29th January 2007

Time and School 2.0

posted in leadership, politics, schoolreform |

Bonnie Bracey Sutton’s January 17th post on the SITE blog, “Tech Divide, Data Divide” includes references to several new as well as older publications that promise to be insightful for ongoing discussions about designing “School 2.0″ and next-gen educational reform policies in the United States. I commented on these ideas this evening on the SITE blog, but I want to highlight two resources in particular that are of personal interest.

Back in April 1994, the U.S. Department of Education published a report titled, “Prisoners Of Time - DIMENSIONS OF THE TIME CHALLENGE.” I regularly post about the issue of TIME as one of the most formidable challenges for anyone seeking to improve PK-12 classroom practices today. Teachers are overwhelmed, students are overwhelmed, and no one has any time. Until we recognize that we cannot expect to improve learning in schools by giving MORE mandates, but instead need to embrace educational deregulation and place FEWER requirements on teachers and administrators, I don’t think we are going to begin approaching a realistic design for School 2.0. Standards and accountability are not the answer. Finding creative and empowering ways to give learners of all ages permission to take sidetrips for learning and get IN DEPTH in their studies of content they find meaningful and relevant IS a big part of a set of answers our schools need. Back in ‘94 the researchers for this DOE report concluded:

Given the many demands made of schools today, the wonder is not that they do so poorly, but that they accomplish so much. Our society has stuffed additional burdens into the time envelope of 180 six-hour days without regard to the consequences for learning. We agree with the Maine mathematics teacher who said, “The problem with our schools is not that they are not what they used to be, but that they are what they used to be.” In terms of time, our schools are unchanged despite a transformation in the world around them.

Each of the five issues - the design flaw, lack of academic time, out of school influences, time for educators, and new content and achievement standards - revolves around minutes, hours, and days. If the United States is to grasp the larger education ambitions for which it is reaching, we must strike the shackles of time from our schools.

Amen. We need new models of education in the 21st century, and one of the most important design characteristics should be FEWER mandates and an invitation for learners to be creative, project and problem-based in their in-depth studies, and much more time-relaxed than we see most students and teachers in US K-12 public schools today.

School or Prison?

The other resource Bonnie mentioned in her post was a new book by Linda Darling-Hammond and Joan Baratz-Snowden: “A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers Our Children Deserve.” I’ve added this to my Amazon wish list! Among other things, the book addresses:

… how to improve the quality of teacher preparation and, in turn, the quality of teaching and student achievement in each classroom.

The reinvention and reorientation of U.S. teacher preparation programs should also be important elements in a School 2.0 design strategy. I look forward to reading this book in the months ahead as I continue to ruminate (with many others I know)on the best pathways for empowering educators in a “School 2.0″ paradigm of learning.

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On this day..

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 1:57 am and is filed under leadership, politics, schoolreform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. 1 On January 30th, 2007, Bonnie Bracey Sutton said:

    You said..

    Fundamentally, I think most legislators are trying to fix our 19th century public school systems with 19th century paradigms of thinking. Teachers need to be invited and empowered to take time for curricular side trips for learning with their students, as David Warlick discussed in his keynote for last fall’s K-12 Online Conference. I think (based on my own experiences as well as research) NCLB and high stakes accountability has had tragic consequences for students and teachers in our U.S. schools.

    I laud the move toward open source technologies which some school districts are embracing, and I think move toward open standards for student assessment systems would also be in the right direction. I do not think, however, that more accountability and more focus on standards is going to help us reinvent schools (design school 2.0) in the ways we need to for the 21st century information and economic environments

    Open source, as pointed out in David Thornburg’s book, when the best are free, allows the funds
    that are available to be repurposed for other uses.

    I was thinking, that the problem with the post that I submitted is the same as with that of NCLB. We have not included creativity, constructivism, and what happened to the metadata, that would be collected so that students could step through at their own learning pace. I remember doing wonderful workshops with this idea in mind at NIST. The funds were shut down. Compete.org seems to have the message, just it is that they are not educators, but those who are worried about what it is that we are not doing.
    Take a look. They have a most compelling video that is for sale, inexpensive that talks about next steps… Bonnie