scott klepesch's List: Leadership

• I believe we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning.

  • It is about a revolution not reform. The world has experienced a revolution as a result of technology. Schools cannot simply adjust.
• That’s not to say, we don’t value the work and the commitment of those who have been fighting the long battle. We do, tremendously. But we also believe that sometime an “outsider’s” perspective can help us see what we don’t see. Wasn’t it Henry Miller who said something like ‘One’s destination is a new way of looking at things.’

• any students who struggle in a traditional learning environment now have the opportunity to attend a “virtual” school, where they can learn at their own pace: Advanced students are not held back by the slower pace of their peers, while students with disabilities have more time to understand the material before moving on. Parents in rural communities who home-school their children because of the time and distance it takes to travel to the nearest brick-and-mortar school can have the support of a strong online curriculum.
• “I believe the blended model is the future of education,” says Darren Reed, vice president of hybrid schools and programs for the online-education company K12 Inc. “With a traditional school, you label kids with the terms ‘above grade level,’ ‘on grade level,’ and ‘below grade level.’ But that can be misleading. A kid can know a certain skill within a subject really well, and not know another skill within that same subject at all. With a hybrid model, we can tailor their learning, using technology and face-to-face learning, in a way that we might not be able to in a pure traditional model.”
• The learning lab model also could be used to teach additional foreign languages, beyond the Spanish and French typically taught in schools today, or to help students who are behind in certain classes catch up and excel.
    Another use of the learning lab model might be for rural school districts to attract or cater to home-schooled children. Often, these rural areas are less wired than other areas of the country, and students might not have high-speed internet access at home. In the East Valley School District in Spokane, Wash., for example, home-schooled students can come in to a learning lab to get the technology piece of their education.
• The YCCS Virtual High School’s campus is located at the Malcolm X Community College. Students who have dropped out of Chicago’s public schools can sign up for the virtual school and attend classes online at the college. Students spend 60 percent of their time on campus and 40 percent at home. The classes run in three-hour blocks, from 9 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. each day. One hour per day is direct instruction from a teacher, while the other two hours see the students using the K12 curriculum online; two teachers for each class of 24 students help facilitate during the online portions of a student’s in-class learning.

  • What would our drop out rate look like if we offered virtual options
• This schedule makes school flexible for the students, many of whom have jobs or other responsibilities they’re trying to juggle—yet it meets Chicago school law by having students attend three hours per day at a physical school location.

  • Tghink about MHS school population

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• In a word, that’s bunk. If we can’t engage our kids in ideas and explorations that require no technology, then we have surely lost our way. Big questions, passion, personal interest are what should drive our use of technology, not the other way around.
• You want to really engage kids? Give them opportunities to learn personally, to create their own texts and courses of study, and to pursue that learning with others in and out of the classroom who share a passion.
• As a high-school English teacher, I was flipping in the classroom in 1983, having my students read the literature at home and come into class ready to discuss it. That was flipping the curriculum, but it still wasn’t flipping the control of the learning. By assigning the lecture at home, we’re still in charge of delivering the curriculum, just at a different time. From what I’ve seen, flipping doesn’t do much for helping kids become better learners in the sense of being able to drive their own education.

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• To help them prepare for the upcoming conversations, seven relevantly accomplished professionals were invited to spend eight minutes each sharing their insights about school leadership and culture.  They included a former superintendent, international educator, a director of education for a large Canadian school district, a developmental psychologist, executive director of the (Canadian) National Staff Development Council, president of a large chain of grocery stores, a professor of sociology ––– and me.
•  It no longer seeks to make readers.  It makes master learners, people who can successfully learn, unlearn, and relearn. **
• Our information landscape has changed: in what it looks like, what we look at to view it, how we find it, where we go to find it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. We all engage in content generating conversations through blogs, twitter, YouTube, and what ever is to come. We can no longer believe it, simply because it was written down.  We are more than information consumers today.  We are participants.
• To become literate, students should learn within an information environment that exemplifies today’s information landscape, where discussions of an idea’s validity become part of learning the idea.  We must learn to be responsible participants.
• Today, habitually questioning content is required. It is a foundation of being literate
• The answers to the test questions are changing.
• According to a 2010 Bowker report, 2009 saw 1,829 new books published in the U.S. about agriculture.  5,131 new books were published about computers, approximately 9,000 each about business and education. 14,281 brand new books were published about history – new knowledge about history.  As we gain more access to information and to each other, the new knowledge that we generate as a society not only astounds us, but it is forcing us to redefine what it means to be educated.

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