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.

[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.

I had an amazing weekend. We had no school on Friday (payback for two grueling nights of parent-teacher conferences on Wednesday and Thursday), but I opened my email that morning to learn that I was selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator. For those who know me, that’s a little bit like the mother ship calling me home.

I’ll be in Florida in July for a week of hands-on learning with the good people at Apple. To say that I can’t wait would be an understatement.

On Saturday I gave a talk on “Leadership 2.0” which I really enjoyed. It was my first time speaking at this kind of event and I think I did OK. I know I could have done better, but I got a lot out of my session — probably more than some of the attendees! — including a great experience that I will be able to take with me as I continue to learn and share.

A Missing Link

Where are all the school administrators? I mean, I know we’re out there. We blog, we tweet, but beyond that it feels like we are underrepresented. I might be missing something, but follow me on this…

Of the 52 ADEs that were selected this year, there are teachers, school technology coordinators, college professors, and district-level tech folks. But as far as I can tell, I’m the only school administrator. What’s up with that?

We’ve got amazing teachers doing great things in the classroom and we’ve got district people with good intentions. But if there is no one in the middle, who’s going to be the liaison between these groups?

A big part of my job is clearing away the big boulders from my teachers’ paths so that they can worry about the little pebbles. If the web filter is blocking a legit site that was working yesterday, I can make the call to IT. If you want to make something happen but need more time or resources, I’m there to help you pull it together.

Building administrators are the vital link in this chain. How can we get more of them thinking about change? How can we expect our teachers to think ahead if so few administrators do?

Here are the links I know you’ve been dying to have for this Saturday’s Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.

• Links to all Elluminate Sessions
• Direct link to the room for my session (My talk begins on Saturday, February 21, 2009, at 9:30 AM MST / 1630 GMT)
  
• Link to the (still in progress) wiki for my talk

I look forward to seeing you there (in-person or virtually!).

[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I blogged earlier this week about the potential for collaborative technologies to have a significant impact on the way we deliver professional development in our schools. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we are right on the precipice of some really powerful transformations in the ways that schools have traditionally handled staff development.

The PD Spiral

Think about professional development and you’ll often think of what I’ve heard described as “drive by staff development.” We’ve all been there. We talk about something (or we bring in a highly-paid consultant to talk about something), we spend a day or two on it, and then it’s forgotten; vaporized into the ether like the opaque projector and the mimeograph. No one knows how it will be implemented or even whether it will be implemented. There was little or no discussion on how it will look in practice. It’s just gone.

Worse, we meet after the students have gone home for the day. Everyone is exhausted and time is limited. But before the actual PD can begin, we have 87 announcements and a mess of administrivia to get through. That leaves roughly 11 minutes for the planned inservice session, by which time everyone is transfixed by the clock on the wall and ready to go home.

The Perfect Storm

I can’t help but think that everything is coming together. Online tools available for free or cheap are sufficient in features and quality to deliver a powerful learning experience for teachers and administrators. Further, in our current economy, it’s safe to say that districts will be scaling back on bringing in high-paid consultants to “teach us” something. Finally, the trend toward building-level instructional coaches means there are dedicated teacher leaders on campus who can support classroom teachers in implementing new teaching strategies.

Vox Populi

At my school we’re not just talking the talk. When our new administrative team came to the building last year we heard the complaints loud and clear. Rather than talk about making PD meaningful, we put together a simple, online survey that took teachers less than 5 minutes to complete. We asked them rate themselves on a 1-5 scale of proficiency in several different areas that were part of the district’s initiatives. We also asked them to give the top three PD topics they’d like to see as well as the one (or two) that they hoped they’d never see again.

While it now sounds forehead-smackingly obvious, how often have we as administrators taken the time to ask the teachers what they wanted? OK, maybe we’ve asked, but have we listened? Have we delivered? Or did we ask because that’s what some seminar on shared decision-making told us we should do and then just do whatever we thought was best anyway?

No More Secrets

Using the data we gathered from our faculty, at our next pre-determined PD time, we didn’t jump right in. As the resident presentation guru (gratuitous link), I prepared for the faculty a brief but comprehensive overview of the survey results so that everyone was on the same page. This way, when we announced that we would be doing a session on a particular topic, it was obvious that it wasn’t just The Suits pushing their agenda, it was what people wanted.

For example, if 85% of our staff felt comfortable with accessing our district’s data warehouse, we knew we didn’t need to spend 4 hours on it. We offered an optional session for our new teachers or for those who wanted to refresh their memories about the site.

Bringing it Together

So now we have the data on what people want and it’s pretty clear that one-size-fits-all is not going to work all the time. Sure, sometimes there are initiatives and mandates and new software that make an all-staff meeting necessary, but more often teachers’ and administrators’ staff development needs are pretty individual.

This is where virtual PD fits perfectly. If four people have a desire to learn best practices for digital storytelling and ten are jonesing for more info about Lexiles, you can meet those needs without subjecting every single staff member to some one-size-fits-all inservice activity that may not even make sense to them.

If we put the pieces together, it’s simple. We need to honor what our teachers already know and find out what they want to learn. Collecting data, aggregating the results, sharing the results with the faculty, and using them to build a comprehensive PD plan can not only change the culture of the school, but it can raise the level of quality and engagement in your school’s professional development.