thrive with it.

I think for me the most important word that springs to mind when I think about how technology is transforming the learning in many schools is the word empowerment.  Technology now empowers students to be able to find the answers to their own questions - which is actually the opposite of being taught.  It allows learning to be personal.   If knowledge is power, then searching for the information that you need to answer your very specific question is empowering.  Of course, this relies on students knowing how to ask the right questions, being able to communicate and collaborate with others who may have separate pieces of the answer, and being able to synthesis all this information to extract the answers they are looking for.

Intelligence is being redefined:  at one time intelligence was measured by how much knowledge we could recall.  Now that's not important as we don't need to recall much - we have instant access to almost anything we want to know.  What we need today is a knowledge of how to find the information and then we need to apply it.  Being able to ask the right questions, being able to apply the answers and problem solving are now the new ways we need to think about intelligence.  Sheskey writes:

As answers become devalued, questions become more valued.

The schools that are leading the way in the 21st century are those that are redefining knowledge in this way.  If a school is concerned with testing, all the students are doing is "learning answers".  Technology, on the other hand, empowers students to inquire - and as a result transforms the learning.

Photo Credit:  Question mark made of puzzle pieces by Horia Varian  

A November Day

Today I've got to Chapter 11 of Curriculum 21 and it's by Alan November.  I'm lucky to have meet Alan in person, many years ago at an ECIS IT Conference, and I always enjoy listening to him speak or reading what he writes.  This chapter is about how students often have to power down when they go into schools as many things are blocked or forbidden.  Of course smartphones, skype, social media and other tools can be very disruptive to education - or at least to classroom management - but they can also be used to transform the learning experience for students.

Alan November writes:

This is the first time in history when many children are learning to use powerful tools outside the range of adult supervision.  What concerns many of us is that our worst fear of students abusing these tools has a much higher change of happening without teachers and parents providing appropriate role models   ....   What about if we were to transform the culture of teaching and learning to adapt to the power of these tools?  After all, our children are growing up at a time when they have instant access to the Web for information and global communication in their back pocket.  And it is nearly free.

This is something that educators should be talking about and planning for.  Several years ago I often gave advice to parents to have their computer in a family room, not to let children have it in their bedrooms where they could access anything completely unsupervised - both good and bad.  And then in 2005 my own children started with a tablet programme at school and this advice seemed redundant - they had their tablets with them all the time.  They used them for their homework - which they did in their bedrooms.  Suddenly it became imperative to talk with them about the use - and abuse - of these devices.  Our conversations were not about what they should not be doing - we turned the conversations around to how to be responsible digital citizens.

This year we stared a 1:1 programme with our Grade 4 and 5 students on one of our campuses.  It's interesting to compare the different campuses, one of which has carts of laptops that are shared between a whole grade and the other where the students have their own laptop in their classroom.   I was talking with the campus head today about how empowering it is that the students all have their own machines.  I'm interested in the fact that it's on this small primary campus that the greatest leaps forward seem to be being made.

A couple of days ago I was looking at an acceptable use policy for another international school and discussing it with one of my colleagues.  We noticed that there were many rules about what not to do and the consequences that would happen if these rules were broken.  I started to think about something I was told when I first started teaching: to talk to students about the behaviour you want to see, not the behaviour that you want to stop.  For example if a student is talking loudly and distracting others, the positive thing to say is "please talk quieter".  If a student is using a laptop inappropriately, I'm not sure that taking the laptop off the student is going to change that behaviour (though it will obviously stop him/her doing it during that lesson).  Perhaps a better way of dealing with this is to give the student something positive to do with the laptop - a role or job that is valuable for the rest of the class, for example a scribe or a researcher.  At the end of this chapter Alan November also writes about this.  Rather than asking students to stop using certain things or blocking certain websites, we should be asking how we can empower students to be more responsible for their own learning, how we can encourage them to contribute to the learning community.   To do that we need to change the culture of teaching and learning away from one of control and towards one of empowerment.

Photo Credit:  I took this photo at the end of the day from the staff room, before leaving school to drive home.  It doesn't really fit with the post at all, except that it was a beautiful November evening, and as I'm leaving the school this year I treasure the one day a week I spend on this remarkable campus with an amazing set of educators.  The photo was taken on my iPhone using Pro HDR. 

Digital Portfolios

Last week I was in a couple of meeting where portfolios were discussed.  From an IT point of view, the only portfolio I  really find useful for my students is a digital one.  It's not possible to print-out an audio file or a movie or an animation, so it's not possible to put many of the multimedia projects the students have created into their paper portfolio that gets sent home twice a year.

A digital portfolio, however, is a great way to collect the work students have done on a computer or using Web 2.0 tools as it is a multimedia collection that provides evidence of a student's knowledge, skills and understanding.  A digital portfolio can be continued by a student from one school year to the next.  This year our Grade 4 students who moved up into Grade 5 "took" their blogs (which are similar to ePorfolios) with them and continued to add on their work - this means that now the digital portfolios are also demonstrating their growth through time.

In Curriculum 21, David Niguidula writes:

When done well, a digital portfolio outlines a student's learning journey in much the same way that a curriculum map describes a teacher's teaching journey.

He goes on to ask the following questions, which are at the heart of all portfolios, both paper and digital:

• Why do we collect student work?
• What audiences are important to us?

These questions in particular are important for helping students and teachers to focus on what they want to collect and select for their portfolios.

In an international school setting, it's great for students to be able to share their portfolio with their extended families.  Often it's hard to do this with a paper portfolio, but again this is where ePortfolios have a decided advantage.  Students can send the URL of their blog or ePortfolio to their friends and relatives back in their home country.

Many schools still rely on paper portfolios, however, so how can we get all the great multimedia projects our students are creating into them?  This week I saw a great solution - turn the URL of the student's work into a QR code, which can be printed and then added into the paper portfolio.  When families receive these paper portfolios at home they can then scan the QR codes and be taken straight to the Web 2.0 projects the students have made.

Eventually I'm sure that all student portfolios will become digital, but for now this seems a good solution that allows both paper and electronic work to be collected and displayed in the students' portfolios.

Photo Credit:  DSC07282 by Phillip Torrone 

Media Literacy: the language of sound and images

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about information literacy, digital literacy and digital citizenship.  As I'm reading on in Curriculum21 I have now come across a chapter by Frank W. Baker about media literacy.   Frank describes how we are surrounded by "a culture filled with visual images and messages" and explains that literacy is not just words, but also still and moving images.  Even if we are looking at words, students need to know how to do more than just understand print - they need to be able to use wikis, blogs, nings and so on.  Yet, as Frank Baker points out, "few educators have been trained in the effective use of media in instruction".  This is in contrast to students who are often already able to do things like text and instant message; connect and communicate via social network sites; upload, download and mashup music, photos and movies; create blogs and podcasts; play video games and participate in virtual reality worlds, and so on.

Although students are surrounded by media, they receive little training in how to analyse or evaluate the messages contained in this media, or how to communicate effectively using it.  Many teachers still don't really understand how useful some of these new tools are, though it's clear that that media literacy is interdisciplinary and can be used across many different subjects and in many different ways.  Media literacy, in fact, is about the analysis of the message as well as the process of creating media.

Frank Baker quotes George Lucas who says:

If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?

He goes on to list ways in which media can encourage students to develop their critical thinking skills, as they ask questions.  I've been thinking about how the key concepts of the PYP can be applied to media literacy and how becoming media literate can be inquiry based.  Using the key concepts of form, function, reflection and perspective students, for example, can ask:

• Who created or paid for the message?
• Why was it created?
• Who is the message designed to reach?
• How does the message capture the audience's attention? 
• How might different people understand this message differently?
• What values or points of view are included or excluded and why?  
• Where can I find out more to verify the information?
• What can I do with this information?

Photo Credit:  Face the Music by JD Hancock  

Going Public

Most of the teachers at school now have class blogs, but there is still one grade that doesn't.  Last week in a planning meeting I brought this up because the students are making multi-media presentations about communities and I wanted to know how these were going to be seen outside of school.  Some of the work the students have done is graphics - these can be printed out of course  - but what we wanted was to move onto adding audio.  I tried to explain that a Web 2.0 presentation has to be viewed on the web, and the power of students making presentations that are going to be viewed by an audience greater than one.  If the students own their learning, they need to be able to access it, to share it with others, to get feedback.

Reading on in Curriculum21 I'm now at the chapter written by Tim Tyson about making learning irresistible.  He documents the changes that took place in his middle school, as students were expected to produce work that would be completely public.  He explained that as students took more ownership of their learning, their interest in learning created the desire to learn more.

One of the discussions we had last week was about parents being able to access the work of all students and whether or not this would lead to comparisons between the students.  Another concern was that if some classes in a grade were blogging and others weren't, would this lead to pressure on the teachers from the parents of students in the classes that did not publish work on a class blog.  The teachers were also concerned about the amount of extra work that would be involved in blogging.

I had a class webpage in 1995-6 and I can certainly empathise with some of these concerns.  Yes, it was hard work (though I feel that blogging today is easier - in those days we had to write the HTML code ourselves!) and yes there were comparisons between my class and those of the other Grade 5 teachers.  However I never had a problems with parents comparing their children with other students.  When I asked a mother about this, she said that she did look at other students' work, but that was to help her have a more meaningful dialogue with her own son about the quality of work he was producing and to celebrate the achievements he was making.  It helped her to put his work into perspective and at times helped her to know if her expectations were too high or too low.  The students universally loved our class site - they were proud of their work and wanted to share it with their families around the world - and because they knew that this work was public it also lead to a greater excitement about their work and more effort into making it good quality.

Tim Tyson writes about how going public with students' work improves literacy.  He asks:

Our society appears to be moving away from passive consumption, away from models in which the few broadcast to the many.  People want a greater sense of participation and involvement, of community, of network.  People innately want to interact.  How are schools supporting this desire to contribute, to create and share?

Photo Credit:  Hand in Hand by Brandon Doran  

Learning by doing: the tree and the cloud

Today I'm on Chapter 5 of Heidi Hayes Jacob's book Curriculum 21.  This chapter, by Stephen Wilmarth, is about socio-technology trends and what the implications are of these for teaching and learning.

Students who are in school today have always been at school in the 21st century, it's just their teachers who haven't.  Unlike most of their their teachers, these students were not alive in a time when the internet didn't exist.  Google has always been around for them, and they have been educated in a time where learning is becoming increasingly social, and social media invites participation.  Publishing, reaching out to millions of people at virtually no cost, has changed the roles of students from consumers of information to producers of information.  The vast majority of web content is produced by "amateurs", people who do it because they want to, not because it's part of their job or because they are paid for doing it.  And what they are doing is good.  Today, for example, a Grade 4 student created an animation about how a pulley works, as part of the How the World Works unit of inquiry, after observing the flag being raised and lowered on the flagpole at the front of the school.  Later today his animation was tweeted out by DoInk, the company that designed the animation tool:

This boy is 9 years old and social media is allowing his work to be viewed by potentially millions of people around the world.

In Chapter 5, Stephen Wilmarth writes about the tree of knowledge being replace by the knowledge cloud, with "ever-changing shapes and patterns" as "learning takes on a more active role rather than the traditional passive mode." Everyone who writes a blog post, or comments on one, who adds a photo to Flickr or to Facebook, who tweets, podcasts, makes a movie for YouTube or an animation using DoInk is producing content and adding to our collective knowledge.  Stephen Wilmarth refers to this as the apprenticeship model of learning - learning by doing.  It's just-in-time learning.  And it's learning that both teachers and students are involved in.

For example, once I saw this tweet from DoInk, I emailed the class teacher so he could tell the boy who had made the animation that his work had been featured today.  I got an email back from this teacher telling me that he'd spent some time with his class today, after they'd made their animations, working with the students so that they could add them onto the class blog.  Now because this teacher is using wordpress.com as his blogging platform, embedding work so that it displays nicely, rather than just appearing as a link, is a bit of a challenge.  It involves tweaking the HTML code.  We discovered how to do this recently when, during the last unit of inquiry, he'd wanted to embed glogs into the class blog, and to be able to display the eBooks his students had made in Issuu.  What he did, he told me in his email, was to look at an email I'd sent him some time ago about how to change the embed code.  Then he and his students just "played around" with the DoInk code until they got it right.

Today I also read a blog post by George Couros.  George was writing about how blogging has brought more depth to his thinking.  And connecting with others through his blog and the comments his readers make allows him to go one stage further.  He writes:

Through the writing process, I have the time to develop my thoughts, but once I hit “publish”, that is an opportunity to further advance them.

Today we are all learning by doing.  And by connecting with others, we are doing it better.  It's not about the technologies we are using to help us learn, it's the relationships we are building as a result of this new social learning that are really pushing us forward.

Photo Credit:  The lonely tree and the ray of light by Bernat Casero  

Schedules, Groupings and Spaces

The last post was about Heidi Hayes Jacob's recommendations for redesigning the curriculum for the 21st century.  As I read on to her final chapter in her Curriculum 21 book, I realised that this is part of a much larger picture of questioning and reforming the traditional way things have always been done at school.

Reforming the curriculum is not enough if we are limited by schedules, grouping patterns of learners and professionals and space.  In the long term, Heidi argues that there is no reason why every student should spend 13 years in school between kindergarten and graduation.  Some students might need a couple more years, some are ready to move onto higher education earlier.  In the short term, Heidi also looks at daily and weekly schedules that often rule the activities and learning, and claims the form is often leading the function as most learning doesn't fit neatly into 40 or 80 minute time slots.  Nowadays, she argues, it doesn't have to, as the physical space of the school can be joined by the virtual learning space, anytime and anywhere so that students could work choose to learn at home in their own time rather than just at school.

Heidi also goes on to look at groupings by both grade levels, spans (primary, middle, secondary etc), type of school and proficiency of students.  She recommends looking into different sorts of groupings, for example multi-year maths programmes where girls come together for some of the maths instruction, or where students can work though online courses at home or during the holidays and then spend afternoons doing internships in the community.

Another question Heidi has is about teacher groupings, most often in departments or grade levels.  She suggests other forms of groupings, for example in vertical teams and in a variety of communities and networks both in and outside of school - including global teams of educators who are all interested in a particular issue (I'm thinking here that this is exactly what does happen in the weekly #edchats on Twitter).

Heidi also writes about virtual and physical space, about how the 21st century classroom involves students connecting with peers around the world.  She also asks how the space in traditional classrooms could be used differently.

This is her essential question:

Could [you] ... generate a version of school that had both flexibility and regulation in long-term and daily schedules, supporting multiple professional affiliations, offered a wide range of student groupings, and used physical and virtual space in direct response to the actual students you have been charged to educate?

Heidi's aim in pulling together a collection of educational essays is to question the structures, which she says are dated and lead the learning.  She calls for us to create "new types of learning environments for a new time and for various types of teaching and learning."  She calls for risk-taking educators with bold ideas to transform schools.  She calls for new solutions for a new time.

(I have to say I am so looking forward to reading the rest of this book!)

Photo Credit:  Pipe Abstract by Steve H  

Growth -v- change

As we have a day off school today I decided to spend some time reading the new book for a professional reading group I belong to.  The first 4 chapters of Curriculum 21 are all written by Heidi Hayes Jacobs, and these are the ones I've been reading today.

At the start of Chapter 1 Heidi states: "As educators our challenge is to match the needs of our leaners to a world that is changing with great rapidity."  In this chapter she writes about the need for curriculum revision in order to replace the out-dated content, skills and assessments with ones that are more suitable to today's learners.  She refers to this as growth, rather than change:  "change in schools can often feel trendy and superficial, whereas growth is positive and deep."  She acknowledges that changes are stressful but goes on to write:  "the real insecurity comes from not growing or changing."

Heidi also writes that a shift in curriculum is not enough, it's also necessary to change the schedule, learner groupings, personnel and the way we use space.  She writes about the need to "replace existing practices" and believes that the best place to start is with the assessments, rather than to start revising content and skills.  While at first this seemed to me to be a strange place to start, it does fit in with the UbD principle of starting with the end in mind.

When the focus is on upgrading the curriculum, teachers commit to reviewing the technological resources available:  the hardware, the software and the online resources.  Then, she writes, teachers need to commit to revising one unit, replacing the current content, skills and assessments with 21st century upgrades.  This will involve professional development of the teachers as they learn to use a new technology tool to replace the old one.  She recommends starting with assessment because "it forces educators to confront the very work assignments that are required of our learners".

Teachers should research the types of products and performances that professionals use in the subjects that they teach.  These could involve podcasts, digital music compositions, webcasts, films, blogs and so on.  Then teachers need to identify the existing hardware, software and internet capabilities of their school.  She recommends teachers should learn and become comfortable with at least one new tool per semester of the school year and should then replace a dated assessment with a modern one.  She writes:

We should aggressively go out of our way to search for better ways to help our learners demonstrate learning with the types of products and performances that match our times.

At this point it's important to share these assessment upgrades with colleagues and with students - teachers need to model that they too are learners.

She recommends that teachers are given a set time to meet to update the curriculum and to discuss their practice with a view to expanding their instructional repertoire.  This is necessary because:

What has changed is the knowledge base, which has grown, and the tools for communicating and sharing what students are learning as they cultivate these skills in a new world.  These tools have given students new forms to convey their ideas, changing the immediacy and range of input that is possible ... When students are engaged in the types of products and performances that are ongoing in the larger contemporary world, they are more motivated to respond to those forms and to create the as well.  The deliberate and formal work of identifying new options and working to target replacements is a sensible place for a faculty to begin.

Meeting about replacing or upgrading the content of the curriculum means that teachers are given the time to articulate what is timely and timeless and needs to be learned, and what can be let go.  She writes that the "ongoing process of challenging accepted knowledge and the cycle of replacing it are the signs of cultural maturation."  Teachers need to research new developments in their subject areas:  "if we examine curriculum without new ideas and perspectives, we tend to simply reinforce the familiar."


Photo Credit:  Spiraling by Will Montague