Today, I had the opportunity to present some ideas about the need for teacher development to the FCC National Broadband Planning Workshop. I was on the panel talking about ways we can harness E-rate monies to help teachers re-envision what schools can be. And to do that, I had to talk a little bit about what schools can be.
Our panel was the last of three on education today, and by the time we got around to our panel, I admit, I was a little fired up. I’d listened to speaker after speaker talk about the promise of broadband technologies as being able to standardize content and results. Jim Shelton, Under-Secretary of Innovation for the DoE offered a vision of education where we found "the best lecturer on fractions to deliver the best lectures in the country, and then every student could watch the lecture and do the problems as many times as they had to until they got it." (And yes, on some level, that bears some resemblance to my Inversions post, but not really.) Other speakers talked about online learning that seemed to my ears to tell a story that had much more to do with training than education, and for me, they really are different. (And I think that’s an idea I need to explore more, because it seems to me that our national focus on standardized curriculum and standardized outcomes might be tracable to a conflation of education and training, but that’s for another post.)
So this was the kind of room that I never thought I’d get to address… FCC policy makers who are looking to re-write the national broadband policy. This felt as high-stakes as any room I’d ever addressed, and I wrote out more notes than any speech I’ve given since a Beacon graduation.
I think the scariest thing about today is — as I listened to the speakers — there is a growing movement in America to give up on schools. If we as educators want to be a part of the coming conversation about what learning looks like, we must offer a compelling vision of what schools can be. We must be willing to examine our own practice and be willing to change. And we must engage parents and students in the conversation, because if we don’t, the "education economy" will end up recreating schools in a way that, in my opinion, will leave us good at training, but poor at learning. Jim Shelton said in his remarks today, "There are businesses that want this market, so they will create opportunities for kids." That’s not the vision of education I have for my children, and it’s not the vision of education I have for the students in my charge.
Despite that, I am, as I wrote recently, optimistic that the pace of change is changing, and that more and more schools are rethinking their practice. I just worry a great deal that the time that we have to do this for ourselves is running out. That is the sense of urgency that I think came through in my voice today.
Interestingly, the WebEx webinar that the FCC set up was acting wonky for a lot of folks, so I just turned on my uStream channel and broadcast my part of the panel out. Here is the uStream of the speech:
And what follows are my notes from the presentation. You can hear that I did some editing as I went:
Slide One:
- E-rate funding has created the technical framework to revolutionize education, by wiring thousands of schools across the country, therefore there is — in many places — the technological infrastructure to re-imagine what schools can be.
- However, the complaint we hear too often from too many people — educators, students, parents — is that despite the infusion of millions of dollars of wiring, hardware, etc… we are not seeing change happen quickly enough where it matters most — in the classroom.
- Stand outside any high school at dismissal, and you will see kids pull the devices that have been banned from pockets and backpacks. Increasingly, school is becoming a place that has little or nothing to do with the ways kids live the rest of their lives. This must change.
Slide Two:
- So what does that look like? (Talk briefly about SLA — 1:1 laptop public school in Philly / partnership between SDP / TFI. Full use of blended learning, with all classes happening on and off line.)
- Broadband technology allows for a student-empowered learning that puts the power into the hands of children, not by devaluing the classroom, but by revaluing it. 
- The single greatest challenge is to help students make sense of the world today. We have gone from a society / school system of information scarcity to one of information overload.
- But a student, sitting at home, logged onto a webinar isn’t the answer. The classroom needs to be revalued as a major part of the solution. Yes, there is no question that learning should not be defined by time and space the class occupies in real time. There is no question that the power of broadband is that learning — "class" — can now be 24/7/365. But ONLY if we make sure to continue to close the gap between the access students have in school and what they have at home.  But also, that does not mean that classroom — real or virtual — is obsolete. The classroom should be where we come together and make meaning, because we know that synthesis and collaboration work.
- If all we do with broadband technologies is create a system with more efficient ways to "deliver content" with pre-determined objectives and pre-determined, all we will have done is repeated the mistakes of the 1950s when we thought TV would revolutionize our schools by delivering the best content in the world.
- Instead, we need to understand what our schools can be when they become transparent through the use of broadband.
- When the classroom, the teacher at the front of the room and the school library are not the end and be all of gaining information, schools can become truly inquiry-driven. We can start with the questions the community asks together and end with reflections on the answers we find.
- Schools can be empowering — what held down the progressive school movements of the past 100 years was not that the ideas were wrong, but rather that it often just took too long to create the authentic examples of learning. With the tools at our disposal today, students can research, collaborate, create, present and network in truly meaningful ways. We actually have the tools to achieve John Dewey’s dream of what schools can be.
- Schools can be transformative — when we harness broadband technology, students can be authentic voices in the world. (Tell the bio-diesel story.)
Slide Three:
- None of this happens without teachers. We need to find a way to leverage e-rate funding to help teachers profoundly change their pedagogy. Because teachers are, in many respects, more important than ever. But, in many respects, their role has changed.
- Innovative, Inquisitive and Wise.
- Innovative: We need teachers who are willing to change — who understand that our society has changed, and our schools need to change.
- Inquisitive: We have to be learners as well. And we have to care more about the kids in front of us than we do about the store of content we can recall from memory.
- Wise: More than anything else, this is what we need from our teachers. Kids are trying to make sense of an ever-changing world, with more access to information than ever before — some good and some bad. What our teachers need to help our students do is turn information into meaning and meaning into wisdom.
- E-rate has done the first piece of the puzzle — it has, for 1000s of schools, brought the bandwidth to the door. Now we need to help our dedicated national teaching faculty be a rich and vital part of the change.
- (Remember to thank the FCC.)
