The Mob vs Collaboration

It's funny how a quote can get  your back up, if you're in a mood. "None of us is smarter than all of us." did that to me this morning. It got me thinking about individual responsibility to act in ways that are morally correct, for some reason. While collaboration is critically important in helping solve problems, there are times when the individual and the sense of personal resolve stand in the face of mob thinking.

The American election process comes to mind. The vitriol being spewed by media-seeking pundits (Ann Coulter's use of the R-word to describe Obama is the latest example.) borders on hate speech, sometimes. How is the group identification, in this case, an example of intelligence? Sometimes, the individual's buy-in on group values or group belief seems to suspend intelligence.

Another concern I have is the increasingly rapid-fire discussion on education reform. Why has this become increasingly urgent. Are we losing students from our schools in record numbers? Do we have more drop-outs? More failures? Fewer suitable candidates for university and the world of work? Yes, reform is important, but why is there a sense that public education is a complete and utter failure and must be changed NOW! Not tomorrow, but immediately. How is this smarter than the individual teacher in his or her classroom dealing with the children in that room? The sense that the person who is actually working with the children is being asked about the reforms is not present. It is yet another thing being "done to" teachers instead of giving teachers time to explore how they want to integrate the good research, practice and ideas that are being thrown at them almost daily. When teachers finally are freed from administration "pet projects", as they are sometimes called in my district, perhaps the reform will happen in a way that sustains both teachers and students.

The Elephant in the Room

I had the terrific opportunity to participate in my local principal/vice-principal's association professional development with Alan November today.I was both grateful for the opportunity and very excited, because as a teacher librarian, I've been using November's strategies and tools to become more information literate and help students for a few years now. I was so surprised and disappointed to see such a limited turn-out for a respected leader in technology, information literacy and education reform. The upper administration of our district and senior staff at the BC Ministry of Education have made no secret of the fact that education reform that will use social technologies is the direction education is moving in this province - indeed, it's moving that way all over the world.
Having just finished reading Will Richardson's Why School? and Michael Fullan's Stratosphere!, I'm a little fired up on change. Add in my current course work on Learning Theories and Education Technology and I'm sure I can be positively irritating. (I'm holding onto the irritating tag - pearls are produced from grains of sand that irritate clams. Yup, I'm irritating!)  I agree with November, Richardson and Fullan that technology alone is not the panacaea for the challenges facing education today, but Fullan certainly makes a case for incorporating new pedagogical strategies along with technology and change theory to implement necessary changes more quickly. Richardson is also absolutely correct that vilifying teachers will not solve problems, either. All three of these leaders see a need for leaders to lead by example and today, while I saw some leaders trying new things, I also observed skepticism, inertia and a reluctance to engage - almost a mirror of the problems I've heard teaching colleagues speak about when working with students.
I find it somewhat ironic that November calls on systems to value and use the skills that qualified and trained teacher librarians can bring to schools. For several years now, many of my t-l colleagues have been using the tools that November demonstrated at this workshop. Not all my teacher librarian colleagues have mad technology skills and information literacy skills, but the elephant in the room was that many of the people in the room today seemed to be very ...tired? Nervous? Cautious? Reluctant? It was a quiet room. It seemed that November had to work hard to get responses and the responses were (from a technology early adopter's point of view) disappointing. It seemed from an outside observer position that leadership in technology use is not even close to being a priority in this district for school-based leaders. If our leaders aren't going to demonstrate to staff and students what it means to be a technologically capable educator, then it becomes really hard to require staff to take on the skills that students and parents are hoping to see in our buildings. If principals and vice principals are too busy to use technology tools, then our buildings need teacher librarians as part of the leadership teams. Teacher librarians must be pro-active in demonstrating to students the skills necessary to be web-savvy and information literate. Unfortunately, the places that most need more teacher librarian time are our elementary schools and those are the places that have seen the greatest loss of teacher librarian time. It's a vicious cycle and one that needs to be addressed by all the stakeholders in the system. It's time to start some pilot projects because doing nothing isn't going to make our current system any better. The elephant needs to start moving!