Laura’s Blog

Being a “change agent” in today’s schools is not an easy task.  When setting out to change an aspect of the way a school works, the “agent” must be extremely knowledgeable about the intended change, adept at communication, and be thick skinned.  One person alone cannot make a change.  Instead, buy in from others must be built in a planned and thoughtful manner.  People  involved with the change need to know why the change is being made, what their part in the change will be, what the time line will be, and what the hoped for outcome is.  There will always be a small group of people who don’t want to change; however, those people cannot be given the power to prevent change for the good from happening.  If the proposed change is research based and matches the situation’s needs, it is important that we work together to make changes.

A Change in Thinking for Everyone

New ways of assessing learning are critical to supporting and encouraging the intended learning of 21st century skills.  Doing so requires a shift in thinking for all involved.  Teachers need to establish the criteria that demonstrates the learning before a project is assigned; the criteria needs to evaluate all aspects of the learning.   Learners need to be provided with appropriate flexibility and ways to demonstrate the learning that has occurred.  The learner also needs to be an active participant in both designing the learning and completing what needs to be done.  Parents and others need to understand the shift in learning, evaluating, and recording the learning that has been done.

There are so many other blogs to peruse throughout edublog, I could easily lose myself in reading, thinking, following links, commenting, and finding blogs to add to one of my RSS reader.

The 2 that I chose to comment on for this project were:

1. Electric Pencil-a sixth grade classroom’s blog.

2. Ed Tech Trek-a techie college instructor who seems to be into all kinds of technologies.

The number of new technologies is increasing exponentially!

How does anyone keep up with it?  Learning, exploring, and evaluating each new thing is time consuming.  Some of these things aren’t worth our time and we can quickly move onto another area to explore.  However, most of the time, we can’t keep up with the number of things we should learn about.  Often finding a personal tie in or reason to learn the technology is the best motivation for learning the new item.  Teachers I work with at school often do best with a new technology when they are able to use it to meet a personal need first.  Reading about new ideas (using RSS feeds, journals, magazines, etc.), taking with other “techies,” attending conferences and workshops, and listening to our students can help us find some of the new areas to explore and evaluate.

This course has been an interesting contrast and/or blend with parts of my “day job.”  My thoughts on which term-contrast or blend-is most accurate changes often!

Part of my job currently involves analyzing test scores in my middle school and language arts test scores through the district.  Further, I sit on and/or lead several committees aimed at Academic Performance Improvement.  Minnesota has, as do many states, tests in Reading, Math and Science that work to meet the requirements of NCLB.  As a result, our discussions and work at school tend to be focused on increasing skills that are of a more basic nature.

As I work through this course, my focus turns toward what skills are necessary for students to have for success in the 21st Century.  These skills of researching, evaluating, and communicating are as necessary as the tested basic skills our students need.

At times I wish it were so “neat and clean” that we were able to teach the “basics” in early elementary and then move onto the 21st Century skills.  Obviously it doesn’t work like that.  Instead the two areas alternately work in parallel formation often crossing each other and becoming intertwined.  Knowing how to best help our students acquire all of these varied skills is why education continues to be a challenge for all of us involved!