Talking to 49 Superintendents

Will Richardson has a great opportunity tomorrow -- he's got a captive audience made up of 49 Superintendents, and he asked for input about what to say to them. I was grappling with this one for a while, and I finally hit on what I wanted to say when I talked to Will on the phone today.

Tell them that our schools have to change or die.

Tell them that there are more and more people arguing that the classroom... the very thing that we have spent our professional career in love with... is becoming obsolete.

Tell them that those people are right unless we learn to change.

Tell them that our kids already have changed.

Tell them that our kids need us to teach even more. Our kids have more access to a more varied level of information than ever before in human history and our kids need us to teach them how to navigate that space more than ever.

Tell them that locking out the sites and tools of this new world our kids live in will render us irrelevant and useless when our students need us most.

Tell them that this new world means that teaching skills -- cognitive and meta-cognitive -- is now more important than memorizing content.

Tell them that multiple choice tests can't possibly measure the new skills our kids must master.

Tell them that our students can be content producers now as much as content consumers.

Tell them that many of our students know how to reach a larger audience more quickly than any school district memo could ever hope to. Tell them that our students need our help to make them understand how powerful that is.

Tell them that we have the opportunity to use these tools to extend our reach far beyond our school walls... far past the hours of the school day. Tell them that we can build the 24/7/365 school if we embrace the technologies our students are already using.

Tell them that there are too many teachers using these tools already to think that our schools won't be affected by them.

Tell them that it's unfair and unsustainable to think that the lone teacher, using yahoo groups and hotmail accounts without explicit school support, can make enough difference to create institutional change. Tell them that the change has to come from our schools using the tools as part of their mission and part of their infrastructure.

Tell them that our students are already telling new stories... and tell them that it's time for our schools to do so as well.

Tell them that this matters more than they are willing to admit.