Dangerously Irrelevant

I’m live blogging from the annual UCEA Convention in Alexandria, VA…

UCEA is the University Council for Educational Administration, a consortium of the educational leadership preparation programs from many of the largest research universities across the world. University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Texas-Austin, Washington State University, Fordham University…  those kinds of places. Iowa State, my institution, is a UCEA member, which is why I was able to take CASTLE (which is a UCEA center) with me when I left the University of Minnesota. The yearly UCEA convention is a must-attend for most educational leadership faculty from large universities. Faculty from smaller institutions attend too, as do a fairly decent number of graduate students (mostly those who are graduating and looking for faculty jobs!).

I think two things make a conference great: what happens inside the conference (sessions, networking, conversations in hallway and lobby) and what happens outside the conference (restaurants, shopping, and other attractions within walking distance). What happens inside UCEA is usually fabulous. Interesting sessions (if you’re interested in educational leadership research) and great conversations almost always occur for everyone. I’m baffled, however, by our hotel choices some years. For example, Albuquerque is a great city but there was nothing near our hotel except for a convenience store. This meant that everyone had to eat breakfast and lunch in the tiny hotel restaurant. Standing in a line of hundreds of people for 60-90 minutes just to get a cheeseburger doesn’t leave good feelings about the conference. The same thing happened in Kansas City. There are great places to eat and shop there, but we were miles from them. Judging by our surroundings here in Alexandria, I’m afraid the same thing is going to happen this week. Other than the hotel restaurant, the closest places to eat are an Arby’s and a McDonald’s, both of which are a 10-minute walk away. Ugh.

Dave
Sherman, principal of South Park (IL) Elementary, sparked a lot of
conversation at LeaderTalk with his post about
school change and school safety. He has extended that discussion to his own
blog, asking
these key questions:

Are we just paranoid that something bad may happen in our schools because
there have been a handful of school shootings in the last decade? Should we stop
all this security talk? As I write this, I am preparing for our very first lock
down drill with our students (see previous post). Is it all a waste of
time?

Visit
Dave’s blog and let him know what you think!

A few weeks ago I
highlighted some videos made by Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas
State University. If you haven’t seen them, I encourage you to do so.

David
Warlick liked A Vision of Students Today. Gary
Stager didn’t. And Michael was stirred to make a
clarification. The comments on all three blog posts are informative and
interesting.

The great part of the Web, of course, is that it makes all of this
conversation public, transparent, open to participation by others, and, dare I
say, even possible. Sure, before the Internet and blogs existed, Michael, David,
and Gary could have exchanged thoughts about Michael’s work via mail or e-mail.
But this is more powerful (and much more fun).

Iowa State University researcher Dr. Doug Gentile studied 2,500
children and adolescents and found that violent video games do indeed foster
hostile actions and aggressive behaviors. Here’s the money quote:

We know a lot about how to be an effective teacher, and we know a lot
about how to use technology to teach. Video games use many of these techniques
and are highly effective teachers. So we shouldn’t be surprised that violent
video games can teach aggression.

Get the full
story at the ISU News Service.

Today is the last day to vote for the 2007 Weblog Awards. Here are the nominees in the Education category. So far the students at James Logan High School (Union City, CA) are ahead by a substantial margin.

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

At the SETDA Leadership Summit and Education Forum, we’ve been talking a lot about 21st century skills, so I thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the work that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has been doing.

The Partnership has been quite busy lately. In October, it announced new poll results that showed that a significant majority of voters ‘are deeply concerned that the United States is not preparing young people with the skills they need to compete in the global economy.’ Here’s an excerpt from the full report:

As I noted on my blog earlier this week, on Monday the Partnership, SETDA, and ISTE released a paper on maximizing the impact of digital technologies for 21st century learning. The document contains examples of successful programs that can be used as models, guiding questions for stakeholders, and action principles for moving forward. Plus there’s also this great (if depressing) quote:

No industry or organization can remain competitive today without making comprehensive use of technology as a matter of course in all of its operations. . . . [E]ducation is the least technology-intensive enterprise in a ranking of technology use among 55 U.S. industry sectors, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Today the Partnership released a new resource, Route 21:

[Route 21] represents the first comprehensive, go-to online resource for high-quality content, best practices, relevant reports, articles and research to assist practitioners in implementing 21st century teaching practices and learning outcomes. Route 21 harnesses Web 2.0 features to allow users to tag, rank, organize, collect and share Route 21 content based on their personal interests. Individuals will continuously update the site with relevant examples as well as share their reactions and insights on implementing 21st century skills in their state, district or school.

You can read the press release, watch the 10–minute video, or dive right into the resources and tagging tools:

Also, for those of you who didn’t know, the Partnership recently updated its famous rainbow framework in order to better highlight essential supporting conditions:

[read more about the framework]

In addition to the resources already described, the Partnership has a number of useful reports, issue briefs, and literacy maps, the latter of which are intended to give some examples of 21st century literacies in practice. Many of the Partnership’s presentations are available online, as are some nifty tools for educators and policymakers.

In short, the Partnership is working hard to help us move our nation’s schools forward. There are numerous helpful resources on the Partnership’s main site and in Route 21. I encourage you to check out what the Partnership has to offer.

SETDA has been a great conference. I have appreciated the opportunity to network with the people in charge of educational technology for each state department and have had some interesting and powerful conversations about the state of ed tech across the country.

Yesterday I was on discussion panels for most of the day so I couldn’t exactly take notes. I was supposed to be on the 21st century skills panel with Ken Kay and others but was moved at the last minute to the panel on transformative leadership. The best part of that move was the chance to meet and spend time with Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

Chris is my hero. He’s progressive, he’s smart, he’s enthusiastic, and his school is doing really neat things with its 1:1 laptop initiative for urban kids in Philly. In short, he’s a great model for 21st century building-level leadership. If you want to get a sense of what Chris is all about, listen to his interview with Steve Hargadon and check out his blog, Practical Theory.

Today everyone is heading to “the Hill” to meet with Congressional representatives and their staff about K-12 educational technology funding. Wish ‘em luck.

Today I had the odd experience of hearing United States Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), recipient of SETDA’s federal policymaker award for his co-sponsorship of the ATTAIN bill, say to the lunch crowd that he was going to tell us a few statistics that most of us didn’t know and then recite a few of the slides from the original Did You Know? presentation.

I think I’m proud? I know I’m glad he is behind ATTAIN. But I’m also going to send him the new version!

Here’s a paraphrase of a great quote from Frances Bradburn: “Yes, you absolutely need tools and training and all those other things. But the key is to begin.”

Notes from the 2007 SETDA Education Forum…

What it takes to compete: Seeing U.S. education through the prism of international comparisons

Prof. Andreas Schleicher
Head, Indicators and Analysis Division
OECD Directorate for Education

• Finland gets 9 applicants for every teaching post because it is considered a profession worth working in
• Jobs in lower skill sectors, and indeed entire sectors of the workplace, are disappearing
• In the 1960s, the U.S. was first in the world re: percentage of persons with high school or equivalent qualifications (ages 25 to 64). Today it is 13th. Within two generations, the educational landscape has changed dramatically.
• College-level graduation rates: U.S. international rank dropped from 2nd to 15th between 1995 and 2005
• By 2015, China will have twice the number of college graduates as the U.S. and EU combined
• PISA – international assessment of what students know and can do – covers 87% of world economy – how well can students extrapolate from what they have learned to novel situations
• U.S. fell below the OECD average when it came to the performance of 15-year-olds to extrapolate and apply in mathematics (dozens of countries were ahead of U.S.)
• Levy and Murnane have analyzed demand for skills between 1960 and 2002
• Demand for routine manual skills has declined
• Demand for nonroutine manual skills has declined steeply
• Demand for routine cognitive skills (that are easy to teach, easy to test, easy to break into small pieces) has declined steeply
• Demand for nonroutine analytic skills has increased sharply
• Demand for nonroutine interactive skills has increased sharply
• Percentage of students at Levels 5 or 6 on PISA has an almost linear relationship to the number of researchers per thousand people
• Money explains about 1/3 of cross-country variation in mathematics performance – U.S. and Italy have expensive education systems but get lower payoff than other countries that spend less but differently
• Best-performing educational systems have both high challenge and strong support systems
• Low challenge and weak support = poor performance and stagnation
• High challenge and weak support = conflict, demoralization
• High challenge and strong support = systemic improvement
• Best-performing educational systems have high ambitions, teacher access to best practice and strong professional development, intelligent accountability and intervention in inverse proportion to success, devolved responsibility so the school is the center of action, integrated educational opportunities, movement from prescribed forms of teaching and assessment toward personalized learning
• Only 12% of variation is across schools: the overall system predicts most of math performance
• “Knowledge poor” profession and national prescription = uninformed prescription, implementation of curricula = U.S.
• “Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”

A perfect storm

Michael Flanagan, Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Michigan

• “Can we agree that our kids aren’t going to work in a verb conjugation factory?”
• Michigan is facing a perfect storm: changing global workforce needs combined with declining ability of automobile factory workers to make a decent living (or even a living at all since jobs are being exported)
• Many, many educators said “those kids can’t do Algebra 2”
• Trying to move Michigan from teaching to learning
• Requirement for students to take one online course before graduation is an attempt to jump start the situation, turn pedagogy in another direction
• No longer automatically accrediting teacher education institutions every 5 years; now leaning on universities to change their preparation practices
• Showed the video of Paul Potts to emphasize that there is hidden talent in everyone and that we can bring that out if we choose

SETDA, ISTE, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills released a document last night called Maximizing the impact: The pivotal role of technology in a 21st century education system.

Take this survey and see how you’re doing on the ‘Guiding Questions for Stakeholders.’ Due date = November 14. I’ll publish the results on November 16.