What Does Your School's 21st Century Education Look Like?

I came across this video on Twitter. It's a terrific video about considerations for 21st century education which seems to be based on on Karl Fisch's, "Did You Know?" video. I'm a fan of all versions of Fisch's video, but what struck me about this was the second half where the district provides real examples of experiences their students will receive.

As I saw it I wondered how principals would respond if a parent showed this video to them and asked what they had to offer...or better yet, asked the principal for a video of what it is their school had to offer their children. If the school couldn’t produce a video message to convey what it is they have to offer for students, what does that say about the school. I think this is a challenge all parents should ask their schools to meet.

It would be great if every school created such a video. In fact I'd love to see videos of this genre created under the leadership of these principals.

Chris Lehmann, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA
Blogs at Practical Theory -A View from the Classroom

Eric Sheninger, Principal of New Milford High School in NJ
Blogs at A Principal's Reflections

Lyn Hilt, Principal of Brecknock Elementary School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Blogs @ http://principalposts.edublogs.org

Patrick Larkin, Principal of Burlington High School in MA.
Blogs at Burlington H.S. Principal's Blog

Dave Meister, High School Director at Paris Cooperative High School in Illinois.
Blogs at PHS Director Blog

Janet Avery, Principal of Jerome Middle School in Idaho
Blogs @ http://averyteach.blogspot.com

George Couros, Principal at a K-12 program in Stony Plain, Alberta
Blogs at The Principal of Change

So, what do you think your school's video might look like?

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Connected Principals - A Place for Leaders to Connect

Principal George Couros recognizes the tremendous amount of support he has received through places like Twitter, Facebook, other social networking sites, and his blog, which have inspired him to learn and share with many other great educators. George recently announced his next contribution to leading in the 21st century. Connected Principals, a blog comprised of a group of passionate school administrators who are sharing their views on education. The site serves as an organized resource with categories relevant to school leaders. The purpose is to share best practices by principals that they are currently doing in their respective schools.

While connecting with these other educators around the world isn’t a requirement to being a great leader, it definitely does help. While leaders can further their knowledge through a university course, or reading a book by a great business leader, George shares that he is finding that he is learning more from others that are in similar positions. What’s more, these are not great leaders of yesteryear, but these are educational leaders of today. Through them he sees unbelievable innovations everyday. The purpose of Connected Principals is to extend this learning to other school leaders. Couros believes that for lifelong learning leaders there needs to be time spent connecting with others. He shares that in doing so, he actually ends up saving time as he has an entire community helping his school to get better.

As George explains, this is not about technology. It is about connecting and sharing with others and technology can be a fantastic medium for this. It is still ultimately about the relationships you create. Connected Principals is a step in that direction. You can check out the site here. Please take a look and share if you are or have a great school leader who might be interested in reading, commenting, submitting a guest post or even becoming a contributor.

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Principal who used to block, now offers guidance to skeptical admins in social media use

With barely a handful of other principals participating in social media environments principal Eric Sheninger feels rather lonely and is extending an offer to lead others into the digital age of interactivity. In his latest post Building Momentum, Mr. Sheninger puts out a call to action to educational leaders to join him in online environments or, as I like to say, become a part of his personal learning network.

Administrators who are skeptical about utilizing social media have a lot to learn from Eric or NMHS_Principal as he’s known in the Twitosphere. He was in the same boat just a little over a year ago, and his ship was sinking. He blocked sites and banned mobile devices to an extreme all in an effort to do what he thought was best for his students and staff. Today he says, “Boy was I wrong!” and realizes the error of his ways.

Sheninger now advocates to empower educators to effectively integrate technology combined with best instructional practices and takes any chance he gets to discuss his transformation with skeptical administrators. His motivation is simple. He says, “I now have the confidence to clearly articulate how social media has enabled me to become a more effective and efficient administrator in many areas.” He adds that, “I stress the fact that this phenomenon is not going away and is a major component in the lives of today’s society.”

Sheninger’s advice to educational leaders is that we should be modeling, supporting, and collaborating with our respective staffs to create a vibrant school culture that fosters risk-taking and innovation. Learning environments that are structured in such a way will not only help students think critically, problem solve, and master the content, but also teach them how to be digitally responsible.

He explains that his motivations are partly selfish too. He needs other administrators to join him saying that he finds it depressing as he looks around his own state of New Jersey as well as the country and globe in general and notices the lack of an administrative presence in the world of social media and other areas of educational technology leadership.

I understand Eric’s frustration. We each have personal learning networks numbering in the thousands, yet there are only a handful of principals participating. We pretty much know the same five guys who I also mentioned recently in my post Want to help a principal start a blog? These 5 principals can provide inspiration. He adds a name new to me Deron Durflinger to the list as well. So there are six guys. As a female, I can’t help but notice they’re all men and add, that not only do we need more school leader voices, but some females would be great too!

In his post Eric cries out to his five principal buds who are all working hard to do their parts to lead in the digital age, but he asks for their help to build momentum pleading, “Can ya help me out with this one?” We need leaders to step up and into these worlds for the sake of our students. As Eric points out, he’s learned a lot, but there is so much more to learn about educational leadership and facilitating sustainable change. He knows from his participation in online networks that the best way for learning to occur is when it happens with other experienced leaders in the trenches that can share their knowledge, strategies, successes, and failures. Like most, this is how he learns best and he confesses that he needs their help, support, ideas, and advice on all aspects of educational leadership, not educational technology. He knows that when educational leaders move together they can all collaborate to grow, lead more effectively, and move towards substantive reform.

To entice his peers, Sheninger offers five facets of social media that truly assist educational leaders to become more effective and efficient. They are 1) Communication, 2) Branding, 3. Professional Development/Growth, 4) Opportunity 5) Collaboration

You can find out how social media plays a part in each of these in his post Building Momentum.

Thank you to Eric Sheninger and the fabulous five George Couros, Patrick Larkin, Chris Lehmann begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Deron Durflinger, Dave Meister for being the pioneering voices of school leaders today.

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Facebook Find: Ed Week's Leader Talk - A Blog Worth Reading

As I checked my Facebook this morning I saw this from my personal learning network colleague:

Dennis welcomes comments on his Ed Week LeaderTalk post: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/LeaderTalk/.

I went to the site and found LeaderTalk, the first group blog by school leaders for school leaders, LeaderTalk expresses the voice of the administrator in this era of school reform. Dennis's piece is compelling as are several of the others.

I'm so thankful to my PLN and powerful networking tools like Facebook and Twitter that make these great discoveries possible. I'm think going forward I will actively focus on selecting a few of my favorites each week to share on my blog.

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Professional Development for Learner 2.0

I am at the four-hour Intel® Teach to the Future Leadership Forum designed to guide instructional leaders as they support and promote effective integration of technology in classrooms. The Intel leadership forum is worthwhile and 20th Century leaders will get a lot out of it, but to better address the needs of the 21st Century leader it needs updating, an infusion of some obvious Web 2.0 tools, more modeling of best practices for the 2.0 Leader and it falls into the common education trap of talking the talk, but still struggling to walk the 1.0 walk.

I do not believe this is unique to the Intel Institute. It is prevalent in conferences, forums, presentations, and professional development proclaiming to be for 21st Century learners. Will Richardson reflected a similar sentiment at NECC 2007 when he said,

The total irony of the moment was that in this “Web 2.0″ and “School 2.0″ session that was supposed to celebrate the uses of the tools, the random notes were being taken on screen in a very un Web 2.0 tool called Microsoft Word. No transparency. No collaboration. No thought to sharing.--The Problem in a Nutshell…The UnProblem in a Nutshell

Here are five thoughts and suggestions I have about how today's experience in particular, but professional development in general, can be more meaningful for the 2.0 learner.

• Provide Digital Materials
• Provide An Overview of Digital Materials and Use 21st Century Formats to Share
• Demonstrate the Power of 21^st Century Tools to Capture Opinions and Feedback
• Ask 2.0 Questions
• Use Web 2.0 Tools to Capture Work, Facilitate Learning and Best Practices, and Keep Conversations Going

Provide Digital Materials

Materials should be digitally accessible BEFORE the session begins. Not doing so is no longer acceptable in classes for 21st Century leaders and learners. I see this as poor planning. At the very least 2.0 learners should receive the session handbook and PowerPoint in a digital format that can accept notes (i.e. not in a pdf that you can not take notes on). This enables 2.0 learners to get beyond needlessly copying down what their PowerPoint slides say, and allow them to get to the thinking faster by actually recording higher-order thoughts and ideas on these slides. Taken to another level, these PowerPoint slides could be a Google collaborative presentation allowing for shared note taking and collaborative meaning-creation on the slides. The simple introduction of a digital handbook and PowerPoint would enable facilitators to model best practices of how to write and take deeper notes on the digital documents and the added bonus is the learners won’t have to carry the materials around, but rather these tools are available anytime, anywhere, on demand along with their other digital resources. And, who are we kidding. If we don’t have these materials digitally, and accessible on demand in seconds through a search, they end up in a pile somewhere along with all the other conference material.

Provide An Overview of Digital Materials and Use 21^st Century Formats to Share
Participants received a CD with supplemental materials that come with the book for participants to take a look at later. As a facilitator with more than a decade of experience teaching and supporting others in doing so, I can tell you that most participants rarely go back and upload these materials. For real impact the materials distributed should be explored and used in class. A great way to do this is to begin the class with an introduction to what is on the CD, where to find the materials and each time a document is being used the class should be shown where to access it.

The other issue I had is that while CDs are inexpensive to distribute, I would recommend against using a 20^th Century format to distribute materials in an outdated medium such as CDs. Many laptops (and most in the room) have eliminated CD drives to reduce weight and instead people use usb drives or rely on material being downloadable from the internet.

Demonstrate the Power of 21^st Century Tools to Capture Opinions and Feedback

The forum began with a paper PowerPoint survey about leader’s attitudes, experience, and behaviors. My facilitators happened to create a digital survey so we had the opportunity to see the data from participants across NYC, but I was disappointed that this wasn't the way Intel designed it. They solely had a paper version for discussion and are not capturing this data which would not only be beneficial for Intel, but it would be of great interest for Principals to see how they compared among their peers. Student response systems are the big rage. While they are great for a classroom without laptops, a classroom full of laptops should be using these free and powerful survey tools that enable facilitators to capture and instantly analyze learner’s feedback.

Ask 2.0 Questions

This was a future leadership forum but they were asking 20^th Century questions. While there is value in seeing participants answers to 1.0 questions, the future leaders should be asked 2.0 questions as well if for nothing more than enabling them to be aware that they need to be aware. The outdated questions included questions like what do you use word processing programs for? I don’t even know people who say word processing anymore. And how does a texting, social networking, berrying, blog commenting, emailing, wiki-ing, tweet trying, collaborative doc writing, IMer really answer that when most of her writing is not even within a “word processing” program. So 20^th Century! A better question is, "how much of your writing is done digitally?"

While I may be over dramatizing the word processing question, my problem was the survey was completely devoid of any 2.0 questions like: How often do you comment on a blog or discussion board? Do you have an active blog? Do you belong to any social networks? Do you Tweet? Do you have an avatar? Do you play any MMORPGs? Do you have a wiki that you created or use frequently to work efficiently? Do you listen to podcasts? How many blogs do you subscribe to in an RSS reader?

While many leaders may not know what we’re talking about, they should know there is a whole lot of questions that they need to be able to answer, because many of their teachers and even more of their students can. Questions such as those can stimulate thinking and potentially shake up their minds to what they could/should be exploring.

Use Web 2.0 Tools to Capture Work, Facilitate Learning and Best Practices, and Keep Conversations Going

I also was disappointed because while there were ample opportunities to enhance the forum with web 2.0 tools the only one that was used was Google docs which was something added in by the facilitator and not already embedded in the class. The forum would have been a wonderful opportunity to introduce discussion boards, blogs, social networks, etc. that principals could tap into to begin building a global personal learning network with other leaders who have participated in this work. It also would engage them in a community where they could stay connected to like-interested colleagues, and keep the conversation going.

Another avenue I felt would have been enhanced with Web 2.0 tools was in the creation of personal action plans. Each leader has their own, but they don't have the option to look at exemplars, share, view, and learn from others, comment, connect or discuss. If they had an option to post the documents, share and get feedback, this would be an incentive to go back to the work and would make for smart and obvious follow up conversation with individuals supporting the implementation of the plan including those within a school and those outside of the school.

Final Thoughts

While I was disappointed with the un21^st Century-ness of my experience today, I do support utilizing this forum for leaders because they will come away with a lot. There are a ton of valuable resources and a tremendous amount of food for thought. It is also very well-thought out, planned, and better than most PD experiences. Additionally, I found more value from this forum then I did from my three days at Microsoft’s Executive Briefing where they could not secure laptops or internet for participants and none of the aforementioned suggestions were employed. Furthermore even at NECC, and the plethora of other PD experiences I attend, facilitators can talk a good game, but they aren’t modeling what they are preaching. That said, I think it’s up to Innovative Educators to push themselves to start using the tools and practices they talk about and provide experiences that are more engaging for 2.0 Learners.

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Microsoft Shares School Leader Development Tool

I’m at Microsoft’s Partners in Learning briefing where Marion Ginopolis is visiting from Michigan to present a School Leadership Development (SLD) instructional leadership tool developed in partnership with Microsoft used by educators and their community partners as a framework for thinking about 21^st century learning. The program has engaging and robust resources that can inspire and motivate leaders provided they have a strong facilitator. There is a facilitator guide that comes with the program. The program can be delivered in a way customized to your needs and can be delivered over about 8 – 10 hours. Below is an overview of the program.

School Leader Development: Building 21st Century Schools
Microsoft has partnered with John Bransford of the College of Education at the University of Washington and Little Planet Learning, a company that delivers custom learning programs, to create School Leader Development: Building 21st Century Schools. This instructional leadership tool for leaders of primary and secondary schools serves as a guide for creating a learning environment that prepares students for a modern world. The unique curriculum combines video, challenge questions, discussions, and expert resources to focus on the following issues facing primary and secondary school leaders:

• Dimensions of change within schools in the 21st century
• Guidance for student learning
• Strategies for success for all students
• Innovative approaches for education
• Strong leadership for all schools

Here is the School Leader Development overview demo. Microsoft states that you can receive this CD to use with school leaders. For more information, send e-mail to pil_lead@microsoft.com.

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Microsoft Prepares 21st Century Leaders

I’m at day three of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning briefing where Marion Ginopolis is presenting on a program for Michigan leaders called MI-Life. Below is an outline of the program Michigan uses to prepare school leaders for the 21^st Century.

MI LIFE
http://www.microsoft.com/Education/PiLUSLeadership.mspx
MI-LIFE is a stimulating, inspiring and challenging course designed for education administrators. The courses in the MI-LIFE curriculum have been developed by a core faculty comprised of Michigan educators who have had practical experience in the "real" world of school leadership and understand the day-to-day workings of schools. While the courses are research based, they are practical and applicable to the busy leader's daily life. It provides technology-rich courses that, when successfully completed, will earn school leaders a Michigan Leadership Improvement Framework Endorsement and 18 State Board Continuing Education Units (SB-CEUs.) You can out about the classes they offer at http://www.mi-life.org. All classes have these four components: 1) Learning 2) Communicating 3) Collaborating 4) Data Collecting.

The MI-LIFE Educational Leadership Curriculum is structured into four Learning Units comprised of “just-in-time” units and six courses that include face-to-face sessions, instructor-led online courses and learner-directed intersession work. Here are the courses they deliver:

Digital Leadership - What are the "Right Tools?"

This learning unit is divided into "just in time" sessions focusing on the Learning, Collaborating, Communicating and Data Collecting technology tools, resources, applications leaders need to complete the MI-LIFE courses and to become successful Digital Leaders.

Goal: Encourage educational leaders to be confident technology users/leaders

Your Leadership - What are the "Right Qualities?"

This unit is comprised of one course, Optimizing Leadership, which provides the leadership foundation for the MI-LIFE Curriculum. Leaders will focus on self awareness as they journey through interactive, introspective reflection on their leadership skills, behaviors and responsibilities. Since each journey into leadership is unique, every traveler will chart his/her own course based on the personal data which emerges from collected information.

Goal: Stimulate, inspire and challenge educational leaders to confront and cultivate their personal/professional leadership capacity

Data Leadership - What is the "Right Work?"

Identifying the “Right Work” for continuous improvement in districts/schools and classrooms forms the basis of the two courses in this learning unit.
Intersecting Data centers not only on what the data “says” but how the work may change when multiple sources of data are intersected and analyzed to create a more accurate district/school profile. Intended for non-statisticians, this course focuses on how to collect, analyze and make use of data intersections to improve all aspects of student achievement.

Goal: Motivate educational leaders to become adept users of multiple sources and types of data in decision making

Aligning Systems

The first of two online courses Aligning Systems, examines the interconnectedness among the elements that comprise the whole system to determine how a change in one area of the system may impact other areas of the system and how that influences the work to be done.

Goal: Provoke educational leaders to become system thinkers

Instructional Leadership - How do we do the "Right Work?"

Doing the “Right Work” requires the MI-LIFE 3C’s for Instructional Leadership:
Coherence, Culture and Capacity.

Coherence

The unit begins with Coherence, the second online course, which ensures that a process is in place for connecting curriculum with high-quality instruction and assessment followed by methods of monitoring and supervising to ensure that high-quality instruction is actually and consistently occurring in classrooms.

Goal: Equip educational leaders to become proficient instructional leaders

Culture,

Culture, the second course of this unit, explores the health or toxicity of the environment in a district/school. Learners develop powerful strategies to create the right culture for a purposeful and robust professional learning community that ultimately impacts student learning.

Goal: Prompt education leaders to develop healthy cultures and promote shared leadership

Capacity
Capacity, the culminating course in the MI-LIFE program, views leadership not as the sole responsibility of the building or district leader but as a collective, shared potential among many stakeholders. This course engages the learners in building capacity to focus on the concepts of principle, purpose, and people.
Goal: Increase capacity by developing a purposeful professional learning community

Of note: Administrators pay $500 to sign up for this program but the actual cost is actually about $1500. Participants can receive CEUs or College Credit. Participants receive an endorsement and certification. They are considering making this a requirement for certain leadership positions.

The folks at MI LIFE are interested in helping other school districts develop their leaders and are interested in working with others to bring this program to other parts of the world or country. To view the MI-LIFE Program Brochure, click here. To view the MI-LIFE Curriculum Syllabi, click here.

In New York we provide a program called iLead for school leaders. All or part of this may be a great follow up to our iLead program. I wonder how leaders at other school(s) are preparing to become 21^st Century leaders. I also wonder if teachers of principals who have attended these programs have noticed a difference.

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