The Buck Stops Here

David Warlick's post, "Contemporary Literacy: Who and When" rang so true with me. In it he discusses Jon Pederson's post's Challenge to the New Information Environment. Jon asks the following question:

What percentage of adults have the required skills to a) navigate this environment and b) be critical consumers of information? Can we expect our students to be proficient with these skills when adults aren’t?

David responds with the following:
This is an excellent question, and I’d love to see the percents myself.  Pew Internet and American Life project has a lot of good statistics, but I’d answer the question this way. The adults who have managed to gain these skills are those who had to. People who work in professions that have access to networked, digital information and owe their success to decisions based on that information, have gained those skills, or else they don’t do it any more. You learn it when you have to. It’s called life-long learning.

What’s really hurting our children is that most teachers don’t have to. They can continue to teach with five-year-old textbooks, cut off from the world by four solid walls, and experience the success that their leaders expect. They won’t teach contemporary literacy, because they don’t need it themselves, because they’re still working within an antiquated industrial age institution.

This really came home for me last night. I am experimenting with an electronic mentorship project on Tapped In  where my graduate pre-service education students explore 21st century learning concepts with seasoned teacher leaders from the Teacher Leaders Network. It is a win-win kind of strategy where accomplished teachers are willing to immerse themselves in social networking tools in an effort to offer electronic mentoring support to pre-service teachers in the field and during their student teaching experiences. The teacher leaders benefit by exposure to electronic communication tools and the confidence of these net geners in using web-based learning strategies. The emerging educators benefit because they get "just in time" solutions to the problems they are facing in the classroom with age old teaching strategies and classroom management. The students benefit because the preservice teachers are better teachers earlier in their careers and have 24/7 support for problems as they arise and they are allowed to learn in meaningful ways as a result of the information shared in the class and the project. The point I want to make here is while I see over and over what David refers to as "dont do it because they dont have to"-- these teacher leaders do it because they "want to". The motivation is they want to give back to the profession and to do so they are willing to master technologies that are new and challenging to them.

Last night--I caught one of my students (preservice teacher) online. He was in the mood to chat. He shared that now that he was midway into his education program he was questioning his decision to go into education. His disenchantment came from the disconnect he was seeing in his education courses. He complained that while we were advocating constructivism we were assigning behavioral type assignments to carry out in the field with students. And that his cooperating teacher was not modeling  anything close to what he was learning about.  That students in his class had never worked in groups and barely could read and when they did it was simply calling words from a page. That there was no wonderment or excitement about learning and certainly no "technology as a medium" examples to follow.

I started thinking. You know I have often said you cant give away what you do not own. If I do not own a car- I can't loan or give one to you. If I do not own contemporary literacy- how can I give it to you? Maybe these K-12 teachers feel they do not need it because it was never given to them. If teachers of education do not own it--which seems obvious by the way we structure our classes and our reluctance to embed the concepts we are advocating in our assignments and assessments, then how can we expect to pass it on? How can we expect to give to our preservice students what we do not own and in turn, how can we expect these emergent teachers to think they "have to" ?

While I agree with David and Jon that principled changes in K-12 education is desperately needed-- I think we have to start at the root of the problem first-- Colleges of Education.

 

Comments

[John Pederson]

I really, really like the "You cannot give away what you do not own" idea as well as the "contemporary literacy" piece. It simplifies something that has been difficult to get out of my mind.

The concept of "ownership" is why we blog. It's why inidivdual blogs are much more successful than "group blogs". It's inidividual, it's "me", it explains why teachers that I blogvangelize to instantly want to create their own blog and dont' quite understand the importance of reading others' blogs.

You opened a whole new area in how I see this right now.

Colleges of Education...yeah...important. Great start. It needs to somehow happen within the system as well. We surely don't have 30 years to give in order for people to move through the system. I'd argue that we can't wait another 5 years. :O) I'm impatient though.

So much to think about....I'll be revisiting your post within the next few days. Thanks for making my day!!!

[Nick Noakes]

I agree with John, that you need to do this at the system level. All places, K-12 schools, colleges of education, etc, at the same time. If you only start with the colleges, then graduating teachers will end up working in contexts that don't support/integrate what you are trying to change and the colleges will be accused of not preparing teachers properly for the reality on the ground. A road we've been down so many times in the past in lots of different education systems around the world. I hope the graduating teachers end up in the schools of the mentors you are using in Tapped In .... is the mentorship through Tapped In also being used to aid placement upon graduation?

[thebizofknowledge]

Sheryl, as a longtime educator, I was very interested in your post and found your comments extremely thought provoking. You really made an excellent point that you can't give away what you don't own. Well said and timely!