The Smaller Office

Photo Credit: Angie Harrison

“We are inescapably facing the fact that the workd is too big to know. And as a species we are adapting. Our traditional knowledge-based institutions are taking their first hesitant steps on land, and knowledge is beginning to show its new shape.” ~David Weinberger~

What do we really know about the human brain? A lot more than we did 20 years ago; likely a lot more than we did even 10 years ago. Last night we watched an episode of the Nature of Things titled Surviving the Teenage Brain. In the doc David Suzuki guides us through an engaging and detailed hour that @techieang and I found both amusing, informative and terrifying~ a state that we know all too well as the parents of 3 teenagers.

I’m also reading David Weinberger’s book Too Big to Know and have been thinking a lot about how our systems will need to adapt to the adaptations that networked technologies are prompting among our children.

One of Suzuki’s key premises that the use of mobile devices and social networks are literally evolving the adolescent brain as it undergoes that natural neural blooming and pruning process that is the actual root of adolescence.

How are we going to respond to this? So far we have considered these tools as a ‘want’ for our students and have responded accordingly. Are we ready to adapt our systems to the prospect that this sense of being connected is quite likely a necessity for our learners? In other words, its a hardware issue, rather than software?

I’m working on 3 key things to help navigate this transition:

Inclusion- diversity is a strength and students and families who are quite likely connected, through networks, with hundreds of others around the globe will need to have schools that help develop the habits and dispositions of inclusiveness in order for there to be a respectful and productive climate within these networks

Inquiry- content and knowledge is no longer scarce and is no longer the property of the few, it is spread out across networks that overlap, refine and re-shape it through social processes that are almost infinite in scope. Developing the habits and dispositions to inquire; based upon rich questions and relevant, personal and meaningful interests is critical. The bucket-o-facts is too small to hold the answers, but more than useful for pouring out the questions.

Innovation- Hope is not a strategy. We can’t hope for creative and adaptive thinking to develop, we need to re-wire our systems to ensure that there is the capacity for innovation to become part of the culture of public education. Teachers and school leaders must be open to innovative practice and provide the support, structures to enable innovation to happen.

Please respond with suggestions and practices that you know of, or are wishing for, in each of these areas; I’m eager to learn along with you.

Photo Credit- Peter Harrison

“…knowledge is becoming inextricable from — literally unthinkable without — the network that enables it.”   ~David Weinberger

On a cold, snowy and windy Canadian evening, Royan Lee (@royanlee) and I braved the elements and met up for a chat in a cozy pub. Like all such chats our goal was to catch up on things, enjoy a pint and change the world. We chatted about our kids, our jobs, our short and long term goals and the challenges we face in each of these areas~great stuff.

We shared some excitement about Apple’s pending announcement and the prediction that they would be ‘entering’ the text book market in a significant way through the iPad platform. We both agreed, based upon the past evidence from Cupertino, that this could be a game changer for our profession; with a proviso, that is captured with this question:

How will our systems adapt to embrace innovation and are we open to the idea of ‘teachers as designers’? 

Networks, as David Weinberger’s quote stresses, have mashed and flattened knowledge (what we have called content) to the point where it is  fluid as it is spread out in the minds and experiences of those who dwell in networks. We put in, we take out in a manner that is alarming is it’s ease and rapidity.

Many school systems are only now understanding this fluidity, as they struggle with the transition from a fixed, block and control  mindset~where information flows out  from the center (or top) of the organization in a controlled manner and the avenues that teachers, students and parents have to put information ‘into’ the system are strictly controlled and regulated.

Controls and regulations are not bad things, they are actually essential for the operation of any network. The idea that  Royan and I wrestled with was how Apple’s foray into content would alter our work as teachers. The use of content apps and the creative tools present in the ‘cloud’ creates an opportunity for teachers (and students) to collaborate (on a huge scale) to interpret,design and create ‘content’ for learning. All of this in a well-managed and strictly regulated network. One thing we know about Apple is they have the whole hardware/software and network integration/regulation thing figured out.

You see, one of the things that educators struggle with in the area of social networking and collaboration is trust~we don’t trust the openness of these platforms and we don’t really trust, in a deep way, their professional knowledge and judgement. This why we tend rely upon centrally produced text books as the carriers of content and shy away from using blogs and SM tools, too few of us are using these tools.

In a world where content is created by the members of the network, and the capacity to connect to create content texts is available in a seamless, all be it messy, manner teachers will need to be designers. And school systems will need to adapt in ways that will allow these networks to function.

If we do, it would be a remarkable evolution and provide the impetus for a radical, necessary shift in how the teaching profession views itself and is viewed by others.

Cross posted at http://www.connectedprincipals.com/

Photo Credit- Angie Harrison

I sat at the back of the the room (as usual) with a few dear colleagues at our last monthly administrators’ meeting listening to my friend and colleague Stephen Louca give a brief talk about the role and impact of social media in the area of leadership and learning. Stephen supports our schools and teachers in the area of technology integration and is a very smart, and very engaging, presenter.

Stephen was sharing some of the ways social media platforms are used by students, teachers and school leaders to connect and extend their learning. He shared some tweets, examples of ways Moodle, Facebook and Edmodo are used in education and then took us to some administrator blogs to illustrate some of the ways principals and vice principals were using blogs. He shared two compilation sites; the excellent Connected Principals blog as well as our growing ONT CLblog and then moved on to highlight some individual administrator blogs; at which point my blog, The Smaller Office, flashed up on the screen for all to see. The heads swiveled, en masse, to the back of the room as Stephen asked if I’d mind giving a brief explanation on why I blog.

Now, the whole point of blogging is to reach out to the world and make some sort of statement, to put oneself out there in a literal sense, so the fact that this attention had come my way did not provoke too much anxiety on my part. The interesting part for me came at the break a short time later, when some of my colleagues approached me to talk about blogging and ask a few questions. Usually, when I’m asked the question from this post’s title it is asked using a curious tone, or one that hints at the “how do you find the time” angle. There are those rare times when the question is asked in an accusatory tone- as in “why do you blog?”.  Of course, in the blogosphere we ask this same question of each other every  time we post, with the emphasis placed on “Why do you blog?” , or perhaps more appropriately; “Why do I  blog?”

So, why do I  blog? I started blogging as a grade 7/8 classroom teacher as we were evolving from using reading response journals towards a more collective and dynamic process for writing about what we had read. In this domain, the students and I summarized, posed questions and challenged each other as readers and writers, as soon as I set this environment in motion, there was no turning back for me. The idea that the thoughts and questions and voices, of my students and myself could be heard in such an elegant and seamless manner was powerful and empowering. As I left my classroom to become a VP, I left too, the richness of this environment and spent two years away from blogging.

As I moved into my role as an elementary vice principal I began to blog again as I was preparing for our district’s principal selection process. My Supervisory Officer had suggested that I write about my leadership experiences in a reflective manner, connecting my experiences to the Ontario Leadership Framework and capacities as a way of preparing for my Principal Dialogue. As a response to this suggestion, the Smaller Office was born.

I still blog for the same reasons I did as a classroom teacher. My posts allow me to express ideas, opinions and questions in a way that is both personal and public. I’m part of a broad community of teachers, students, parents and other school leaders who challenge me, engage me, make me think and help me in immeasurable ways. Ontario principal Shannon Smith blogs  ”to participate in the conversation about what needs to be happening in education to continue making it better.” B.C. principal Chris Wejr’s blog posts and the responses he provides to my posts challenge me to think about the harmful effects of many traditional school practices and the ways school leaders can navigate towards more engaging and collaborative schools. Ontario teacher Royan Lee’s posts and responses are rich in student and teacher voice and provocative; often prompting me to formulate a response that becomes a blog posting of my own. My York Region colleague Greg Collins’ regular posts on the Lorna Jackson PS school blog serve as a model for the transparency that I aim to achieve as a principal and a blogger. These are just a few examples of a ever expanding community.

Mike Schmoker uses a term I love to describe what an authentic learning community ought to be; argumentative literacy. You see, it’s not that  I’m connected through blogging that matters to me, it is how and why I’m connected that matters. How the tools of the web connect us and make response so efficient and seamless is critical. Equally critical is the notion that writing is a tool for thought andcan be driver of collective and individual change, sometimes the tools do matter. The give and take, the back and forth, the discourse and discuss, the visible and meaningful arguments about important ideas;  these are the reasons I  blog.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.