Early this morning teacher Blogger, Brian Cosby, echoed an increasingly asked question, “Where are the best practices?” The sixth grade teacher points back to a number of references, most notably something written by Will Richardson about a conversation he’d had with Australian educator and expat Tom Marsh during a NECC webcast. You can see that conversation at NECC Live. Look for Web 2.0 in Education.
From his perspective, as a classroom teacher, Cosby suggest several reasons why we are not seeing more innovative applications of technology coming out of our classrooms. I urge you to read his Learning is Messy blog posting, Where are the “Best Practices†Examples!???! for the complete list. But if I could paraphrase, he says:
- Schools & districts block the publishing of exemplary student work.
- Sharing student work is time-consuming.
- Educators value the journey not the finished work.
- Sharing student work is technically difficult.
- Time structures make the production of significant student work difficult to impossible.
- Most teachers making innovative use of new technologies are starting from scratch with their students.
- Many technology-innovative educators are more interested in the technology than the curriculum.
- Some do not realize that what they are doing is “Best Practice” They don’t see the “WOW”.
If I misrepresented any of the above items, I apologize. Again, please read Cosby’s original post.
I’d combine it all down to say that we simply do not value the “WOW” any more. I’m taken back to the various times that I have had the opportunity to work with educators in other countries, notably the UK and Canada, and how I so often heard words like inspire, innovate, motivate, within the conversations I had, and how those words sounded almost foreign to me. It didn’t use to be that way. But we have become so focused on robust standards, measurable results, and definite and comfortable definitions of students, teachers, and classrooms, that we have lost sight of what it is that we are doing — holding the hands of our children and guiding them into a brilliantly exciting future where almost anything is possible.
We continue, stubbornly, to want to count the seeds in an apple, rather than counting the apples in a seed.*
Citations
Rosevita, “Apple_IMG_3935.” Rosevita’s Photostream. 21 Sep 2005. 11 Aug 2006 <http://flickr.com/photos/rosevita/45365722/>.
*Reference to a quote by Robert Schuller, “Anyone can count the number of seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”
David, that is one incredible line, at the end of your post. It really makes one thing as to how to we could teach, no, inspire, students to think about the wow in the world. On my blog, I’ve been experimenting with a new posting strategy, posting lesson ideas every day in response to a newspaper article. I’d love to have more people collaborate with me with the intention of developing strategies for eliciting that wow factor in our lessons, particularly with reference to technology.
Andy
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html
Instructional strategies used in the classroom need to change – even the most innovative technologies can be worked into a mid-20th century teacher’s lesson totally removing the Wow. We can engage students through the use of better strategies and better use of their brains and time.
I like Andrew’s idea about lessons. If we were to create such posts, would a particular tag be a good idea? (21stclearning perhaps?)
I was just wondering if there was a cooler way to reference your stuff. For example, I use CiteULike to manage my ‘scholarly articles’ and to see who else is reading the same stuff and what they thought of it, etc… but I was wondering if there was anything out there that helps you do a similar thing with content that is not online or is of any media… it would be cool to connect everything…
I think that this idea of tagging best practices is a good one. the problem is getting people to do it, and creating a clearning house. If people will do it, then we can create a clearing house, perhaps a page on Steve Hargadon’s Support Blogging Wiki Site that aggregates blogs tagged with something.
I’d be in favor of getting right to the point, like bloggingbestpractice.
What do you think?