Inventing the Future for Our Students

As superintendent of a one school K-8 school district, I have the advantage of seeing the entire continuum of our students’ experience all in one place.  We recently began registration for our kindergarten students that we will welcome in August 2014.  We are responsible for creating their educational experience that will help them be successful for not only the next nine years (K-8) but for the eight years (high school and college) or so of school that will follow that in addition to their life beyond that.  We need to project what will their experience and their life be like 9 or 13 or 17 years from now and begin to prepare them for that.  This is both exciting and scary at the same time.  

At the same time, we are getting ready to send our 8th grade students off to high school.  As we prepare to say goodbye to our 8th graders and welcome our new kindergarten students, I have been reflecting back to August 2005.  That is when our current 8th graders started kindergarten. I did some digging to remind myself of how things were in 2005.  

• Did you know that four months before our 8th graders started kindergarten YouTube was launched?  Did any of us predict at that point that by the time they graduated more than 1 billion unique users would visit YouTube…EACH MONTH!  Who would have thought that the YouTube channel for the band One Direction would have over 12.6 million subscribers?
• iTunes was only selling music when they started kindergarten and made up a little over 4% of the music industry market.  A quote from a November 21, 2005 article indicated "Apple Computer's iTunes music store now sells more music than Tower Records or Borders, according to analyst firm the NPD Group.”  iTunes recently sold its 25 billionth song and has sold more than 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies. iTunes users are spending $1.75 billion a year on videos alone and iTunes accounts for $6.9 billion a year spent on digital music. In addition, the App store has hit over 50 billion downloads and Apple has paid out over $10 billion to developers.  
• Facebook only had 5.5 million users.  Today 1.184 billion people are on Facebook.
• Twitter was created in the spring of their kindergarten year.
• Just before they started 2nd grade, the first iPhone was released.  Now many of them have the 4th or 5th generation iphone.
• In fourth grade soon after they returned from winter break, the first iPad was released.  

The bottom line is that when today’s 8th grade students started kindergarten, none of us would have predicted things as they are today.  As I mentioned at the beginning, in August 2014, a new group of students will start kindergarten at Park View.  It is our job as educators to prepare them for success in the future.  We don’t know what that future will look like but it is safe to say that it will be continually changing.  New tools and new opportunities are created every day.  What it means for us as educators is that we need to continue to learn and grow and adapt to provide the best educational experience we can for our children.  Years ago a colleague of mine gave me a pen for my desk with a quote by Alan Kay that says, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  We need to continuously work on improving what we do and inventing and reinventing the future for the sake of all of our children.

Cursive? Keyboarding? Hmmm...

I shared this with my Board of Education last December...thought I would pass it on to others.

Recently on my RSS feed I’ve seen a couple of headlines come across that made me think.  One was “Tim Cook ‘ditched’ physical keyboard, uses iPad and iPhone 80% of the time” and the other was “Some states preserve penmanship despite tech gains”.  As I read the two articles I thought back to my Typing class in my junior year of high school (80-81).  We used typewriters in that class and were excited that we actually had some electric versions.  At that point we didn’t have a sense of what might be coming down the road…

In 1980-81, who would have thought that we would come to a point of:

-       using word processors instead of typewriters to create documents?

-       sending many more emails than we do letters or cards?

-       texting our children and our friends more often than we call them?

-       using an RSS feed to get our daily news rather than the paper newspaper? (I admit that we still get the Sunday paper at home but it is mainly for the sale papers…and now for many of those “there is an app for that”).

When students who are currently seniors in high school were in third grade (2003-2004), the iPhone was still three years away, iTunes was just being launched, and the fifth Harry Potter book was released.  Now we are on the iPhone 5, iTunes has expanded into music, movies, books and more and all of the Harry Potter movies have been seen by millions.

Our current 3^rd grade students will graduate from high school in June, 2022.  At that point who knows how they will be capturing and sending information.  Will they still use cursive at all?  Will home row typing as we currently know it be on its way out in favor of “thumb-typing”?  Will tools like Siri make most sharing voice-activated?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but there is one thing I do know.  We need to make sure we don’t restrict the potential opportunities for our students because of how we learned or how we did things in the past.  If we did, we might be considering implementing 1:1 electric typewriters rather than 1:1 iPads. 

There is a quote I keep on my desk by Alan Kay that says “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  It is our job as educators to continue to invent the future for our students.

Why consider 1:1?

Why do districts or schools adopt a 1:1 laptop/iPad/tablet initiative?  Some may do it to provide the resource to their students and because it is a direction that several districts are moving.  They may be trying to “keep up with the Joneses”.  Others may approach it with the idea that “if you build it, they will come”. In other words, they provide them to an entire grade level and then work to build the skills of the teachers to help them develop ways to use them in the classroom.  In some cases, these teachers may not have been interested in moving in this direction.

We took a different approach in District 34 under the leadership of our ED of Educational Technology, Brian Engle.  We started with the question of who is interested in exploring the use of this tool and is committed to fundamentally changing your instructional practices?  We had several teachers step up and express a genuine interest and desire to do things differently instructionally.  We have teachers at kindergarten, first, second and fifth grades involved in the project this year.  All of these teachers were strong instructionally to begin with and their students were growing and performing well.  They were all looking to take the next step. 

We met with this group yesterday and to a person they shared experiences where students were able to take more ownership of their work, students had more opportunities to reflect on their learning, teachers were able to provide students more frequent descriptive feedback, and students were able to create products quickly and more efficiently than they were ever able to before.  Students in our kindergarten bilingual classroom have recorded themselves reading at school and at home and been able to share these with their parents and their teacher and all can hear the progress they are making over time.  The teachers all indicated that they can’t imagine going back because they don’t know how they would be able to provide the learning opportunities to their students that they have this year. 

The conversations yesterday drove home the point that a 1:1 initiative is not about the tool, it has to be about the learning opportunities and the changing instructional practices in order for it to be truly meaningful. 

Leadership is an Art

Max DePree is my favorite author on Leadership.  His book Leadership is an Art has shaped who I am as a leader and I revisit it periodically.  The ideas are simple but profound.  As he defines leadership he states "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.  The last is to say thank you.  In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.  That sums up the progress of an artful leader." 

Serving others is a key concept that leaders need to keep in focus.  A leader needs to be willing to provide the support to others to help them be successful.  That can mean sitting down and helping someone problem solve a situation or simply listening as someone talks through a challenge they are facing.  A leader doesn't need to solve every problem on their own but needs to support the people they work with so they can develop effective solutions.

For anyone in any type of leadership role, I highly recommend DePree's book.  It will help shape your thoughts and approach.

This is my first blog post.  Over time I will share thoughts, stories and tidbits on leadership, particularly focused on the field of education.  Please share your feedback so I can continue to learn and grow.