Leading and Learning in 21st Century Schools

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach Co-Founder & CEO Powerful Learning Practice, LLChttp://plpnetwork.comsheryl@plpnetwork.com

President21st Century Collaborative, LLChttp://21stcenturycollaborative.com

AuthorThe Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age (2012)

MemberExecutive Board- International Society for Technology Education

Follow me on Twitter@snbeach

Mantra for today’s keynote…

We are stronger together than apart.

None of us is as smart, creative, good or interesting as all of us.

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

Things do not change; we change. —Henry David Thoreau

What are you doing to contextualize and mobilize what you are learning?

How will you leverage, how will you enable your teachers, your leadership or your students to leverage- collective intelligence?

Learner First—Educator SecondIt is a shift and requires us to rethink who we are as an educational leader or professional. It requires us to redefine ourselves.

Introduce yourselves to each other at the table and brag a little. Talk about (in 2 min or less) most recent and compelling thing your school/organization has done to support connected learning.

Emerson and Thoreau reunited would ask-

“What has become clearer to you since we last met?”

Trust Building Exercise

I need 3 brave volunteers.

Getting Connected as a CommunityNING and Twitter

http://plpcommunityhub.com/

#cfisdplp and #plpnetwork

Collective Wondering- What do I wonder about Leading the Shift?

It begins with Finding your Passion, then you will find your purpose.

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR You are all leaders!

Are you Ready for Learning and Leading in the 21st

Century?

It isn’t just “coming”… it has arrived! And schools who aren’t redefining themselves, risk becoming irrelevant in preparing students for the future.

The world is changing...

But schools… not so much.

By the year 2011 80% of all Fortune 500 companies will be using immersive worlds – Gartner Vice President Jackie Fenn

Libraries 2.0Management 2.0 Education 2.0Warfare 2.0Government 2.0Vatican 2.0

Credit: Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid

Everything 2.0

6 Trends for the digital age

Analogue DigitalTethered MobileClosed OpenIsolated ConnectedGeneric Personal Consuming Creating

Source: David Wiley: Openness and the disaggregated future of higher education

“We are tethered to our always on/ always on us communication devices and the people and things we reach through them.”

~ Sherry Turkle

2nd

Photo credit: http://cradlepoint.com/sites/default/files/uploads/Internet_of_Things.jpg

Internet of Things & Services • The Internet of Things is a technological system, a suite of

products and services that will make life a bit more comfortable.

• It is more than the Internet we know — it goes beyond empowering people to communicate and collaborate.

• The Internet of Things can connect any product or service. And it automatically links what might emerge as a result of this collaboration — interact even without human intervention.

We have to change school cultureRecapture OURpassion for the profession.

-- change behaviors-- experience success-- creates faith-- creates hope-- changes beliefs, values, dispositions

From: AzharSent: 2013-10-04 11:03 AMTo: DaddySubject: Our teacher fell asleep

Which takes LEADERSHIP (this is where you come in)

Managers Leaders• Believe in standardization of the process• Fiercely protects the status quo• Manipulate resources to get the job done• Focus is on tools and deployment• Expect compliance and reliance• Safe- Tried- True

• Create change as a way of solving problems and innovating• Ask what if– builds on strengths and what people know and can do• Focus on what can happen if people know what to do with tools for self directed learning• Build thick leadership density in others. • Take risks and expect criticism

Eight strands of technology and TSIP• Content driven • Memorization• Tested• Standards Aligned

But as long as I kept it learner driven and based on what both adults and kids were interested in things went fine.

“Content is just the context for participation. It’s not the outcome. It’s one of our design constraints. What we care about is kids’ engagement, the challenges they’re trying to solve, and how complex those problems are.” ~ Katie Salen

Then it hit me… Content wasn’t the focus. Context was… and using the technology as a paint brush or a canvas that connected to the child’s wonderment changed everything. I became an insatiable learner.

dangeuslyirrelevant.org

Our kids have tasted the honey.

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Free range learnersFree-range learners choose how and what they learn. Self-service is less expensive and more timely than the alternative. Informal learning has no need for the busywork, chrome, and bureaucracy that accompany typical classroom instruction.

Shifts focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATORThe Disconnect“Every time I go to school, I have to power down.” --a high school student

Shifts focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.

Connected Learning

The computer connects the student to the rest of the worldLearning occurs through connections with other learnersLearning is based on conversation and interaction

Stephen Downes

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms..

Share

Cooperate

Collaborate

Collective Action

According to Clay Shirky, there are four steps on a ladder to mastering the connected world: sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action.

From his book- “Here Comes Everybody”

Connected Learner Scale

Share (Publish & Participate) –

Connect (Comment and Cooperate) –

Remixing (building on the ideas of others) –

Collaborate (Co-construction of knowledge and meaning) –

Collective Action (Social Justice, Activism, Service Learning) –

How do you do it?-- TPCK and Understanding by DesignThere is a new curriculum design model that helps us think about how to make assessment part of learning. Assessment before , during, and after instruction.

Teacher and Students as Co-Curriculum Designers1. What do you want to

know and be able to do at the end of this activity, project, or lesson?

2. What evidence will you collect to prove mastery? (What will you create or do)

3. What is the best way to learn what you want to learn?

4. How are you making your learning transparent? (connected learning)

Connected Learning has the potential to takes us deeper

“The interconnected, interactive nature of social learning exponentially amplifies the rate at which critical content can be shared and questions can be answered.”

From: Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Cathy Davidson, professor at Duke University

Connected sometimes trumps F2F with deep learning…

Via Marc Andreessen’s blog, the findings of researchers as related by Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect:

Diversity of thoughtAllows for Greater Innovation

Frans Johansson explores one simple yet profound insight about innovation: in the intersection of different fields, disciplines and cultures, there’s an abundance of extraordinary new ideas to be explored.

Professional development needs to change. We know this.

-----Do it Yourself PD

A revolution in technology has transformed the way we can find each other, interact, and collaborate to create knowledge as connected

learners.

Learners who collaborate online; learners who use social media to connect with others around the globe; learners who engage in conversations in safe online spaces; learners who bring what they learn online back to their classrooms, schools, and districts. They are DIY, self-directed learners.

What are connected learners?

What is Do -It- Yourself Learning ?

What does it look like?

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

Professional Learning Communities

Personal Learning Networks

Communities of Practice

Method Often organized for teachers

Do-it-yourself Educators organize it themselves

Purpose To collaborate in subject area or grade level teams around tasks

For individuals to gather info for personal knowledge construction and to bring back info to the community

Collective knowledge building around shared interests and goals.

Structure Team/groupF2f

Individual, face to face, and online

Collective, face to face, or online

Focus Student achievement

Personal growth Systemic improvement

Community is the New Professional Development

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999a) describe three ways of knowing and constructing knowledge…

Knowledge for Practice is often reflected in traditional PD efforts when a trainer shares with teachers information produced by educational researchers. This knowledge presumes a commonly accepted degree of correctness about what is being shared. The learner is typically passive in this kind of "sit and get" experience. This kind of knowledge is difficult for teachers to transfer to classrooms without support and follow through. After a workshop, much of what was useful gets lost in the daily grind, pressures and isolation of teaching.

Knowledge in Practice recognizes the importance of teacher experience and practical knowledge in improving classroom practice. As a teacher tests out new strategies and assimilates them into teaching routines they construct knowledge in practice. They learn by doing. This knowledge is strengthened when teachers reflect and share with one another lessons learned during specific teaching sessions and describe the tacit knowledge embedded in their experiences.

Community is the New Professional Development

Knowledge of Practice believes that systematic inquiry where teachers create knowledge as they focus on raising questions about and systematically studying their own classroom teaching practices collaboratively, allows educators to construct knowledge of practice in ways that move beyond the basics of classroom practice to a more systemic view of learning.

I believe that by attending to the development of knowledge for, in and of practice, we can enhance professional growth that leads to real change.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S.L. (1999a). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teaching learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249-305.

Passive, active, and reflective knowledge building in local (PLC), global (CoP) and contextual (PLN) learning spaces.

“ Do you know what who you know knows?” H. Rheingold

Netw

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Or are you a Connected Educator?

In Phillip Schlechty's, Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations he makes a case for transformation of schools.

Reform- installing innovations that will work within the context of the existing culture and structure of schools. It usually means changing procedures, processes, and technologies with the intent of improving performance of existing operation systems.

It involves repositioning and reorienting action by putting an organization into a new business or adopting radically different means of doing the work traditionally done.

Transformation includes altering the beliefs, values, meanings- the culture- in which programs are embedded, as well as changing the current system of rules, roles, and relationship- social structure-so that the innovations needed will be supported.

Transformation- is intended to make it possible to do things that have never been done by the organization undergoing the transformation.

Different than

So as you develop your vision for learning in the 21st Century how do you see it- should you be a reformer or a transformer and why?

Make a case for using one or the other as a change strategy.

Change is hard

Connected learners are more effective change agents

Real Question is this:Are we willing to change- to risk change- to meet the needs of the precious folks we serve?

Can you accept that Change (with a “big” C) is sometimes a messy process and that learning new things together is going to require some tolerance for ambiguity.

Last Generation

PLP’s Connected Learner Experience

is in Houston this year!

Bring a team…

Leave with a legacy.

All of OctoberFree professional learning

Free for you– free for your staff

http://connectededucators.org/