Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 19:22:49 -0700 (MST) From: ferdi@silicon-desert.com (Ferdi Serim) To: CoSN Discussion List Subject: TelEd Reflection: Advocating Alchemy? Hi folks, (Note: TelEd in Austin was a gathering of roughly one thousand education technology pioneers, sharing both successes and challenges, but more importantly providing the irreplaceable opportunity for person to person contact. The following essay reflects the essence of dozens of conversations before, during and after the conference. It should take 10-15 minutes reading time.) Across the land, efforts to improve K-12 education, wire classrooms, and strengthen standards form a rising crescendo of activity. Our race to solve long standing problems sometimes overtakes our ability to process and understand the interdependence between these strategies, most importantly how each of them plays out in the lives of the people they're intended to help: the learner. In the previous sentence, it's remarkable how effortlessly we can substitute the word "student" for learner, but do so with less ease for educators, who ought to be considered "professional learners". Perhaps it is because we expect "students" to complete the process in 13 years, whereas we act as though we expect educators to complete it once and be done, but aren't sure how. In my state (NJ) the idea that every educator will complete 100 hours of professional development every 5 years is considered groundbreaking (indeed it was a remarkable achievement to get this instituted). In which other professions would this even be considered adequate? Art Wolinsky said "professional development is like the changing of the seasons: in some parts of the country it comes four times a year." It certainly ought to come more often than you change your sheets. Professional learners need to learn *every* day. Feed the Need It's even more remarkable how the demand for training opportunities which prepare educators (to prepare students to think critically, learn independently, work cooperatively, and present convincingly) is being "met" by "training" that uses the very same traditional techniques of lecture and information transfer that have already proven ineffective in meeting these new kinds of goals. Of all the exhibits at TelEd, only a handful addressed this issue, and none of them offered educators long term, integrated experiences, but instead offered resources, materials, workbooks or standalone workshops designed for individuals. The best practices are embedded within projects, which know they need to upgrade the users in order to thrive. Brain based research provides us a deeper look into the processes that comprise learning, and reinforces the anecdotal observation of master teachers, that content is best learned in a context of caring. Furthermore, the application of learning is a community (not an individual) enterprise. Yet we persist in linear, individualized mastery of mass instruction, instead of vertically integrated, collaborative applications of individualized learning. Talk to some educational researchers and decision makers about such distinctions, and they'll look at you like you're advocating a return to alchemy. "It's a matter of expediency and scalability...there is so much teachers need to learn, and they need to learn it fast. What's worked for the pioneers won't work for most teachers. They're not up to it," is the general tenor of the argument. Feed or Fish? In the face of this intellectual famine, educators are offered fish. Distilled from studies of effective practice, mined from databased lesson plans, culled from catalogs, the "make and take" workshops of yore are replaced by their technological conterparts. "Give me something I can use Monday morning" is the cry that gets responded to. Who has the courage to reply, "what you need Monday morning is a new approach to learning" or "what you need Monday morning is an environment that supports your success instead of thwarting it"? Another approach to the daunting needs of educators is to build community. By this, I mean a voluntary association of people who believe that by supporting one another, they will find it more possible to achieve their goals than they could individually. The only skills that users need to explicitly develop within this model are to become more effective learners, communicators and contributors. All other content skills will flow from pursuit of goals that matter to the learners, and sharing both the successes and challenges encountered along the way. This response is the time honored "teaching to fish" alternative to "giving fish" to meet long standing needs. (Some people never will learn to like fish, either way, and if you taught them to cook, maybe they wouldn't have to). Teacher Alchemy: Transformation, not Training It is as though we're saying that by forming such communities (which rely upon the abilities of people to learn and share) that we're trying to turn lead into gold (if the toxicity of lead bothers you, you may spin straw, as you prefer). Instead, we're advocating something more akin to quantum physics. But as we've seen in a recent report, only 30% of our students understand enough about that concept for it to work as an effective metaphor, even though the students probably remember more "content" (facts about it) than most adults. The facts of the new science indicate that by energizing an environment, one sets the stage for extraordinary results, which though individually tough to predict, at a certain point moves the entire environment to a higher level. If that seems too random, perhaps genetic engineering is closer. DNA is nothing more than information, a permutation of a small number of basic building blocks. The changes education reform requires would alter the "genetic code" of the institutions that "deliver instruction" into "organizations which grow learners". If this makes you think of cloning, you may be looking at the issue from a top-down perspective. Biodiversity is a result of the interplay of genetic instructions with environmental exigencies, communication at a deep level indeed! Our brain is not a fait accompli, but is a work in progress, ready to stretch and grow. Scalable to whose scale, anyway? In practical terms, if the 2.2 million of us who are educators need to be trained by trainers in groups of twenty, it will take 110,000 sessions to take us through the first of many topics upon which educational improvement depends. If the 2.2 million of us learn to work collaboratively, this work can proceed in parallel, instead of in series. If we share our results with available and emerging technologies, the benefits of "just in time" learning can kick in. Because of the sheer number of people doing excellent work, it's simply not possible to converse with a statistically significant sample, but in my meetings with Laurie Maak (Internet Catalyst), Terrie Gray (EDsOasis), Ed Gragert (I*EARN), Al Rogers (GlobalSchoolNet), Jason Ravitz (National School Network), David Wecksler (Math Forum) and Libby Black (Boulder, CO school district) I became convinced of two things: although there are many ways to be excellent, we all face the same brick walls that limit the extent of our efforts for educational change; although our culture fosters an atmosphere of competition (organizations compete for a finite universe of grant and foundation support) the idea of competing for users is ludicrous. All of us put together don't approach the capacity required to deal with the smallest slice of the pie. In the Online Internet Institute, for example, we took a hard look and decided that we can deal with a maximum 300 educators over the next year, at the level of personal support we feel is appropriate. The other 2,199,700 are up for grabs ;-> Do you get the feeling this will need to be a team effort? Can you imagine a more exciting team to build? We need the skills of education researchers to help illuminate the way toward forging such new approaches into measurable techniques. We need the support and understanding of decisionmakers and funders to focus the time and talents of our best minds on this grand challenge. We need to work with our peers to understand that our role as professional learners can renew our calling into a form that is more nearly "just as we imagined it could be". Thanks for your patience....and let's pick up the discussion at NECC! Ferdi ______________________________________________________ Ferdi Serim phone: 609 921-3135 Princeton Regional Schools fax: 609 924-7347 Computer Teacher/ District Computer Coordinator Online Internet Institute, Director http://oii.org ferdi_serim@monet.prs.k12.nj.us (school) http://prism.prs.k12.nj.us/WWW/Ferdi.html co-author: NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet http://www.ora.com/info/netlearn/ "We are more than the sum of our knowledge, we are the products of our imagination." - Ferdi