U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been advocating that, to meet the complex constellation of student learning needs, schools should extend the length of the school day and the number of school days in a year.

Now I don’t think anyone would deny that keeping kids in school for longer in dangerous urban areas keeps them safer and away from harmful temptations.

But does more time result in higher achievement, as Secretary Duncan advocates?

Not if the $100 million pilot program in Miami is accurate.  In Miami, achievement generally trended downward in the schools that ran longer. 

Read the Miami Herald article summarizing the project here.

A few days ago, I posted a question of where we are on the journey toward 21st-century learning.  It’s a huge paradigm shift.  And it’s a scary shift, especially for school librarians who sometimes feel like Henry VIII’s wives — things are good now, and we’ve got some sparkly toys, but some day, if we stick your neck too far out, the guillotine may come down. 

And what if out admin sees student-centered work as lazy librarianship?

(Think about it … it’s a fine line between backing away to let students fly independently and old-fashioned laziness …especially if you’re in a really big school and the principal doesn’t regularly observe your library.  In the olden days, if they passed the library and you were lecturing with a data projector, at least they knew you were “teaching.”)

How do we measure our growth? As our staff has been revewing 21st-century documents, they’re asking for some sort of checklist against which to measure their progress.  They’re looking for external reassurance and validation that they’re on the right track. 

Sounded OK when I first heard it.  But now I am finding myself in the middle of two very strong debate partners.

“A CHECKLIST??? That’s not constructivist!” say some of my deep-thinking colleagues.  “They need to create their own definition and then move to embody it, just like we’re asking students to do.”

“Yeah, but we’re busy and tired and don’t want to fall short of administrative expectations,” I hear teachers say back in my imagination.

“But if we give a checklist, and they define some items on the checklist in a thin way, they can have a false sense of mastery.  Instead of reaching toward the paradigm shift, they might just bend the checklist items to make them fit what they’re already doing.  Then there’s no real change — just new words to describe old practices.”

“OK, but my husband got laid off, we’re trying to support four kids on my salary, and one kid is throwing up … can’t you just tell us what you want from us?”

“Intrinsic buy-in?”

“Yeah, you tried that last time, and I bought into whole language, only to have phonics come back two years later.  Not sure I want to go there, but I’ll do whatever’s on the list.”

It’s a trickier issue than I once thought … bridging the divide between what could be (way) oversimplified down to a debate on intrinsic vs. extrinsic.  What do you think?

Portrait of Anne Boleyn from Wikipedia, with speech bubble added with BigHugeLab’s Captioner

As we near the final month of school, I’ve had lots of ideas rattling around in my brain about where we are in implementing the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.  How far have we come? How far have our colleagues come? 

The trilogy of new documents is now complete:

• Standards for the 21st-Century Learner – what students should know and be able to do, outlined as skills, dispositions, student responsibilities, and student self-assessment abilities.  In other words, it’s about students.
•  the Standards in Action — sample lesson plans showing how some librarians have envisioned implementing the Standards into their own practice.  In other words, it’s about educators.
• Empowering Learners, the program guidelines for school libraries.  It’s about budget, policies, and the roles of the media specialist.  In other words, it’s about professional responsibilities and administration (both by us and by our building and district leaders).

Even for those folks who have studied and mashed up the Standards for what is going on two years, it’s hard to find two folks who interpret them exactly the same way or pull out the same priorities.  We still see a bit of “information literacy in sheep’s clothing,” where we do what we always did but now call it 21st-century learning.  We still see teacher-driven lessons, with neatly typed up graphic organizers asking students to find answers to specific questions, claimed as “student-centered work.”  We talk about the Standards being about student responsibility but are still afraid to let them falter or fail for fear that administrators will attribute their failure to us instead of seeing it as a part of the iterative process of real researchers.  We still put 21st-century tools in students’ hands but hover carefully a few inches away “just in case.”  We’re scared of implementing the Standards too much in case our colleagues won’t buy in.

I argue that many of us — maybe even most of us — are in an early stage of our 21st-century learning journey. If our travel is a transformative one as we voyage from adult-driven tasks to student-centered inquiry, where are you on the trip? Where am I?

The best thing I’ve seen that demonstrates this idea of many-points-on-a-journey is AASL’s I Heart 21st-Century Skills contest.  The three finalists, whose videos can be viewed here, show us three very different visions of 21st-century learning and skills.  Which represents your vision most? Which represents where you want to go?

Image: AASL