NOW Classrooms Leader's Guide. Meg Ormiston
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students will graduate into this changing world of innovation and technology, and we need to do our very best to prepare them for this age of acceleration. As a school leader, you need to take charge of implementing that plan to bring innovation to your school—not just technological innovation, but an innovative approach to teaching and learning.
Eight Administrators Walk Into a Classroom …
Eight visiting administrators walk into a classroom. It sounds like the start of a joke, but in fact, it was the genesis of the NOW Classrooms series. Here is what we saw there.
It was a second-grade classroom, and groups of students were huddled around a device, actively engaged in creating a script for a video project on mammals and their habitats. Some group members were checking facts collected from various online and print resources, while others were sequencing the script or choosing digital images. Students worked in pairs, trios, and solo, but their interest and engagement in the project was obvious in every configuration. Not one student stopped learning to look at the eight visiting administrators, but when asked, each could explain the purpose of the project in his or her own words. The teacher monitored student progress, supported group problem solving, and reminded students that the project was to be published on the classroom web page in two days.
Across the hall, a third-grade class prepared for its Mystery Skype to start. Mystery Skype (https://education.microsoft.com/skype-in-the-classroom/mystery-skype) is a Microsoft Education initiative: a classroom sets up a Skype session with another classroom, and the students in each class must ask careful yes-or-no questions to determine where in the United States the other class is located. Sitting in teams, the third graders in our building took a few minutes to share strategies for locating the other class, making careful choices about what questions to ask and systematically planning the order in which to ask the questions. Each team’s table contained a printed map of the United States and a Chromebook showing Google Maps. Once the session started, the teams eliminated states from the map based on the other class’s answers, and they began to zero in on a location. The students were excited to see their questioning strategies in action and talked excitedly about how best to refine them.
In the building’s learning center, groups of first graders prepared to film their group book trailers. Every group was independently working on all different types of projects using a variety of tools: apps, laptops, an interactive whiteboard, large paper, digital cameras, books, and a green screen. Every student from each group could explain the learning goals of the activity, as well as the process his or her group had gone through in planning for their trailers.
We all wondered, “Is this kind of engagement normal?” The principal confirmed that it was; students learned like this every day in his school. It was common for him to walk into a classroom and see highly engaged students collaborating on challenging projects and lessons that were aligned to specific learner outcomes. Technology often supported this learning work, and teachers purposefully designed lessons to focus on communicating and critical thinking. The classrooms were rarely quiet.
The Series
Afterward, as we excitedly talked about our school visit, we tried to figure out how best to capture this magic and spread it to other classrooms. Our hope was to help leaders everywhere create schools where active, collaborative, and engaged learning happens for all students, all the time. As a result, we outlined this leadership book that afternoon, along with the four grade-band books of lessons in the NOW Classrooms series.
This is the first series we know of that details technology-driven teaching and learning from kindergarten through high school, as well as from the point of view of administrators and building leaders. We intended it to be a potential framework for any school district interested in bringing systemic change to classrooms at all grade levels. What an adventure it has been to write it, and we hope you find this book and the others in the NOW Classrooms series useful!
Introduction:
The Future Is Ready Now
When you walk into a magical classroom, such as the ones we described in the preface to this book, you see change in action. Students lead most of the conversations, and all decisions start with the specific short-term goals that the students formulate. The teacher uses formative assessment data to support students, helping them to make connections as they collaborate on a variety of tasks to meet their goals.
Are there digital tools in the classroom to support the students? Yes, but there are also paper and pencils, books, and much more. In other words, the focus is not on the tools, but on the student-driven learning. All students are laser focused on their personal learning goals as they work on rich, realworld problems that are important to them.
You can feel the energy in these magical classrooms, which we call NOW classrooms. We selected that term because our students deserve to thrive in rich, learner-centered classrooms now, not in a few months or years. We believe schools are ready to create this type of NOW classroom, typified by technologysupported teaching and learning, and the evidence we’ve seen bears this belief out. Our goal with this book and this series is to help you create it.
Teaching Before Technology
When computers first became available in schools, students in K–8 could typically only use technology once a week during scheduled computer lab time due to a lack of hardware, infrastructure, and wireless access. Although home environments changed dramatically in the years that followed, few school systems had the finances necessary to replicate the technology-rich environments that students were quickly becoming accustomed to at home. Therefore, access to technology via scheduled weekly computer labs remained the norm for some time, and students’ experiences in school could not come close to equaling the innovative creative projects they often engaged in outside with immediate access to a wide variety of devices. In fact, Bill Daggett, president of the International Center for Leadership in Education, often explains this clash of cultures by saying that students leave their homes, where technology is integrated into their daily lives, and then enter the museums we call schools. Similarly, Gayle Gregory and Martha Kaufeldt (2015) claim that most of what adept digital natives commonly have access to at home is prohibited in school.
Outside of school, students have ownership of their learning; whenever a question occurs to them, they can research the answer using technology, or they can imagine and use digital tools to create whatever inspires them at the moment. Such authentic, integrated experiences engage students in learning. As Patti Drapeau (2014) states, “Students are motivated when they feel there is meaning behind what they are doing, which results in taking action” (p. 63). Engagement is inevitable, according to Gregory and Kaufeldt (2015), whenever students communicate, research, analyze, and problem solve real-world, authentic tasks. And as Bob Sullo (2007) tells us, “When teachers and kids are having fun, learning is deeper and stronger, and students maintain the keen desire to learn” (p. 9).
Yet this sustained engagement is in sharp contrast to the way that many administrators and educators structure schools and classrooms. In many schools, this model is changing as devices become more available, but the change has not been an easy one for teachers to adjust to. However, transforming teaching and learning is essential to start preparing students for the demands of today’s workplace. Therefore, our team hopes to inspire classrooms, schools, and districts to shift their focus to promoting sustained engagement and collaboration among students.
The Race to the Device
Our broad, shared vision starts with a shared frustration. Over the years, our entire team has experienced many different forms of what we call the race to the device. There have been many different devices of the year: tablets, Chromebooks, interactive whiteboards, specialized software, subscription services, and other innovations. In many districts, there is such a focus on acquiring and delivering these miraculous devices to students that they leave many other technology-rollout details to chance. Yet as our co-author Steve says, actually purchasing devices is the easiest part of the process. The big picture of teaching and learning involves a far greater number of