This is a draft of an assignment for class. Its semi-outline right now. Comments welcome.
Schools are irrelevant. Schools are boring. Schools don’t allow me to be me! What percentages of your students agree with these statements? Mark Prensky writes in the journal Educational Leadership (December 2006) that educators must “Listen to the Natives”. Students have grown up in a world completely foreign to most adults. Digital devices have become an extension of their bodies. They operate comfortably in a multi-task, global, collaborative, strategy based environment.
How can school leaders deal with the growing dichotomy between a technology-rich home life and a technology-poor learning environment in schools? Will the gap continue to increase? What strategies can leaders use to close the gap? These are questions that led me to focus on Prensky’s article.
Summary of Leadership Issues:
Prensky sums up his point at the beginning of the article; “Schools are stuck in the 20th century. Students have rushed into the 21st”. The gap between students and schools is widening, and it is accelerating. Solutions that rely on 20th century views of students, teachers, and learning will not close the gap fast enough.
Teacher selection needs to change. Instead of choosing teachers for subject matter knowledge they should choose them based on their guidance abilities. Teachers must practice engagement before content in their teaching. Students understand engagement. Students are used to working in a collaborative, global, strategy based environment. Students are highly engaged in a technology rich after school life. Digital tools are an extension of their brains. In most of the industrial world schools embrace digital tools such as phones and iPods. Students have a internet delivery device in their pockets. In Britain it is common for students to submit work using their cell phone, which is checked with a voice print. How often in American schools are high school students oral communication skills assessed? Maybe three to five times per year in oral reports? This could be 3-5 times per day using current technology.
Collaboration must increase and we must model this behavior. Students should be an active and equal part of teacher and administrative meetings. How would teacher professional development days change if students choose the workshops?
Avoid irrelevancy. The gap continues to grow between student life and school life. Will schools become just a credentialing institution existing only to produce a piece of paper that parents want?
We have all seen the student after school that is playing an online game (with other students from Japan and Bolivia) while talking on their mobile phone with their school friends, while listening to their iPod, and…..eating a snack. These students come to school and we give them 80 lbs of textbooks, a pencil, and 10-15 papers per day to fill out. They rarely if ever see a computer (and often they take a special trip to a lab to see one). Technology and computers are simply not part of the daily life of almost all American schools.
This growing irrelevance of American schools is a “big issue”. A leader of schools of the 21st century must break the molds of 19th century schools that we still live with. We currently have high school students taking classes online with instructors they never see face-to-face. Is it impossible that a town would say “lets not build that new school, provide the town wireless access, and outsource the teaching jobs to India”? Online learning at annual cost of $4,000 per student. No infrastructure. No capital costs.
No Child Left behind has begun to reorganize schools and educational leaders must quickly start “Listening to the Natives”. We must collaborate with students on providing a technology-rich environment that develops independent learners and thus avoid the growing irrelevance of American schools.