With all the discussions swirling around personalized learning, and school reform, I have been thinking a lot about change, and how we do it right.
I found a recent “Management Tip of the Day” from the Harvard Business Review on 3 Ways to Quietly Promote Change — very reassuring and instructive as we look at our work around teaching and learning in West Vancouver:
- Model the change. Demonstrate the way you want things to change through your own language and behaviour. Often, seeing a leader do something first gives people the courage to try it themselves.
- Turn negatives into positives. Find ways to reframe people’s resistance as opportunities for change. This requires that you listen carefully, understand the underlying reasons for the opposition, and address them directly.
- Find allies. Chances are someone else in the organization wants the change as badly as you do. Find that person and pool your resources and ideas.
This fall, I have been amazed and impressed with the energy in our district around personalized learning and how teachers are using technology to support it in their classrooms. While it has taken many forms, and actually very few use the term “personalized learning” and opt instead for differentiated instruction, grouping for learning, inquiry-based learning, among a host of other terms, we have profound examples of teachers feeling they have “permission” to experiment and be creative, and students owning their learning in new ways.
Of course, this is not a race.
Earlier this week, we spent some time with all our principals and vice-principals looking at our successes and challenges during the first month, as well as what we want to do during the next 90 days, with personalized learning and using technology.
One theme constantly emerged: the need to continue to focus on learning goals and then, if appropriate, see how technology can support them. We also discussed the opportunities and challenges of students publishing for a public audience, and how we work with students and parents as we do this in an authentic and secure way.
The discussions we are having may be about schedules, content or technology, but almost all of them come back to being about change – schooling looking different for students than it did for their parents; schooling looking different for staff than it did when they were students.
Our commitment for the next 90 days is around providing more support to teachers around pedagogy and technology, to build greater capacity at each school, and to continue to invite participation from students, staff and parents on this journey. We all agree that education is changing, and there are some amazing examples in our district of what is possible, right now.
There is not one right answer, and to finish this where I started, it is not a race.
For more on personalized learning, here is an earlier post referencing a presentation I first shared last June on: Teaching, Learning, Technology and Personalization
Chris, you described a theme “the need to continue to focus on learning goals and then, if appropriate, see how technology can support them”. I wonder if/when the day will come where the two are inseparable. IE, where learning goals are not possible to achieve without the use of some form of technology. When I reflect on the past 10-20 years, I see exponential expansion in how/where our lives (personal and work) are dependent on technology of some form or another. Education is starting to see similar change.
So, what do you think? Will the day come where technology powered learning goals and learning goals are one and the same?
Brian – I think where we get stuck right now is that too often we get excited about the tool. So rather than focus on improving writing we focus on “learning” blogs or “learning” a new piece of hardware or software. I agree that in some places within education we don’t think of adding technology because it is just part of what we do.
Our best examples are classes where you don’t really notice the technology – but this has come with a confidence and mindset from teachers and students.
We often use the cliche – but most of the technologies we use are just like pencils – tools – and we don’t sit around and think about how we can use pencils to support learning goals.
Here’s a great post the links nicely to this post.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=2762
Are they students or are they learners? The use of technology is neutral to this question. But until we clarify this fundamental issue personally, organizationally and politically we won’t know how to focus time, energy and budgets.
Ah, students or learners. Is this another way of exploring the question of whether our work is primarily about teaching or learning? This too unpacks interesting values and assertions that folks hold to be the essence of their work. What may on the surface appear simplistic, requires dialogue so that our purpose/intention is clear, and we can focus on what we must attend to.
Wish I could join you two for a coffee talk:-)
I’m not sure ‘we’ get stuck focusing on the tool… Rather, I think that the need to learn the tool at the same time as you are also using it to teach, is the issue. Throw a new textbook at a teacher, or a new course, and it could take a while to acclimatize to as well.
I think we are at a point of transition now where teachers are often learning to use tools as they teach with them & so a few key things are needed to help foster effectiveness:
1. Time- Pro-D, preparation, planning & play
2. Co-teaching & collaboration opportunities
3. Models & Mentorship
We spend so much time making learning a social experience for students, but I think most of a teacher’s career is spent in an isolated learning environment. That’s why so many people in my twitter network are hooked on their pln… because it offers them the rich learning experience they desire,but can’t find in their schools and districts.
Chris – one thing I’ve learned from organizational change is that you need to address the “why” and the “how”, but that a real stakeholder analysis will also help identify the layers of engagement people have with the potential change. It helps to identify those possible champions, the biggest resistors, etc. Change that you are talking about it is complex, grey and intangible.
Some teachers may have issues with technology, others are excited about the technology but don’t want to abandon the sage on the stage approach, others are happy with their teacher autonomy. But, you’ve also got students, parents, administrators, community members, board officials, etc who have a stake, too.
Let me know if you want any info on stakeholder analysis or change. Although most of my work is not with school districts, I have worked with one. Happy to chat further if you like.
Holly
David, you’re absolutely right: the “at the same time premise” is paramount. the argument that technology is the facilitator and not the driver is slowly dissipating as a result of the repositioning of “starting points” as demonstrated through our students’ ‘new’ knowledge base. I’ll give you an example of what we’re doing at JO regarding the ‘same time’ premise.
We have started – first year – a digital immersion program: a technology supported and enhanced learning environment with the aim of nurturing students in their goal to learn, adapt, and thrive in our new technology rich world. Each student works with a laptop in which he/she is able to learn, build, and improve upon their skills and knowledge by learning through rich media and web-based delivered content in a wireless classroom (no textbooks).
However, the ‘same time’ premise looks like this: the students also receive a computer technology block in which they learn the platfoms that will be integrated into their core academic areas. As Pro-D, all teachers receive the same training so that they can embed this technology and really hammer away at what Chris says about “adding technology because it’s just part of what we do.” This ‘what we do’ has extended laterally in that in one year, 30% of our teachers now use Moodle and students access their hand held devices to read the student bulletin (RSS fed to everyone in the school) and their teachers’ blogs. Greater capacity on a shoe string budget!
Gino – we have a similar DI initiative at Riverside Secondary (Chris’ old high school as principal). What I was getting at in my comment is the shift you elude to from tech as facilitator to driver. Or, I like to say enabler, transformer… at some point in the near future I believe we won’t distinguish learning from learning with technology as it will be the same thing intertwined.
Technology, for better or worse, is melding with every aspect of what we do. Online and offline is becoming a mute point for many and likely in 5-10 years irrelevent.
I just finished Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” – I don’t buy into his vision but aspects of it are likely when you look back in time and project forward…
[…] was inspired by reading Chris Kennedy’s post by the same […]
Thanks everyone for the feedback. In reading the comments, I am reminded of Will Richardson’s recent post, The Assessment Problem – http://weblogg-ed.com/2010/the-assessment-problem/. Will nicely describes the challenges our very best teachers face, “School’s starting, and it’s 2010 which means we’re in “doing both” mode. We’re making sure the kids pass the test, but we also have to make sure that our own assessments are doing more to evaluate our students ability to do all those other things we want them to be able to do that aren’t currently being assessed.”
Our very best are doing both – ensuring students are prepared for traditional measures, in a way that is reassuring to the community and at the same time, engaging the students with assessments they know truly matter.
Just as Dave describes through a technology lense, our very best are preparing students with the skills of the past concurrently with the skills for the future.
[…] was inspired by reading Chris Kennedy’s post by the same name. Chris starts his post: “With all the discussions swirling around personalized […]
[…] was inspired by reading Chris Kennedy’s post by the same name. Chris starts his post: “With all the discussions swirling around personalized […]