Yesterday was my ISTE session – Beyond Tools: Thoughtful 21st Century School Reform. It was at 8:30 am on the last day in one of the big 200 seat halls – a challenge of energy to say the least. I really wanted to make sure this was an interactive session, not a lecture. It might be because I’ve done a bunch of keynotes lately, but I really don’t want to talk at people, I want to talk with them. And while, not surprising, much of what I was talking about in this session was, well, what I often talk about, my goals was to use the ideas I am most passionate about as a frame to get other people to talk about what they are most passionate about — and how to start to think about creating schools that reflect those passions. (A perhaps unnecessary aside… the problem I have is that I really lay out what I believe about the big ideas of schooling when I do keynotes or workshops… and I hope I have had an evolution of those ideas, but it can be hard to radically change what I talk about.)

So the goal was to front load some of the ideas of reform as a framework for talking about school vision, and then to give the participants a chance to dream themselves. Once given a chance to dream, then the hard work starts — what changes would schools have to make to achieve those dreams? How will you problematize those very good ideas? How will you build buy in for those ideas? And what happens if you actually achieve those goals? In all this, it is powerful for me (and I hope for the session participants) to be able to use the journey we have walked at SLA as a frame for those questions, but in the end, it matters more that participants frame those questions where they live and work and learn.

What struck me most about the session is what often strikes me in workshops I have done like this — we have such incredible wisdom and expertise that often goes unrecognized and unhonored in our schools. People had powerful and meaningful ideas and they were able to see the changes necessary… and the pitfalls they face even if they were to "get their way." Teachers and administrators can, with a bit of a vision-push, see a clear and beautiful vision of the schools their communities need. And they can see the work necessary to get there. That’s the most hopeful thing I can imagine.

So here’s a question I have… and forgive me if it is presumptuous or in any way egoist. Something about today’s session struck me as important… as real and powerful and resonant. (And yes, as I said, it’s not wholly new. Somehow, the mashup of stuff I’ve done before felt really good.) And I really am somewhat consumed right now by the idea of 1,000 conversations all over the country where we dream big. Scaling EduCon is a powerful way to do that, but maybe there’s an intermediary step.

If the work we have done at SLA, and some of the talks I have given about the ideas that unpin our school, is useful, perhaps the session I did today could be replicated. Is it possible that a school could bring together a group of teachers and students and parents and administrators and watch either the TEDxNYED or the #140 Conf talk and then tackle the questions from today’s session (located in the slidedeck above) as the start of a larger dialogue about how to reimagine their school community? Because, in the end, a session at ISTE is great — and I went to a bunch this year that inspired me — but the work that needs to get done is on the ground where we live. More and more, I believe that grass roots reform, the hard work done by educators and students and parents, is our best bet to get the schools we need in this country. I want to know how to help… I am wondering if today, I stumbled into a way to be useful.

What do you think?

This was my fifth ISTE this year, and it was a fantastic experience. On a personal level, I kept insanely busy, doing work as a presenter / facilitator with the Leadership Bootcamp, CoSN’s CTO Forum, the Online Learning Institute and my own session, but I also was able to attend sessions led by Bernie Dodge, Howard Rheingold, Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss, Jeff Mao and I spent a lot of time in the poster sessions, talking to students and educators about their ideas and projects. In between, I caught up with old friends, met with new collaborators, listened to folks who have an ear on the policy world of Washington, DC and even snuck off to watch the USA soccer match. (I’m still not over that loss. What a great team we had this year.)

I took tons of notes in sessions… from Bernie Dodge, I was able to deepen my thoughts about the relationship between engagement and empowerment. Bernie’s work has been important to me for over a decade now, and his thoughts about being savvy and careful about what we consider "the engaged learner" caused me to reflect on the "Shifting Ground" piece I wrote for Principal Leadership magazine back in the fall. More than ever, I believe deeply that engagement is a step to what we really want to see from our students — empowerment.

From Jeff Mao I was able to compare the state-wide roll out the Maine 1:1 laptop project to our 500 student laptop program. It was fascinating to me to hear how so much of the Maine roll out had incredible common cause with what we do at SLA. (It probably shouldn’t. I leaned heavily on the Maine resources when we were starting SLA, but both Maine’s and our ideas have evolved since then.) The biggest "aha" take-away came when Jeff talked about how (most? many?) schools in Maine do a parent workshop on the laptops and what it means to give them out as they allocate them. We don’t explicitly do that, simply because we never thought of that. Marcie and I talked about that idea after the session, and we will be doing that this year. I wonder how many of the hiccups we see in 9th grade around laptop use we can mitigate with better pro-active parent education.

Jane and Suzie’s session is going to get its own blog post, because it was just so rich and so very important to the work we do at SLA. They ran a session on the inquiry process as the foundation of project-based learning. There will be more on this later, but it was just lovely for me to take part and look at inquiry through their lens. There was, not surprisingly, incredible common ground, but there were new "tricks of the trade," and I’ve got a new book for my reading list – "Change by Design" by Tim Brown of IDEO. His ideas about the perfect brainstorm could have great resonance in our classes, and I look forward to taking it back to SLA.

Howard Rheingold’s session on developing our students’ (and our) CRAP detectors was an engaging and interesting session that, more than anything else, showed how even a visionary like Howard Rheingold has asked himself what are the limits of the ideas he champions the most. For him to have to deal with the distractions of the laptop in the classroom and to be frustrated by it was really interesting. There’s more to unpack there too.

There’s more specific detail, of course, but those are the big session reflections. I was really happy to spend so much time this year back in sessions. I have a strategy that I’m not going into those sessions looking for the "big" moment, but I want to honor all the small moments of learning that allow me to shift or deepen my thoughts, and I felt that in every session I went to. That’s a great feeling to walk away from ISTE with.

And the general feel of ISTE was different for me this year. There was no big new social tool like Twitter that everyone was trying to learn. (Although, the iPad was clearly the "new" technology. There were hundreds of them.) This year, to me, it felt like there was a deepening at work. People weren’t running around as much for what’s new. Many of the people I talked to were looking to figure out how to make sense of what they already had learned.

Perhaps this was the year we won the ‘battle of the tool.’ This year, I didn’t hear anywhere near as much of the ‘What is… X,’ instead I heard more debate about the efficacy of the use of tools in various places. That’s good. That’s healthy. Smart, rational people should disagree about that. We should be striving and straining to figure out what this really looks like if we get good at it. That’s a community growing up and getting ready to take on a larger role in the national education debate. Good.

And perhaps a last thought on that. Now isn’t the time to settle for easy answers to those questions. The easy work is either largely done. People know online learning, social networking, blogging and wikis exist. Now we have to decide what we believe about those things… how, where and why they can – and can’t – be used… what we gain and lose when we use them… and what school might look like when we do. These answers aren’t easy and facile. And we are going to need leaders who define visions of education that have a defining pedagogy that take us to transformative places. The community of people I saw at ISTE this year is ready for that conversation. Let’s have at it.

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Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about how to scale… how to grow the School 2.0 movement. I’ve gone back and forth about what is necessary… do we need a national organization to be a defining counter voice to some of the edu-capitalist organizations that seem to be getting a great deal of heat? Do we need advocacy in Washington that is more targeted? Or are we best as a grass roots movement that makes change every day in classes?

The answer, of course, is probably all of the above.

But what is doable, possible, immediate and powerful?

The more I listen to teachers and parents, the more I talk about the ideas that I am most passionate about, the more I hear people wanting road maps that will allow them to change their schools where they are, the more I am truly convinced that a smart, grass roots movement might be the thing we need.

What if we all tried to dream big about what we can imagine schools could be where we lived?

What if we brought together teachers and parents and students and community members if cities and towns all over the country and shared a vision and then discussed ways to move our schools closer to that vision?

And what if we aggregated the stories and ideas and dreams that came out of all of those meetings? And what if there were some common ideas to the structure and meaning of the meetings and those formed the core of a grass roots movement? How much change could we affect?

And maybe what we’ve been able to start with EduCon can be a model.

So let’s start 1,000 EduCons all over the country. There are some models for that already. The folks at Co-Learning out in Colorardo have done it. But let’s network the events. Let’s aggregate the ideas. And, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "Friends, they may call it a movement."

So here’s the core values of EduCon:

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5. Learning can — and must — be networked

Here are the major pieces of the conference –

• The pedagogy of the sessions should match the pedagogy of the conference.
• Discussions, not lectures.
• Ideas over tools.
• Longer sessions.
• Time to reflect and talk.
• Share a meal.
• Involve students and parents.

People all over the country have amazing ideas. Let’s come together and talk about them where we all live.

And then let’s make sure we tell the world about it.

Who knows… we might just make a difference.

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