Over the past few months, as our district continues its quest for 21st century learners and professional learning communities, and as I’ve attended AASL Fall Forum and our state media conference, I am reminded of how busy educators are. A huge percentage of an educator’s day is spent not planning for instruction, but actively engaging in instruction.

A while back, I read The Google Story, in which I learned that Google employees may spend 20% of their time working on projects that are personally meaningful to them.  20% of their time — roughly one day per week — can be spent pursuing personal interests, not Google tasks.  

I remember reading and thinking that if only teachers got that time to explore new tools, collaborate with one another, redesign instruction and assessments, and bone up on best practices, our profession would be quite different.   

Instead, most educators receive only a sliver of their paid time as duty-free, and that time is usually spent with grading, bureaucratic paperwork, reviewing the day’s inbox (digital and paper), answering parent communications, and standing in line at the copy machine. 

My thoughts were echoed in David Warlick’s blog entry today:

The teacher-day is virtually unchanged from the classrooms I attended in the ’50s and ’60s.  Think of lawyers, surgeons, or even farmers.  Do they spend all of their time in front of juries, in operating rooms, or in the fields.  No!  An important part of their job is research, collaboration, reflection, resource development, and professional development.       

Now think of factory workers, who spend all of their time on the assembly line, installing parts.  And think of teachers, spending all their time with students on a conveyor belt, moving through kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, while we install math on them, reading, science…  Education is still an industrial age institution, trying to address information age problems.  

Those of us who teach in Michigan are acutely aware of this tension.  Many of us view ourselves as information age educators, yet we recognize that we have factory roots.  We recognize that when auto assembly line workers unionized,they paved the way for teachers to organize for better benefits and working conditions.   

Yet we are painfully, acutely, frighteningly aware of how quickly the industrial age is disintegrating and how ineffective “conveyor belt” education is to meet the needs of our students’ uncertain future.  Huge numbers of the parents in our school work for General Motors or auto suppliers, and most of us have relatives in the auto industry.Our state faces the possibility of retooling two generations at a time: our current students in the public schools and universities and those current auto employees facing unemployment, those with both white and blue collars.

And our state’s tax revenue is the primary funder of education, a change from local education funding that occurred about 14 years ago that was designed to better equalize the per-pupil funding statewide, especially for students in low-income areas.   As those automakers and suppliers face diminishing income, that translates into less state tax revenue, which results in districts having already hacked millions of dollars out of their budget each year for the last several years … and that was before Congress declined to make a loan. 

Now I don’t deny that the auto industry has its share of bloat and unsustainability.  But what I do want us to realize is that our students’ future and its present are on the line. 

So here is our challenge: how do we continue to promote the kinds of innovation and changes in practice that the Standards for the 21st Century Learner, NETS*S, ASCD’s Whole Child, and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning propose? 

We’ve got to keep pushing for professional development in these areas.  And if the districts cannot or will not prioritize professional development for learning (a key component outlined by the Partnership), we’ve got to do it ourselves with study groups or after-school meetings or professional reading or paying our way to conferences.  

I know we school librarians are busy, but we can be key players in offering this professional development and helping to move staff forward, especially if we have flexible scheduling time.    

Many of you are out there doing this already via email newsletters, wiki tutorials, informational notices posted in school bathrooms, staff meeting presentations, ad hoc meetings with individual or small group staff members, or formally-scheduled professional development sessions.   

The new challenge is to reinvent ourselves  beyond “click here and then click here” procedural PD and help to raise the bar of conversation to include the student learning (the cognitive skills, dispositions, self-assessment, and responsibilies), or the thinking behind the doing in school. 

And no document I’ve found is more specific about breaking down the vision for successful student learners than the Standards for the 21st Century Learner.  As the holidays and our much-needed vacation approaches, take some time to curl up under a cozy blanket and read them.   Come back in the new year ready to talk about them with colleagues inside and outside the school.Image: One Gear in a Clock by Flickr User G & M (Neil Stewart), used with a Creative Commons license.�

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If you’re looking to make connections between the AASL Standards and 21st century student learning, take a look at this Boston Globe editorial:

If students are to succeed in today’s complex economy, they need to know more than just English, math, science, and history. They also need a range of analytic and workplace skills. So says an important new report on 21st-century skills, which concludes that though Massachusetts schools have made impressive progress in the last 15 years, many students still don’t graduate with the abilities today’s jobs require.“In our high schools, we need to prepare our young adults to be college and career ready,” says Gerald Chertavian, chairman of the state board of education task force that prepared the report. “Unfortunately we are not in that position today.”Indeed, a depressing new study that headlined Monday’s Globe found that though Boston sent some 64 percent of the class of 2000 to college, seven years later only about 35 percent had actually graduated. Further, according to a recent study by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, state employers say high school graduates lack essential job skills.Mastering those skills means learning how to think critically and creatively, work collaboratively, use the Internet to do research, and communicate clearly and effectively. Students also need to be responsible and accountable, to be up on the news, and to have a workable knowledge of economics and business.

Responsible? Accountable? These fit in with our AASL dispositions. Collaboration? Critical thinking? We find them in the AASL Standards, too.  More ammo for your toolkit if you need it!�

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Glory, glory! Sometimes, I read stuff and am amazed with how it resonates with what I’ve been thinking about.  That’s how I felt reading David Brooks’ op-ed piece in Friday’s New York Times. He argues that we need to be talking about the cognitive age, the thinking processes that ultimately drive decisions.  He talks about how politicians are spinning globalization and its impacts as a campaign issue.  He sees it globalization differently:

We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

It’s not that globalization and the skills revolution are contradictory processes. But which paradigm you embrace determines which facts and remedies you emphasize. Politicians, especially Democratic ones, have fallen in love with the globalization paradigm. It’s time to move beyond it.

Isn’t this what librarians have been claiming for years? Aren’t you glad you’re in a profession who put forth such visionary new standards that address this perspective so well?  Here are our new AASLfour guiding standards:

1. inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge;
2. draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge;
3. share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society;
4. pursue personal and aesthetic growth.

I love it when we’re ahead of the curve. Now if only I could get my classroom colleagues to tell jokes based on Dewey numbers.  Did you hear the one where the 636.7 met the 636.8 in a dark alley?  It was no 398.2, let me tell you.  But it was one for the 031’s.   Ouch.  Maybe not.

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