Doug Johnson just posted a thoughtful reflection on the benefits he received from his guides during a recent hiking trip. He praised them because they (and I quote):

1. Pushed us to do things we might not have done on our own.

2. Modeled things that encouraged us to do things we might not have done.

3. Showed us things we might not have found.

4. Demonstrated technical proficiency/best practices.

5. Smoothed the way.

He concludes by saying: 

Why does learning in school have to be so disagreeable to so many students and teachers when we all know learning itself can be about the most fun one can have under the right circumstances. Maybe a little more guiding and a little less “teaching” might make even school a better place.

We school librarians are a strange breed: we are leaders, but also peers.  We have administrative functions but also teach and do clerical tasks. But this list reminds me of the power of our role as professional development coaches as well.  We have to know what we’re doing (#4), make transitions easier for our colleagues (#5), model a desired outcome (#2) in order to move colleagues (#1), in large to small ways, toward even better instructional practices (#3). And we have to do it all without appearing to be a know-it-all, a bossy personality, or a shill.

It’s a delicate balance but, when we get it right, it’s powerful.

A few years into the project, Philadelphia’s Microsoft School of the Future shows that there haven’t been as many paradigm shifts as imagined. 

One of their findings resonates with me as our district infuses our upper-elementary classrooms with more and more technology. Kathleen Kennedy Manzo’s Education Week article points out a classroom in which the general instructional paradigm is still in place despite the addition of digital tools.  She says:

Today, however, a visitor would be hard-pressed to decipher how the school is fundamentally different from a typical high school, aside from the superiority of the facility.

The furniture is new, but students still sit facing the front of the room where the teacher is using an interactive whiteboard to write standard algebra problems. The class bell rings every 45 minutes to send the 750 students to the next period. And during those periods, valuable class time can be spent taking attendance, correcting rude behavior, and even sharpening pencils, as was the case on a recent day early in the school year, before each student was issued a laptop.

The article raises this obvious question, which we school librarians must consider seriously in our role s building curriculum and technology leaders: Has the learning experience changed if teachers are still in the front with a whiteboard and kids are still in rows, even if the whiteboard is interactive and the kids have laptops? Does the technology infusion matter if they’re learning the same old content in the same pedagogical style?

A few days ago, a reader blogged about how she worried that my new afternoon gig doing staff development both embedded in classrooms and after-school was taking time away from kids.  The questions raised by this article reminds me why I took the gig: to do everything I could to make sure we weren’t doing more of the same but with more expensive digital pencils.

Need some (free!) resources for promoting the AASL Learning4Life implementation effort (which includes promotion of the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, the Standards in Action book, and the Empowering Learners guidelines)?

Look no further.