by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.
It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come. Sam Cooke
“Now let me say right off, I can’t do this by myself. I’ll need all the help I can get. I’ll need support from like minded people who know that changes at school need to be made so that these kids who are disconnected from school, from home and/or society can gain a sense of belonging, feel needed, useful and reconnected.” Elona Hartjes, think big, start small, act now
Gleaned from Scott McLeod…
“You can’t expect responsible kids if you don’t give them any responsibility.”
Love it.
Isn’t this what it is all about, this teaching business?
Thanks Scott.
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[cross ranted as a comment at Stephen Ransom’s EdTechTrek] [and slightly elaborated]
I am starting to think that because many teachers and administrators
still do not know exactly what we can do with technology there is a
reluctance to put it in the classroom.
Example – today the Internet had, for some reason, stopped working
in the west wing of our school. I was at the computer lab with one
other teacher. She packed her kids up and went back because she only
books the computer lab for the last period of the day so that her kids
can ‘play on the internet’.
For her, technology has nothing to do with learning, it is a form of
entertainment. I stayed with my kids and used the time to work on our
Science vocabulary while teaching them how to hyperlink in
presentations. They were linking their vocabulary words to comments and images made by their peers, creating a collaborative learning network around the new terminology they are learning in Science. (Not bad for a wing it activity, eh ;)
For some reason, this teacher has not caught on yet that technology
can be much more than a way to waste time. I can understand the frustration of the new teachers that Stephen mentions in his post, but
until the more experienced teachers and administrators at schools begin
to use technology as a learning tool, really use it, and demand that
good forms of it be available in the schools, it isn’t going to happen.
I can also understand the frustration of the more experienced teachers who are
expected to use technology but who aren’t really given the time to grow
less afraid of it and to experiment with what can be done. There is a huge divide between our students who live and breathe with technology as part of their daily lives and the teachers who don’t. Huge. and while
there are still administrators who don’t use technology in their daily lives and who don’t champion for its appropriate use and availability in the school, let alone the classroom…well…that divide can only be expected to widen.
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Image: from Firehouse 3rd grade 57-58 Mrs Barrett by Clarkstown67 available on flickr through a creative commons license.
“When will we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are
unique. In all of the world there is no other child exactly like you.
In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another
child like you. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a
Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel.”~ Cellist Pablo Casal~
It rips my heart out each time I hear a teacher refer to a student as a monster, as unteachable, as not wanting to learn.
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The first part of this post was originally posted as a comment to The Future of Teaching.
I am getting the idea that we, at least those of us involved in this conversation, are ready to act on new ideas. People have asked for priorities, have asked about where we go from here.
I think that something like this can help us get there. I know that Gervase Bushe has been using Appreciative Inquiry with the Vancouver Public School System. This was published in the Summer 2007 edition of the SFU Business Newsletter, the Executive Edge:
In the last Executive Edge newsletter we told you about a $150,000 three-year research project to study a change management trend called appreciative inquiry. It’s a new process that works to change the way people think – to get them thinking collectively about how they want their organization to operate.
Gervase Bushe, SFU Business associate professor of management and organizational change, who is consulting and studying the process and its outcomes at the Vancouver School Board, reported on the results of the first year of study. “Preliminary indications are that the change process has been so successful that the BC Schools Superintendents’ Association is offering appreciative inquiry training and is also planning an appreciative inquiry summit for Kelowna in August,” says Bushe. What’s more, he says, numerous BC School Districts are planning to use appreciative inquiry in their schools next year.
It’s a powerful change process, based in the very foundations that have been brought up in with Will’s post.
Here is a recent article that Gervase wrote, which I think does a great job at outlining just what Appreciative Inquiry is:
G.R. Bushe (2007). Appreciative Inquiry is not about the Positive.
He talks about the generative nature of AI:
Generativity occurs when people collectively discover or create new things that they can use to positively alter their collective future. AI is generative in a number of ways. It is the quest for new ideas, images, theories and models that liberate our collective aspirations, alter the social construction of reality and, in the process, make available decisions and actions that weren’t available or didn’t occur to us before. When successful, AI generates spontaneous, unsupervised, individual, group and organizational action toward a better future.
If we were to design an appreciative change process for our school systems I think we could find our way to get there…together.
It would begin with a conversation that has already begun not only in Will’s post that I referenced above but in various places across the blogosphere – on LeaderTalk, on Scott Mcleod‘s blog, Kevin Sandridge‘s, Barbara Barreda‘s, Miguel Ghulin‘s, Justin Medved‘s, Dennis Harter‘s, Stephen Ransom‘s, and many others.
Is anyone interested in continuing that conversation? I’d love to be part of the process with you.
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