Justin and Sandra,

First of all, let me applaud you and your efforts to engage and inform through the use of Twitter.  There are many government entities who are not willing to do so.

Let me also encourage you to actually engage and not just inform.  You will certainly find a host of passionate, candid individuals in this space, as you’ve no doubt already encountered.  They may well offer you more than you bargained for when you created your account.  Understand these are people who believe passionately in students, their possibilities, their potential, their ability, and their education.  And many of them are frustrated with the present state of education.  As frustrated as you likely are based on your recent tweets.  You’ve now provided them an outlet to unload their frustration.

I hope you will stay around.  I hope you will respond to the questions, the challenges, and even some of the pointed criticisms.  We don’t get enough of that from our government officials.  You have an opportunity to help remedy that.  I hope you actualize this opportunity.

I would also offer this one last piece of unsolicited advice.  Be careful of your words.  I know that is your profession, and that is why you work where you do, but I still offer the advice all the same.  When you make statements like, “we need to stop lying to students” you step upon very uneven and potentially damaging ground.  Because the statement immediately begets the question, “who are the we that are doing the lying?”  Are you insinuating that you are lying to students?  Are teachers lying to students?  Are administrators lying to students?  Are parents lying to students?  Are we all lying to students?  That’s a tough way to begin a constructive dialog.  Especially given the history of honesty from our politicians.  So please, weigh your words and expect them to elicit a very real, genuine reaction from the community.  If you want that reaction to be constructive, I’d encourage you to frame the questions and statements in a more measured manner.

I honestly appreciate your presence here.  I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

Ben

You can find the official twitter page for the Department of Education Press Secretaries at http://twitter.com/EDPressSec

Thanks to Star Dust for the use of the Flickr image.

*This is a reflection post required for my JHU-ISTE Leadership program.

This reflection is to focus on answering the following questions:
How has your definition of curriculum been shaped by the course readings and discussions? How and why has your definition of curriculum changed?

For reference, our texts for this course were:

Burrello, L. C., Lashley, C., & Beatty, E. E. (2001). Educating all students together: How school leaders create unified systems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Glatthorn, A. A. (2004). Developing a quality curriculum. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Glatthorn

Tomlinson, C. A. (1999 or 2004). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Tomlinson

As posted in my first reflection for this course I was certainly pushed on my definition of curriculum over the past eight weeks.  When I first started the course, I wasn’t sure that I had an established definition at all.  It seemed to me that many different people used many different definitions for the term.  Still does.  And while I believe I have more clarity on the issue, I’m not sure I’m ready to declare I have a definitive answer.  I’m not sure I want to.

The theme of the “written, taught, and tested” curriculum came up time and again in our work.  It still seems to me that is too narrow a focus for true curriculum.  I’m still of the mind that curriculum remains everything that students end up learning in our institution.  The written, taught, and tested is a big part of that to be sure, but it isn’t all of it.  Because again, kids learn as much about themselves, us, and learning from the things we chose to omit as from the things we choose to include.

There are many curriculums that are “test prep” focused.  That speaks volumes to students about the value of creativity and innovation.  Especially when they aren’t allowed such because it would interfere with the test prep scope and sequence.  When programs start cutting the arts, that teaches a student more than what they learn in an entire unit of grammar.  They learn between the lines.  I’m afraid we forget that.  We mislead ourselves to think they learn what we direct them to.  If you believe that, I’m afraid you’re sorely mistaken.

And if you aren’t considering the needs of all your students, again, you’re missing an incredibly large part of the point.  We’re not in this business to make things.  To manufacture items.  To manage.  We’re here to serve students and help them figure out how they can most effectively learn.  And we do that for all our students.  Tomlinson’s book certainly provided a great deal of thought on this topic.  And I think we’d do well to all remember that not all students  run a six minute mile, nor do they learn at the same rate.

In considering how my definition of curriculum has changed over the course of this class, I also recognize Glatthorn’s influence on my thinking.  His work provides an excellent framework for considering when working on implementing a new curriculum.  Although I can’t say that he directly changed any part of my definition of the term itself, he certainly provided great guidance in setting up a sound system that will help navigate curriculum change.

As this course draws to a close, and I’m considering my final definition of curriculum, I’d probably have to return to a variant of my original definition.

Curriculum is everything we want our students to learn; including the explicit and implicit of what our system fosters for learning.

I’m sure that will continue to evolve, and I’m happy with that.  I’m not ready to stop wrestling with the concept quite yet.

The term gets quite a bit of air time these days.  I defy you to go to a conference and avoid hearing the word less than a dozen times.  Go to a session on wikis, and it’s a collaboration bonanza.  People love to talk about it.  People love to challenge others to use it.  People love to say how important it is for kids to learn through it.  Problem is, I’m not sure people actually know what it means.

Go ask five people right now and see if you get a clear, common definition.

Ask yourself, and see if you have a clear definition.

We most certainly live in an age where it’s never been easier to stand in a space and mix our ideas together with others.  There’s great power in the act.  We’re certainly made smarter and sharper and our learning is grown richer because of it, but I fear we’ve done a poor job really understanding the what and why of the whole idea.

I think we should stop and clarify with our staffs and even our selfs.  We should let them wrestle with it.  Let them see that we aren’t just talking about cooperative work.  Collaboration and cooperative learning are two very different ideas.  Certainly the circles of their constructs overlap in Venn Diagram fashion, but there’s more in the separate circles than there is in the overlap.  We need to understand the circles.  Find their boundaries.  And then find what it is that makes collaboration such a powerful force in learning.

I’ll admit, I’m still fighting with the circles myself.  Still struggling to understand the space between the two.  Still working to see what would happen if we found ways to really let our learning step out of the cooperative and move into the collaborative.  Where would it take our students?  Where does it take us?

If you really want to wrestle with the ideas, I don’t think there’s a more challenging description of the two than what Ted Panitz has framed up.  I’d strongly encourage you to go read it.  Then wrestle with it.  Let it work on you a bit.  Then come back and share your thoughts on it.

Can we hope to get our students to engage and collaborate using the tools we champion when we ourselves haven’t clearly established our own vision of what is evidenced when collaboration takes place?  If we aren’t clear on what we expect to find when it happens, should we be advocating for it?

I know there’s great power in the process.  I just believe we have to understand what it is that comprises it.  And then, maybe, perhaps we can all get a little nutty and actually start thinking about assessing it.  Now wouldn’t that be a novel idea?

Thanks to caribb for the use of the Flickr image.

*This is a reflection post required for my JHU-ISTE Leadership program.

This post is being completed for the course “Curriculum Theory.” We have been exploring various curricular theories and programs, and this week we are to reflect on the following two questions:

* As a school administrator and instructional leader, what instructional technology would you expect to see in the written, taught, and tested curriculum of a school or school district striving to meet the needs of 21st century learners?
* What instructional technology would you promote to differentiate instruction for all learners?

The first question is certainly something I’ve discussed at length in the past. I don’t believe we should start with the technology first. I believe as a school district, we should first establish our learning goals, and then work to establish an ecology that helps us best meet our goals. I believe we’re past the point of teaching students specific technology competencies. I believe the technology is simply another option we choose to exercise when working to improve the learning experience for our students. I wrote about the way we started on this work in this post.  I still believe this is the approach to take. Establish the institution’s vision for learning, and then find the way to build the resources needed around the vision.

Developing an environment that is rife with opportunity for students to learn and extend beyond the classroom is also growing increasingly important. This discussion about the spaces in which we learn by David Jakes is a way that I see technology moving beyond the focus on tools.  The way the conversation is framed focuses entirely on how digital spaces and physical spaces merge to create an opportunity for students to engage the process of learning. In my opinion, this is the need of students today. Our mandate is to move the focus from teaching to learning, and then from the traditional means of learning to a more dynamic, individualized mode of learning that allows students to learn when and where they want outside of the classroom.

I believe creating such an environment will also provide the opportunity for students to differentiate the way they learn. By using ideas like the recorded lecture becoming the homework, we can then move the individualized the transfer of learning in a classroom without taking up so much time with traditional instruction that leaves the collective intelligence of the classroom passively sitting and receiving information from a single source. Utilizing techniques like this with a combination of the physical and online environment means learning can become much more customized for students.

It is my honest belief that too often we approach technology backwards. We look at the tools, get excited, and work to shoehorn them into what is happening in the classroom. We focus more on the instruction rather than the learning. We get caught up in “Web 2.0 Whirlwinds” and “Tool Smackdowns” so that soon we misplace our focus on the tools and not what is taking place with the learning.

I absolutely believe in the power of technology-rich experiences like digital storytelling to engage literacy, wikis to engage collaboration, student-created media to engage creativity, primary sources available online to engage information fluency, and many other such technologies when they are working to engage the process of learning. When our focus is leading students on the journey of learning how to learn, and we choose technologies that help us advance that goal, that is when I think technology is the most meaningful and relevant for our schools and our students.