Innovative School Cultures

This article on "Crowd Accelerated Innovation" is quite interesting, especially the day after our district wide inservice.

The opening line of the story on crowd accelerated innovation is this, Perhaps my greatest professional passion these days is promoting innovative schools cultures, and particularly ones which facilitate our students in becoming innovators.

And there certainly needs to be more of that. There was plenty of that was on display at our professional development sessions. When examining the class list, I saw a number of innovative ideas offered. My concern is that we all were exposed to these neat and nifty and innovative ways of teaching, but are we really going to do anything with them? Are we going to use them and make them part of our curriculum?

Another worry I have is that we simply don't have the best and brightest in this profession. Not you can say that I'm being a pompous ass here - and I probably am - but I work hard, love what I do (no, I don't do teaching. This is just who I am. It's no job or even a mission. It's a life.), connect with my students, and get them to do some pretty relevant things. So call me a pompous ass. I can live with that.

But I too often see people in these session who do not belong in public education!

Since I was actually presenting a session in the third course slot, I was unable to register for sessions. So I just decided to drop in on a couple of sessions that looked interesting.

The first one was presented by a friend of mine, Gene, and it was devoted to becoming an effective teacher. While I sat down, I noticed that another presenter also decided to drop in on Gene's session.

Gene started discussing how we approach such areas as curriculum, assessment, and classroom management. There was a pretty good discussion going. We were contributing and Gene was rolling with it.

Then he asked how many elementary school teachers we had in the session. Two hands went up. Gene called on the closest one - the other presenter who was sitting in the front row.

He asked her a simple question about her classroom practices, and here's where I observed what I loathe about education and what makes me want to join forces with Rhee and Duncan in their quest to purge teachers from the field: the teacher/presenter looked like a damn deer caught in the headlights.

Seriously?

You're an educator. You're in a great environment with others of your profession. And you're supposedly going to be presenting to other teachers later in the day!

And you can't even answer a simple question.

I couldn't help but thing, Oh, Lord what kind of damage is she doing to her elementary classes if she stumbles on this?

I'm sorry, but if we are educators, we need to model a love for learning, dedication, passion, interest. You know - all that stuff we expect from our students.

We need to show it off and strut our stuff when we have the chance. Not look like we were just asked the million dollar question on Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?

The best way to improve our schools is exactly what the author of the above article focuses on: promoting innovative school cultures.

Now our keynote presenter was great. He was uplifting and motivating. He had a great message. But I don't really need a reminder that teaching is a mission not a profession. But I can use a reminder on how to better use my SMARTboard or how to engage students better in discussions and how to really assess what my students learn.

What I love about this article is that it focuses on web 2.0 tools and it seeks to kill the age old idea that we teach in a vacuum.

Too often we enter our rooms and shut our doors and that's it. We are in charge and run the show.

My College Comp II class has taken off because I've stopped closing the door, so to speak. I've started bringing in other people (other teachers and business people) to speak to my kids. I've invited teachers with third block prep in to model strategies for us. I've contacted professors to enter into dialogue with my students. I've had former students come in and share what it's like to be in college. I've had students generate feedback - usually via text message or interview - asking for their peers'/parents' on what we're studying.

All of this is done to keep that door wide open. And now upon reading this article, I realize I have to do so much more of this.