I had a great experience working with a group of teachers and leaders in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a couple weeks ago. While I like to kid about them being a “tough crowd,” the truth is that they were an open-minded group who asked great questions.

One of the participants (I can’t recall her name – sorry!) challenged me during my session to identify the Top Ten Things Every Graduating High School Student Know or Understand. Since I enjoy a challenge, I told her I’d work on it and post a response here. I’m not sure it’s what she had in mind, but it’s the best I can think of.

• Know what is valuable. The value of factual information is either at or quickly approaching zero. What you need are skills. Skills that will allow you to learn and re-learn will be more important than factual knowledge. Now, don’t read this to say that factual knowledge is never valuable or that it shouldn’t be taught — all things in moderation will create balance — but if all you take away from science class is that you memorized the Periodic Table, then we may have a disconnect between what we do in school and what you’ll do when you’re done in school.
• Learn how to learn. In our information-rich, always-on, instant-access world, the winner isn’t the one who knows the most, rather it’s the one who can do the most. So how do you learn? Do you read a book or watch a video? Do you find a mentor or expert tutor? Do you throw your search at Google and click “I’m Feeling Lucky”?
• Tackle interesting problems, and be OK with messy solutions. Find an interesting problem and solve it in a unique way. But know that the answer will rarely be found in the form of a 5-paragraph essay or a nice, round integer.
• Be a connoisseur of information. Anyone with a computer or cellphone can do a Google search. But you need the information literacy to make sense of the results. The trade-off of having all this information a click away is that you’ll need to be able to read and assess it for possible reliability and validity issues.
• Be conscious of your digital footprint. It’s never too early to start being aware of your online presence. You will be Google-able and you will be Googled. I suggest that you be certain that you’re in control of what people find when they Google you.
• Give back. Share. Contribute. Help out. It doesn’t have to be monetary.
• People are more important than technology. Technology is awesome because it gives us the ability to break down barriers. We can share and collaborate in ways that, even as recently as 5 years ago, seemed like the exclusive domain of the crew of the Enterprise. So use the technology to build and strengthen connections, but always remember that technology is only one tool in relationship-building.
• Find something you’re passionate about. Life is really going to stink if you can’t find something you love to do.
• Be nice. One effect of all this technology is that everyone who’s anyone has a blog or a Twitter account or a Facebook account. That’s swell. But what I don’t particularly care for are those who use these platforms as a soapbox to pop off about anything and everything simply because now they can. And because there are no short-term consequences, people uncork with things they’d never say in front of actual people for fear of getting punched.
• Play. It’s not just for kids anymore. Play is an important part of learning. It helps us think.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m not sure if it’s what she expected, but that’s that I think our kids need to know when they leave high school. I sure hope you weren’t expecting me to say they needed to understand the electoral college or how to change the amplitude of a sine wave. They can look that stuff up when they need it.

When I first saw the video of Ken Robinson talking about creativity, I sat and nodded my head in agreement. Most of the people I show it to do the same thing. But then most of us go back to business as usual.

Is our current educational system even capable of addressing an idea as nebulous as “creativity?”

Do we employ creative teachers? Creative leaders? Is it even a trait that we value when we interview prospective teachers or administrators?

Do we have students who think of themselves as being creative?

I’ve said out loud before, ‘You know – I’m just not a very ‘creative’ person.” It’s taken me a long time to realize that what I really meant to say was, “I’m not really good at drawing things.” Because when we talk about creativity, that’s the first place a lot of our minds go: the fine arts. Sometimes we extend that into writing classes, but we rarely envision students being creative in Physics or Calculus.

Fortunately for us, though, Albert Einstein didn’t view math and science as a series of chapters in a textbook. He didn’t think that doing math meant doing “1-35 odd.” He didn’t have “science time” during which he thought about the Theory of Relativity followed by “math time” when he calculated how many dimes and nickels he had if he had 13 coins and 95 cents. His most important discoveries and theories came from having time to just sit and think and play with the interactions of multiple disciplines.

And Einstein knew how to have an idea and take action to push it forward; to focus on moving from vision to reality.

I like Ken Robinson’s definition:

Creativity means having original ideas that have value.

I would also add that it’s about knowing where to go from there. It’s about ignoring — just for a moment — the impulse to tell yourself, “That’s stupid.” Of course, not every idea deserves all that attention, but for those that do we need to know what to do next.

from "Indexed" by Jessica Hagy

So I’m wondering a lot lately about how we can provide time for educators and students to just sit and wonder. Or play.

I know, I know. We would allow kids more time to be creative if it weren’t for [standardized tests, behavior, curriculum, attendance]. I know the barriers because I live within them, too.

But given all that, how we can support teachers, leaders, and kids learning how to make their ideas happen?

from "Indexed" by Jessica Hagy

I think some of us — for fear of being perceived as fundamentalist technology apologists — feel the need to qualify statements about particular hardware or software with the phrase, “It’s not about the technology…”

I should know. I’m one of them.

It’s about the learning, certainly. And the technology that supports that learning. But if the goal is to create a collaborative, networked space for learning then technology and the Internet are necessary catalysts.

I’ve become increasingly reliant on certain online tools to get things done at and away from my desk. From my task list in Remember the Milk to our Web-enabled classroom walk-through instrument to the Google Docs I use to collaborate with colleagues, sometimes the best solution requires Web access.

I, for one, am spoiled. I’m so used to ubiquitous access to the web whenever and wherever I need it that I take for granted that it will always just be there. I’m stopping short of an of existential crisis here; I’m not “re-evaluating” my choice of tools. I like my tools and they work for me 99.9% of the time.

I’m just pointing out how amazing it is that in a relatively short time we’ve come to a place where, when the technology doesn’t work as intended, we’re paralyzed.

I know. I’m hilarious. But it’s a good question, right? We wouldn’t think of keeping campus open if the indoor plumbing suddenly stopped working, would we?

Argue all you want that we shouldn’t be so dependent on tools that live “in the cloud,” but having access to them has become de rigueur in my world.

This begs the question (for me, at least…) of how this little temporary outage affected our students. Was it business as usual, or were classes interrupted by the inability to access resources? This certainly isn’t a value judgment — there are fantastic traditional lessons and really horrendous online ones — more of a general wondering. If technology tools have become as embedded as we’d like them to be, I would hope this would be evidenced by at least some disruption in the day’s activities.

If class had been temporarily shut down due to lack of online resources, think of the amazing teachable moment. What better opportunity to make sure students have the interpersonal, social tools they need to collaborate with people who happen to be in the same room.

I made this because I saw this and this on the same day. Then I saw Scott was having a contest, but the deadline had already passed.

Then Dan made this and I got re-inspired. Plus, I hate getting beat at my own game.

So I made this.

Because I don’t like to be left out.

[I posted this on LeaderTalk earlier today.]

I had a whole post ready for my “official” LeaderTalk day last Friday but in the end I just couldn’t bring myself to click “Publish.” I was a little frustrated when I wrote it and I think it needs to simmer for a bit before it’s ready for prime time.

Fast-forward to this morning and a great keynote from Karl Fisch about literacy in the 21st century. Karl said a lot of great things and challenged the thinking of a lot of people in the room. This led to some great conversations throughout the morning and throughout the day.

But Karl’s talk got me thinking about my “unpublished” post. I’ve been spinning a lot of half-formed thoughts around in my head all morning and this is my attempt at putting them together in some quasi-cohesive form.

Most of us reading LeaderTalk and publishing our blogs are basically in agreement that school, in its current iteration, leaves something to be desired in terms of its ability to meet the individual needs of students in a way that doesn’t look like an assembly line. Though the methods proposed to address this deficiency vary from blog to blog and person to person, there isn’t a lot of disagreement that something needs to change.

The question I’m left with, then, is that with all of this ideology around how things should look, and all these great conversations “out there,” how do we carry these conversations back to our schools? If we (the schools) are supposed to “be the change [we] want to see in the world,” then how do we start talking about this change at the micro level in one school?

More pointedly, how do we have a real discussion about these real ideas that doesn’t somehow degenerate into (a) “If the school/district would buy me a projector/computer/document camera, then I could do this stuff,” or (b) “Let’s talk about tardy policies and consequences for cell phone use…”?

Is this the majority of teachers? Probably not. Are these equipment and policy issues important? Sure. Are they the most important? Not to me.

Nonetheless, I would love to get beyond them in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m minimizing the concerns of the teachers for whom these are the Big Issues Of The School.

My struggle right now is trying to frame these big ideas in a simple, straightforward way that is accessible to everyone and doesn’t alienate any particular group of teachers. On the other hand, part of me feels like waiting around for buy-in from everyone means we’re wasting a lot of time when we could be moving ahead.

I guess don’t have a lot of answers, but I sure have a lot of questions.