Reflections from the Road

I have spent a good part of the last few weeks on the road working with educators from eastern North Carolina, to several locations in New Hampshire, to Texas, and back to NC. Each of these events has been extended workshops, rather than short addresses or presentations at conferences. As a result, they have been an opportunity for me to learn from teachers about their world of the classroom, and their insights about teaching in a time when information and communication are changing so rapidly.

Here are just a few reflections on what I am learning.

First of all, I am both reminded and surprised at the amount and consistency of frustration that teachers and administrators across the country are experiencing with high stakes testing. They see many elements of NCLB as barriers to their personal goals as educators and their vision of the profession.

It is important to note that these are teachers and administrators who have selected themselves to attend workshops called “Integrating Contemporary Literacy into the Curriculum”, “Blogs, Wikis, & Web 2.0”, and “The Three-Ts of Teaching in the 21st Century”. But I ask you, are these the educators you would want for your children, or the ones who remain in their classrooms working hard to assure rising test scores. Still, the extent of their frustration and their willingness to express their frustration surprised me.

Another thing that has given me pause to think came out of a recent set of workshops I facilitated on Video Production. As part of the workshop, I asked the participants — elementary school teachers, in an extraordinarily technology-rich school — to interview each other with video cameras. They were asked to pretend that they were teachers in the year 2015, and to talk about how the job has changed since back in the year 2005. Almost without exception, the teachers described schooling as something where learning happens independent of the teacher — literally and geographically. The teacher works in Utah, for example, while students can be all across the nation.

Now I know these teachers, and I know that given more than 2 minutes for such an interview, their vision would extend far beyond notions of distance learning for 4th graders. Yet it disturbs me a bit, as an old school teacher with admittedly romantic notions of what teachers and students do, that all of this technology is leading people to think of education as something that involves plugging in. I personally do not think that this is where formal education is going, though certainly a large part of life-long learning will be virtual, in all its degrees.

But teaching children involves adults leading them by the hand into their future, fully aware of the the tools and times that we live in, and availing ourselves of all the opportunities and responsibilities.

I recently heard a quote that I’ve taken to heart. Ray Kurzweil said…

I am an inventor.
As an inventor, I am interested in long term trends.
Because an invention must make sense in the world in which it is finished,
not the world in which it is started.