For the first 10 or so years of my career, I was pretty much exclusively interested in pedagogy, instruction, learning, and the classroom level education. The instructional core is where the rubber meets the road, where teachers and students get to together and try to rewire each others dendrites and neurons in pro-social ways that expand human capacity.
In the last two years, I've gotten much more interested in leadership and policy, in part inspired my one of my mentors and role models, Chris Dede. Chris has had a long interest in using emerging technologies--augmented reality, multi-user virtual environments, etc.--to support rich learning experiences, and along the way he decided that building new technologies was not enough, he also had to be involved in transforming education systems to be able leverage those new capacities. As another mentor of mine, Barry Fishman, once said "Technology needs education reform more than education reform needs technology."
So I've started doing a lot more consulting with school and district leadership teams, and getting more up to speed on leadership and policy via experiences like the J-term seminar I did at Harvard. Fortunately, if you spend 5 years at Harvard's Ed School, it's hard not to pick up many of the basics of both what the U.S. system does, and how the best systems achieve their superior results. And I'm trying to turn around and share what I'm researching and learning with folks working in schools and districts... ultimately in the hope of creating more supportive environments for the many teachers than we've worked with and will work with in the future.
One surprising observation for me, in working with school districts, is how even very simple ideas can be profoundly helpful to school and district leaders. In the last two workshops I've run for administrators, I've unpacked the phrase "Technology should be in the service of learning." Sharing this phrase has been a major revelation for some of these leaders; they have highlighted in evaluations that this concept has been particularly helpful for them. To say that technology should be in the service of learning is to say that rather than buying loads of hardware and dumping into schools and hoping that someone will get around to doing something useful with it, schools and districts should have a clear set of learning goals, hardware purchase should support those goals, and technology professional development should be provided to help teachers develop plans that help meet those goals. The PD shouldn't be about turning things on and off, but figuring out how new technologies can be integrated into thoughtfully designed lessons.
On the one hand, being steeped every day in thinking about learning technologies, this is not a particularly inspired concept. When I first started introducing the concept, it was a phrase that fell out of the side of my mouth... like one might say "Yep, sun came out again today." (I grew up in rural New England. We really do say things like that.) A statement of, what to me, is the obvious. However, it has not at all been obvious to plenty of folks out in the field. Here I add my usual caveat--nothing I'm saying should be taken to demean or belittle this educators who are smart, talented, and committed. There are so many issues with technology, connections, wires, wireless, switches, bulbs--so many details, that the forest is lost for the trees. Schools spend hours debating mac vs. pc before they debate "What should a child be able to do when she leaves our school? How would technology help?" The marketers of technology don't help, with seductive messages about how technology is like fire, you gain a benefit just by standing near it (that's one of Dede's lines. No credit here). So I can come in, and be helpful by offering something which seems pretty obvious to those steeped in it: technology should be in the service of learning. That should be the mantra of your tech team and your curriculum dept. There are many, many next steps towards delivering powerful instruction across a school or district using technology, but that's the place to start.
This experience connects to a larger issue that came up in my recent policy class about the challenges of spreading best practices. Why don't districts adopt some of the fundamental things that we know are essential to success? In some cases, the fundamentals are really complicated. The best school systems have cultures of continuous improvement, cultures that are really, really hard to build. In other cases though, the fundamentals are simple. The best school systems have a common language around instruction. Doesn't even matter what it is. UbD, TfU, PBL, EEEI, 49 things, whatever. Just pick one, and have a common language so your teachers can talk about what they are doing in the same language. Align decisions to learning goals... like decisions about technology. I'm not surprised that the hard stuff is hard to spread, by why does it seem like some low hanging fruit is just sitting their on the tree?
What can we do--from the trenches, from the ivory tower, from wherever--to help get some of these core ideas baked into the architectures of our systems? (I mean, besides blog about it and do workshops with schools...)