Joel Zehring

I’m thinking of presenting some questions to the staff at my school to see how close we are to a hedgehog concept. Here are my iterations of the three questions:

1. What do you love to teach? (Be specific)
2. What could our school do better than any of other school in the world?
3. What could we do to make people want to give us money?

The trick is in the ask. I don’t want to simply throw it out at a staff meeting, and a Google form seems a little bland. I have this sense that packaging the questions in the right ways might really spark the imaginations of the teachers, administrators, and support personnel. The right ask might initiate dialog in addition to collecting data.

Any ideas on how I might creatively survey 50+ educators?

Educational technology enthusiasts relegate themselves to niche status when they promote tech integration in the classroom without contextualizing ed tech within the larger picture of education.

Let’s play a short round of Jeopardy. The answer: educational technology. The question: Where can educators find tools to accelerate their progress toward the ultimate goals of K-12 education?

This question exposes a key gap in much of the educational technology propaganda circulating today: What are the ultimate goals of K-12 education? How transformative or revolutionary is educational technology without a clearly defined goal?

Consider this analogy: when I travel from Tucson to Phoenix (cities in the state of Arizona, USA), I have numerous options that might assist me in arriving at my destination, which is usually my parents’ house, where the free food lives. I can choose to walk at about 4 miles per hour, and arrive at my destination in about 1 day, 10 hours. With the right training and licensing, I can use a car to arrive in about 1 hour, 43 minutes (the time is less if I’m perfectly honest about my driving habits). Clearly, this technology allows me to arrive at my ultimate destination faster.

The technology-as-accelerator principle rings true in education, just as it rings true in business, medicine, and engineering. If my school staff can achieve a consensus about what we want our school to accomplish, what specific service we want to provide to our community, then technology can be a great accelerator toward that goal. If my school continues to be an amalgamation of individual educational practitioners teaching isolated pockets of 25 students, then technology will be a sideshow, a distractor, a headache, but not revolutionary.

Lisa Parisi and Maria Knee asked on their latest podcast episode “Is teaching a calling or a job?” The conversation was wide-ranging, and several interesting points were shared; points to which I will now selectively and insightfully respond.

There are two sides to the passion coin. Passion is critical for attracting and developing great teachers (good teachers with no passion can still get “the job” done). Passion is not sufficient for sustaining a great teacher over the course of a 30 year career. It is a pillar that needs to be partnered with other pillars of great teaching: purpose, professionalism, development, collaboration, innovation, success, recognition and even compensation.

Yeah, I said compensation. Those people who tell you they didn’t get into education for the money are lying to you (and possibly themselves). I don’t see many teachers doing this thing for free, and that’s a good thing. Humans have decided to ascribe value to a service by exchanging money for that service. The more valuable the service, the more money it deserves (to a point). Service professionals who accept less money than their services warrant devalue their services and themselves as professionals. This can lead to sub-standard service and a disintegration of professional standards, as we’ve seen in some corners of public education.

So what’s the solution for training pre-service teachers? We need to show them how to build their careers using all of those previously mentioned pillars, not just passion and perks (I’ll admit it, summers are nice, and our upcoming fall break will allow me to stay home with our new baby on the way).

Additionally, we need to rally together as school communities to build great organizations, not just good schools. We need to answer these core questions: What are we deeply passionate about? What can we be the best in the world at? What drives our economic engine? Finding the single answer to those three questions and pursuing that target relentlessly will make us part of something bigger than ourselves, which is a sure-fire method for attracting great teachers and retaining them in education for the long haul.

Cross-posted on Ed Tech Talk and the Conversations Blog.

Dan Gross has some great posts on his blog, and his latest has generated quite a bit of discussion. Make sure to read the comments, as Dan posted some really interesting correspondence concerning union tactics for the professionalization of education. My comment is down there toward the bottom.

Lisa Parisi and Maria Knee have gathered together many clever educators in their first two episodes of Conversations on EdTechTalk network.

In this week’s upcoming episode, they’ll be tackling the question of how to influence our schools toward change. I’m not sure about the kind of change to which they’re referring, but I do have some ideas about the characteristics of successful change agents in public education. I’ve grouped these characteristics (roughly) into two categories: who I am as a change agent and what I do as a change agent.

Who I am

I am a teacher of disciplined principles. As a change agent, I must be guided by transcendent beliefs and values that drive every decision I make. The trends and tools of education will change rapidly, even mercilessly. The principles of good education are the rules that shed light on those changes, exposing the good and the bad of the educational landscape at any one time. Principles are like the laws of physics that govern what floats and what sinks like a rock in education.

How can I refine and develop my beliefs and values about education? I must read books (not just the latest and greatest, but a variety of books), study educational history, and look outside of education at the world around me. In many cases, the foundational principles of education are the same foundational principles of other spheres like business, government, and religion (gasp).

I am a teacher of developing practice. With refined principles (refined like gold in a fire, not like Grey Poupon) I can evaluate and adopt teaching practices that best serve the individual students in my class. New tools and techniques for instruction continue to emerge. I must shine the light of disciplined principles on each tool that moves into my inbox (physical or email), RSS reader, or social network and decide through cost-benefit analysis whether or not it is worth trying in my practice.

To be clear, the phrase “tools and techniques” encompasses everything digital, analog, and invisible which might be used to enhance learning. The shift from a static website to a blog with comments enabled is a digital shift. The shift from chalkboards to dry-erase boards is an analog tool shift. The shift from test-based assessment to project-based learning is an invisible shift of techniques. They’re all tools, and each of these shifts has pro/con tradeoffs inherent in the exchange from old to new. The challenge is to avoid throwing out effective “old” tools for flashy “new” tools that seem more useful, but may prove more harmful than helpful.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about specific actions I can take to be a change agent in my school.