I had a great day, yesterday, in Davidson County’s (North Carolina) administrative retreat. I opened the day with a keynote on the Flattening World and Flat Classrooms. All of the attendees had been required to read The World is Flat, and dutifully had their copies on the tables in front of them. I tried to share some ideas about globalization as expressed by Friedman, but also some contrary perspectives, based on creative-class writings by Richard Florida, saying that it is as important for us to be teaching our children creative arts as it is the science arts.
Most of my time was spent on describing the millennial generation and characteristics of the flat classroom. Vinod Khosla’s ideas about media industries that maintain their audiences into media engines came in handy again in helping me to describe classrooms as learning engines. (more about that later)
The keynote was followed by three breakout sessions that the administrators cycled through. One was facilitated by Davidson County Schools technology staff, showing active boards and desk clickers, as well as other neato’s. Another breakout was facilitated by a young man who’s name has completely slipped my mind, and I can’t find memtion of it anywhere in my notes. I am so very sorry. But this Chris Harrington, a public relations specialist from Charlotte evidently, who did a fabulous job of introducing administrators to blogging and podcasting as a communication medium.
I facilitated a book talk about The World is Flat with each group, where I tried to focus the discussion on stories that have come out of the book. I asked them to pretend that they have required the parents of their students to read the book, and then to decide what they would say to the parents at next year’s open house about globalization and the needs for education reform.
I must say that I was extremely impressed with the people in my groups. They get it. There was a lot of talk about project based learning and other issues, but there is a great deal of frustration with the constraints of high-stakes testing (in North Carolina Most high school courses are tested by the state) and general attitudes about education that are so firmly seated in 20th (19th, 18th) century notions about teaching and learning.
Enough for now. Got to get to work!
2 more cents worth!
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What an exciting way to get the administrators at the district and school level educated and excited about web 2.0! I am going to share this with our leaders to see if we can do something similar. Thanks for sharing! I am on a mission to upgrade our district to District 2.0 🙂
Thanks for coming David. Maybe we can get some people on board that will be able to facilitate the changes that need to be made. Chris Harrington is the guy that you are talking about. He did do a great job introducing podcasting to our principals. Thanks again for all you do and keep telling the story.
This is a test.
This is only a test…
David,
I had a great day at Sapona. I left feeling energized and ready to grab the tiger by the “long tail” to begin the mission of preparing our students for the world today. Davidson County Schools WILL make the educational reforms needed to lead our children into this new century of change and wonderment. I know it will be an exciting trip. I want to tell “the story” to everyone that will listen. Thanks for the gentle push you gave all of us. You were great!!
I am happy to see that some of the administrators are starting to get the point of the ‘Flat Classroom.’ This is important to me, since from the persective I have is that many administrators, while having been good teachers in their time, are disconnected from the use of technology to ‘flatten’ and break down the walls of the traditional classroom. Because of this, many administrators won’t evaluate teachers for tech integration and global perspectives. In most districts, there is a technology integration requirement for teachers, yet the level of technology integration has been extremely slow, why? The administrators doing the evaluating don’t have a visual perspective of what appropriate technology integration looks like. And if they do see a teacher integrate appropriately, they write it off as that one teacher being so far in front of the curve that they can’t see holding all teachers to the same standard.