Two themes are emerging in what I’m learning here at ISTE 2010. These aren’t new ideas by any stretch, even to me. It’s just that they are being driven home in very powerful and deep ways.

The world is small and flat. Not precisely in the sense that Thomas Friedman meant in his book, but in the sense of connections and relationships. As I said yesterday, I can hardly turn around anywhere without seeing someone I know, or meeting someone I’ve conversed with on Twitter. Today I met Jeff Agamenoni and Sue Waters, from Montana and Australia respectively, and with whom I have chatted many times over the last couple of years. (Sue, of course, reminded me almost immediately that I forgot to bring her the chocolate I promised her. And then I took her seat in the Blogger’s Cafe. Great way to treat someone I’ve just met.)

When our students leave our schools, they are going to land in a world where they need to relate not just with people who live and work near them, but with people around the world. It’s not optional any more. Everyone is your neighbor. Distance is now measured not in miles but by your ability to connect with different channels. The more communication tools you know, the closer you are. Kids are going to have to be able to find people and be found, to build their own digital homes and tell their own digital stories.

Which is the second theme I’m seeing over and over:

Design is an essential skill. Garr Reynolds in his book and blog, Presentation Zen, talks about how often people treat design as an afterthought, as though it’s decoration to be painted on after making the content. But design is much deeper. It is ultimately about effective communication and facilitating connection. If a valuable message is obscured by poor design, the message will lose power, or the recipient will give up before it gets through.

Just as kids have to learn how to connect with the world and manage those connections, they have to learn how to effectively use the principles and tools of design to enhance their communication. The only way we will ever be able to teach those skills is to use them ourselves.

So my first takeaway from the day is that all educators, not just the ones who like that “technology stuff,” have to become connected and become designers. It’s not optional anymore, because we will be putting our kids at a disadvantage if we don’t get there.

I am soon going to need a new car. The one in this picture would be just about perfect. Care to donate to my replacement fund? Yeah, didn’t really expect so.

So why is it that you’re not willing to help me get the transportation I need? Because you can see that what I’m asking for is really a want. It may very well be that my car needs to be replaced soon, and having reliable transportation is in fact important to me, but there’s no real reason I need to spend almost $67,000 to get it.

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Social networking, if you believe half of what you read, is a 21st-century, Web 2.0 phenomenon that has exploded onto our culture through our youth.

Anyone that was around before the Web was even a 1.0 knows this is hogwash. Social networking has been around as long as there have been humans. The older I get, the more I understand that everything comes down to relationships. My success as a teacher, in particular, depends far more on the relationships I develop than it does on what I know or my pedagogical skills. There are many technology tools that I’m learning to use to strengthen and grow those relationships.

But the more I think about social networking, the more I realize that we’ve had them in our schools forever. They’re called hallways. Classrooms may be where instruction takes place, but they are essentially private islands, isolated from the school community. The hallways are the public face of the school, and they are where the connections happen. I’ve observed a few things taking place in hallways over the last few weeks that I’m convinced make schools operate well and make the learning that takes place in the classrooms more effective.

Classroom “Home Page”

As I walk through a school, I can sometimes get a glimpse of what is going on inside a classroom through the door. More often, though, I only know about the class through their public face: the hallway space just outside. Some teachers use this internal building “home page” to the fullest, giving us ongoing, developing pictures of what the students are learning and their growth over the year. In my experience, these classrooms and these teachers are the ones generating the most learning.

Courtesy and Respect

Within a classroom, the students and teacher negotiate over the course of time an understanding of how things will work. Often, the rules–stated and unstated–can vary widely from one room to another. I visit fourteen different classrooms besides my own every week, and I see so many different sets of procedures and expectations for behavior it is sometimes difficult to keep track of what is appropriate in each.

But the hallway is a different world. Out there, everyone in the building, as well as the larger community, have to function with more broadly accepted rules of courtesy and respect. It is in the hallways of a school that many young children first learn the concepts of passing on the right and stopping at intersections. They need to learn how to travel as a group, and when to allow others to have the right of way; how to be aware of others’ personal space and respecting the learning going on in rooms as you pass; waiting your turn, navigating new spaces, and handling responsibility. (Do you remember the excitement and anxiety you felt the first time you were chosen to be the messenger?)

Collaboration and Planning

We teach in an inclusive environment today which requires more than possibly ever before that teachers work together and share responsibilities within classrooms. The reality of school schedules means that a significant amount of that planning happens on the fly. It is common for me to run into a colleague as I pass by in the hall and we will stop to have an impromptu meeting to discuss a student or plan an upcoming lesson together. The hallway is sometimes the only opportunity I get during a day to see and interact with my fellow teachers.

Community Infrastructure

Within a school comprised of individual classrooms and grade levels, the hallways provide a means to develop a larger, building community. Office bulletin boards, parent spaces, the school store, the main lobby, and hallways outside common areas like the gym, cafeteria, and auditorium, are all opportunities for developing the unique climate and character that defines a school. The hallways in a school set the tone, and can tell you a great deal about how tightly connected the network there is. I can often sense within a few minutes of walking into a school what the climate is like and how people will interact there.

Some of the best schools turn hallways into additional learning spaces, too, by setting up areas for students to work and putting up activities and information. One school I visit, for example, has a “Word of the Week” posted outside the library. Students and visitors walking by can’t help but see the display and think about the intriguing vocabulary word as they walk by every day.

(As an aside, I was struck as I was searching for a photograph to accompany this post that picture after picture showed vacant, sterile hallways with little or no decoration, and in most cases little or no color at all. It makes me wonder if the instruction going on in those buildings is similarly vacant and sterile.)

Hallways are what connect the disparate pieces of a school into a community. Hallways are one of the ways that real relationships can occur in a school, and the members of the community need to recognize their functions and importance–as well as their limitations–in order to make the most of them. We can think of hallways as simply a way to get to the rest room or the office. Or they can become a place where we join together with our colleagues to build a network that can deal with the challenges confronting us in our efforts to make learning happen.

Hm. Sounds just like the “new” 21st-century, Web 2.0 social networks.

Yesterday I wrote about feeling conflicting emotions about truly making a difference in education. This morning I read an article by Lisa Parisi which scores a point for hope against futility. If enough teachers could really get on board with this and really live differentiation instead of just talking about it, maybe we could start to turn the ship. Now how do we coordinate the effort and have more impact? One blog post at a time, I suppose.

What ever happened to striving for excellence? In schools today, it is now about striving for proficiency. Students are expected to perform at a proficient level on state assessments. Schools that aren’t meeting goals for proficiency are censured. There is no incentive whatsoever for schools to encourage students to perform at the advanced level. A student who scores perfectly on the state assessment counts exactly the same as one who barely crosses the proficiency threshold. But to many people, this is now what it means to strive for excellence

Robert Sternberg, in a recent issue of Educational Leadership, asks what it means for a school to be excellent. Too often, a school’s own definition of excellence is defined by the performance of a subgroup of students. The school looks solely at the improvement in performance of the bottom students, or the very top, or perhaps that group just on the cusp of proficiency. He argues that instead, schools ought to focus on excellence for all students, and that the numbers will fall into place as a result of that changed focus.

According to Sternberg (2008), in addition to the traditional 3 R’s, we also need to be teaching students Reasoning, Resilience, and Responsibility. I believe this is particularly important for gifted students, who can often learn the basics of academic content quickly but have more difficulty with these “Other Three R’s”. What if when we compact the curriculum for these children we were to focus our enrichment work on teaching these new skills?

Unfortunately, they can’t develop in a vacuum. All three skills (and, I would argue, all of the traditional three as well, past a certain level) require students to interact with others on a deep level. But how can we do that when we may only have one student in a classroom (or perhaps even in an entire school) who can move quickly into this area of learning? Certainly we want to provide these opportunities for all students on a regular basis. But Reasoning, Resilience, and Responsibility can be more of a centerpiece for gifted students who are capable of engaging them at a depth that other students may not attain until much later.

One solution to this is to provide more opportunities for gifted students to interact with their intellectual peers. Creating situations where this is possible can be a challenge, however. If there are only a few gifted students in a school, even when they are all together, the level of interaction is not high.

Online tools can provide a way to expand the connections for our gifted children. Andrew Torris recently wrote about how social networks and online collaboration can help educators to be more engaged with each other in their own professional development. Many of the same arguments he gives, and indeed, many of the same scenarios he describes, apply as well to gifted children in our classrooms.

I have recently experimented with using a wiki to allow students from multiple schools to work together and interact on a common project. There have been some successes and some challenges, and the level of interaction so far is not high. But even at this very basic level, my students have gotten a glimpse of the power of networking, and as my own professional network grows, I hope to find ways to add to my students’ network of colleagues.

Torris ended his article with a powerful video. I’m including it here also because it emphasizes the importance of sharing, collaboration, and learning to network. Watch it twice—once from the perspective of your students, and once with your own professional growth in mind. Then think: How can we begin to move back towards excellence, first in our own lives, then in our instruction, so that all students can gain meaningfully from their time in our classrooms?

References

Sternberg, R. (2008). Excellence for all. Educational Leadership, 66(2), 14-19.