[The photo is of 12 Crawford Rd., the house where my mother lived the first two years of her life.]

I’ve spent the last few days with folks from Broughton Hall High School in Liverpool. As part of the very ambitious Building Schools for the Future project that is underway in England, they are embarking on a massive building project to update and upgrade their school.

Fortunately, their leadership team of teachers and administrators recognize that building a school with a forward looking vision is about much, much more than the bricks and mortar that create the actual physical facility. They are in the process of challenging much of the way teaching has traditionally been done in England, infusing their school with a more project-based approach and looking at the 21st Century tools that can help to get them there.

So I was there to help, to talk about some of the ways we built SLA, to talk about some of the things I see as necessary in the coming years, but most importantly, I was there to ask a lot of questions, serve as a sounding board and generally be a colleague, not an expert. I had set up a Brought Hall wiki that could serve as an online repository for ideas as they continue their work. (Unfortunately, folks were still pen and paper that day — I was hoping we’d all have laptops so we could capture ideas as they came to us…) And mostly, we just did a lot of talking and planning.

I’m feeling more and more that Will and others are onto something when they say that what is different right now is that learning is networked. And I think that is different than what has come before… to demonstrate the power of the network, I showed off twitter (although, it proved that it can be just as big a distraction as help, no surprise there…) and we Skyped Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach into the conversation for a few minutes.

What strikes me — again and again — as I go around and talk about these ideas that there is an incredible "aha" moment when people realize that our classrooms — our learning — is no longer bound by the walls of the building. And I think that is fueling much of the excitement around Second Life and Twitter and other tools, but I also keep having that other epiphanous moment that even with the new tools, even with the new ideas of a learning network — in fact, perhaps because of them — we have to ground our planning, our ideas, our schools in strong, well-thoughtout pedagogy. And for me, that’s what keeps leading back into the past for ideas.

What made this workshop so enjoyable and so powerful for me (and hopefully for the Broughton Hall folks too…) was that those foundation pedagogies are there at that school. There wasn’t the need to back up and explain project-based learning… there was no moment where someone said, "How can an entire school expect to share a set of educational values?" Those ideas are powerfully and fully alive at that school. That means we could move forward with the question that I love exploring…

How can we adapt and adopt the best educational philosophies of the past to the changing world in which we live? How will those ideas change, given our times, and how will these ideas make us change our schools?

That’s the conversion I want to have over and over again. And thanks to the Broughton Hall folks — administrator, teachers and students — for engaging in a wonderful two days with me. I can’t wait to come back… and I’ll be sure to keep following your progress through our learning network.