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Dr. David Hopson |
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October 29 , 2007 The school committee has been discussing what the future should look like for our district. We viewed the presentation “Did You Know” at the October 3rd meeting—a very eye-opening experience regarding trends in society and raising questions about what education should be. (Google “Did You Know” to view this presentation on the Internet.) Gateway’s vision statement—“The Gateway Regional School District will provide an exemplary education that challenges all students in an instructional setting appropriate to their needs”—provides an overall destination for the district but doesn’t provide a roadmap. To me, exemplary means that we’ll provide an educational experience that can serve as a pattern for other schools, one that is so fitting and appropriate that others wish to imitate our success. What this looks like, and how this changes over time, is the puzzle that we’re still completing. We have many of the pieces—great teachers, excellent facilities, small staff to student ratios, supportive communities, extensive technology, highly competent support staff, an evolving curriculum, flexibility in adapting to meet challenges and, above all, a selection of students that many schools would be highly envious of—but I’m not sure we yet see what the completed picture should be. This may be both the problem and the solution. Schools cannot remain embedded in addressing change by utilizing a model fit for the industrial age, when the world is changing at an ever-increasing speed. Our overall picture needs to be constantly shifting to reflect emerging needs rather than be a fixed, unchanging portrait. Our task is to find some comfort in the idea of change, to retain a familiar and comfortable setting for students with a set of learning expectations and benchmarks (i.e., basic understandings, literacy, mathematics) that is routinely assessed so that we can adapt our learning environments to meet individual needs. We must do this while not losing sight of the necessity to empower students to handle an ever-increasing amount of information that exponentially grows outside of the school walls and traditional educational processes. You can find the district’s five-year goals, staff survey results and a wealth of related information on the district’s website under the Gateway 2015 pages. You can determine Gateway’s standings in MCAS and AYP on any number of sites other than our own. You can review 21st Century Learning outcomes in many places, including www.21stcenturyskills.org. You can do one of the 2.7 billion Google searches performed each month and access the 1.5 exabytes of unique new information that will be generated this year (more new information in one year than in the previous 5,000 years). You can be cognizant that technical information is expected to double every 72 hours by 2010 and that using the Internet to access this information is no guarantee that the information is correct, relevant to your question or helpful in solving your problem. But I hope that you can see that determining the right question, filtering and assessing information, and then using this information to solve problems is a core component of education along with creativity, innovation, collaboration, social skills, leadership, flexibility, adaptability, self-direction and the basic 3R’s. In my humble opinion, the core of education—preparing students with the skills they’ll need to succeed in life—isn’t changing, but the way in which we deliver this education and the refinement of critical thinking skills is changing at an ever-increasing pace. Part of this change is the expectation that schools will increasingly use technology to enable students and staff to collaborate and partner in the educational process, just as the ‘real’ world has used technology to make life and business more productive. Rapidly fading are the days where meeting parental expectations meant a once a month newsletter, 4 report cards and seeing them at open house. Instead, parental expectations are growing to reflect what they see in their own work—instant communications, on-time delivery of services, personalization of responses and the ability to tap into information on an as-needed basis. Staff who use e-mail, answer voice-mails, maintain WebPages, run blogs, use Moodle, post grades on-line and so on represent what’s currently becoming the standard for parental interaction. Those that use technology routinely in the classroom—accept assignments electronically, use technology to increase collaboration, post homework assignments, use Moodle to interact with students, run a class blog and generally accept that the use of technology is a given rather than an option—are becoming the new standard in education. As the $100 laptop continues to gain international momentum, we can anticipate an ever-increasing demand for the use of technology in the classroom and a continuing decrease in the cost of providing that technology—leading to the question: how will teachers utilize laptop computers in the classroom everyday when every student has one (similar to today’s question of how to effectively use available technology on a routine basis). To quote David Warlick “I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.” As former Secretary of Education Richard Riley said “we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist . . .using technologies that haven’t yet been invented. . . in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” If we cannot clearly predict the future of our students, which becomes more important--what they learn? Or how they learn it and what they do with that knowledge? Information is just a raw material to be put to use innovatively—it is not an end product or a finished job. Most students use technology to access information. Limiting the use of that technology means that students will go home in order to learn the skills they need to survive and prosper in an ever-increasingly interconnected and global economy. Do we make ourselves and our schools relevant to these changes and student goals or do we continue do an excellent job on preparing students for a rapidly fading past known as the industrial revolution? ### |
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