Industrial Model to a 21st Century Model

This week I have spent a lot of time researching how we should design and change our current structure of the high school education delivery from the industrial model to a 21^st century model. If you have been reading my blog, you know that this year we went to a one to one iPad program with students. The next step for us to fully utilize this tool for education is to evaluate our current deliver model.

What I envision for our students is more of an open structured campus that will allow students and teachers to meet and work in both small and large group settings in a new more applied curriculum where students need to apply knowledge to real world problems. After reviewing a number of journals, videos, and papers on this topic, I have developed several questions that will need additional research.

1.     Most of the research alludes to project based learning that incorporates inter-disciplinary units. This requires teachers to ask higher thinking, critical thinking, and guiding questions for students to discover their own learning. What types of professional development do we need for teachers to make this transition from delivering content to facilitators of knowledge?

2.     To facilitate the type of educational model necessary, traditional bell schedules and sorting of students is not going to be practical. How do you develop a master schedule that supports learning in this type of environment?

3.     Changing from the traditional model, how do you design a model utilizing a building built in the early part of the 1900’s?

4.     How do you change the expectations of your community, parents, teachers, and leaders to support making the dramatic changing that you envision as the future of education?

I think everyone in education realizes the professional development, professional learning communities, and inclusion of teachers in planning is critical to success of any change. But how do we realistically change the entire industrial education model to a 21^st century model quickly and efficiently?

Reflecting on One to One

As a One to One school, reading and learning all that we could prior to and during implementation, one important factor missing from most research we read was pedagogy. While everyone agrees that pedagogy has to change in a One to One environment, there are may different opinions on how it should change. Project Based Learning, Flipped Classroom, Individualized Instruction, online courses, using Apps in the classroom and the list goes on. These are all wonderful techniques that teachers can use at certain times in the classroom but teachers need time to plan, experiment, and reflect on each of these modalities to see what best fits their teaching and expertise.

As a district, we started a full year prior to student iPad implementation with professional development of our teaching staff. We allowed the staff to use, experiment, and test applications on the iPad for the student and classroom. With that in mind, we did not tend to an important area of need in this preparation, instructional pedagogy. As with any teaching staff, you have some teachers who need additional support for improvement of instruction. I think all teachers can always improve in the teaching and learning process that is what life long learning is all about. As we move forward, our professional development focus will be on instructional planning and pedagogy.

It is obvious which teachers planned, experimented, and reflected on uses of technology in the classroom.  While most of our teachers are using the iPad in class to a high level some, which we did expect, have not embraced the technologies usefulness to enhance instruction. The questions that we raised are did our planning for implementation fail or was our expectation for our professional staff to high? Did we have enough professional development? Or did we fail to cultivate the basic need for our staff, instructional pedagogy?

As we have completed the first set of instructional rounds, we have identified a large number of staff members who as seen as experts in the classroom. During our PLC meetings we will begin to address the needs of some of the staff in pedagogical strategies and planning. Our focus for professional development will be to use the staff that we have seen as exemplar to train and assist other staff members moving forward.