:Connecting the Dots

Today I got away to Tech Forum NE, a regional technology conference sponsored by Technology & Learning magazine, and spent most of the day thinking about professional development.  I find myself frustrated by the whole topic these days: tired of hearing teachers complain, “why aren’t we being given time to train for this?” yet groping to find a model that goes beyond the superintendent’s conference day and the one-shot click-here-drag-there workshop.

It’s a model that served us fairly well when there were a few applications and no one knew anything about technology.  For motivated teachers, it was enough to get them started down the road.  Others lagged behind.  And all the while the pace of change increased, the number of tools multiplied, and the demands on teacher time continued to rise.  The most interesting question of the day today was one that was posed to a panel that included David Warlick and David Jakes: do we want teachers to achieve mastery of discrete tools or to become master learners?  Clearly the answer is the latter, but how do we get there?  How do we motivate and empower them to learn on their own instead of reinforcing a model of spoon-feeding and dependency?

It’s a project I’ve been working on for many years now, but with few successes.  Today we talked about personal learning networks, building learning communities, online learning– all of the things that are supposed to help make that transition, all things that I’ve tried with mixed results, at best.  What’s missing?  We know there are 21st century skills; we know schools have to change; we know technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace; we know more now about how adults learn than ever before: so where is the professional development to make it all click?

In a roundtable on “professional development successes,” I really rained on the parade by airing these frustrations and asking where the table was for “professional development failures.”  The silver lining I eventually found was this: the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, and at least I – and I suspect many others – are there now.  So what will 21st century professional development look like?  What’s act II?

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I’ve always been a fan of focused, incremental professional development. Find a few areas that are “ripe” and work them hard with whatever group of teachers you happen to be helping. I talk with a building tech committee and ask them what they think we should be focusing on and we’ll throw around a few topics and that largely sets my agenda for part or all of the school year. For example, at our high school, we made a push with wikis during the spring, and a few of our teachers made important steps forward in their classrooms.

But David Warlick’s got me thinking that, especially with the constellation of web 2.0 technologies, maybe each tool can’t be taught in isolation from the rest. In a post on “Tying It Together,” he discusses one teacher who approached him recently and said that she was finally “getting it” after seeing a presentation on web 2.0 and personal learning networks:

She continued that she knew about and had played with blogs, wikis, and RSS, and understood them functionally. But she said that after this conference she saw how they all worked together, that there really is a new connectedness today where information flows in logical and directable ways, connecting us not only to the content we need, but to the people we need, not merely because of proximity — but through the content.

Maybe trying to teach teachers about blogging without introducing them to RSS and wikis is a mistake. Maybe the “focus on one tool at a time” approach is robbing teachers of the context they need to understand how these technologies support and reinforce one another and, taken as a group, represent a whole new communication paradigm.

But who has the time? With so few hours for professional development, how can we effectively introduce teachers to “the whole enchilada” in a way that is meaningful, in a way that connects with classroom practice? And does such an approach result in information overload? Is it better to ask teachers to try to swallow the whole web 2.0 thing at once and then go out and integrate it with their practice or to keep them moving along a slow and steady path that may prevent them from seeing the big picture, a path where one tool is forgotten/discarded by the time the next one comes along? Our teachers are standing on the deck staring down in to the giant pool that is the read/write web; do we structure professional development along the lines of toe-dipping or cannonballs?

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