Sometimes, it’s not what you do in the conference sessions, it’s what you do after them that defines the conference for you. Last night, Marcie and I had the chance to have dinner with Chris Sessums, Bill Fitzgerald and Tom Hoffman. It was a fun, wide-ranging conversation that ran from pulling out our laptops and iPhones to show off pictures of our kids to conversations about educational technology to general school reform to some very fun jokes. But I wanted to take up one piece of the conversational thread (for now) and tease it out a bit on here.

Tom mentioned the idea of foundational ideas in education — the old ideas, the old philosophers — and the need for rooting our pedagogical framework for School 2.0 in the old ideas. I couldn’t agree more. There are times when the rush to talk about what is new in educational technology, how School 2.0 is completely new, completely different, feels to me both dishonest and anti-intellectual.

In my opinion, there is very powerful need to ground ourselves in the work of the educational theories of the past hundred years for any number of reasons…

• It grounds in a long "conversation" about education, and it is important for us to understand that stand on the shoulders of giants. That should humble us, and that is important.
• It can contextualize why we are where we are today in education. We didn’t come to NCLB overnight. It happened for many reasons, and some of those reasons are representative of patterns we have seen before. If we don’t want to repeat the past…
• It’s good practice. We don’t want our students to be ahistorical, we should not be either.
• It’s scholarly, and well, we teach. I’m not saying that every teacher needs to write their dissertation on education reform, but we also should have a passing familiarity with some of the big ideas of education reform.
• There’s a lot to learn there. These writers can open our minds to things we hadn’t thought of before. They can give us the language for things we have felt but have not been able to express. And they can point us down a road that we may have otherwise missed.
• They allow us to be taken seriously. Will asked in our session at the Edubloggercon, how can we move our ideas forward. To me, we have to ground our new ideas in the old ideas. We have to find a way to talk about what we want to do moving forwad within the context of the hundred plus year dialogue about school reform in this country.

When I talk about SLA, I always talk about how what we do works within several long traditions in American school history. I talk about being part of the progressive school movement, part of the math / science academy movement and then part of the current wave of "School 2.0." I think what makes SLA unique in many ways is that we’re a strange mash-up. I’m not sure how many other schools see themselves as part of those three distinct educational movements, but we’re having fun thinking of ourselves that way. And that anchors us. And that’s incredibly important, because it reminds us that there are models, there are lessons to be learned, there have been successes and failures for schools that did many things the way we did, and we can learn from those lessons. And it reminds us that there are people who have been talking about what we want to do for a long time, and their words can give us strength, inform us and drive us to move forward when we hit stopping blocks.

I wonder — I worry — how much of the angst we see in the education blogosphere about where this movement may be going is because we often are taking an ahistorical look at this movement. If all we can see is our own experiences and our own words, then we can only move as far as the power of our own ideas. I can’t imagine trying to build a school that way, and I certainly cannot imagine trying to push a national conversation that way.

So here’s my challenge for NECC 2008 and the blogging we do in-between. Let’s put our ideas in context. Let’s look backward as we look ahead. Let’s take the time to step back and, in the words of Robert Pirsig, ask ourselves not, "What’s new?" but instead ask ourselves, "What’s good?"