Walter’s blog archive: http://surfaquarium.com/blog.htm

Note: since I will be on travel a good part of the coming week, I am posting an excerpt from an upcoming book to share on the blog this week. I hope it resonates; feel free to share with colleagues.  -Walter

A new age demands a new paradigm, and educators are on its precipice. Much like doctors, scientists and engineers are evolving in their practice through the benefits of new technologies, so must teachers. You wouldn’t accept care from a doctor who is still practicing medicine the way he did forty years ago, would you? Students should have access to all kinds of technologies and a variety of experiences for making use of them. Not rote, artificial experience; not didactic, how-to experience; but meaningful, authentic, real-world, experience that matches the demands of the twenty-first century workplace. Our challenge as educators is to provide an education that is consistent with our students’ Information Age experience and future. The good news is to accomplish this you don’t have to be up on every new trend and gadget. Rather, teachers must holistically reconsider the way they have designed and managed their learning environments – their classrooms – so that they are conducive to the ubiquitous computing of our time. 

The industrial age is over. You can pound that old pedagogy the way John Henry pounded steel, but in the end you will have to concede to the realities of our times. John Henry’s identity was in his sledgehammer, and like him, if the only tool you have is a hammer everything around you will look like a nail. What does this mean? It means that the classrooms of today – not of the future but the here and now – must be designed and managed to promote collaboration, creativity, problem solving, research and management of all kinds of data using a set of digital productivity tools that accommodates all the different ways we learn. No more drill and skill, no more instruction by textbook and worksheet as if they were the curriculum, no more one right answer, no more learning to earn a specific grade or teaching to pass a specific test. Even computer labs are going to give way to handheld technologies in the classroom. 

Recognize the ways you were taught as a student. Embrace them and appreciate them for the time in which they served you well. Then let them go and move on. Think of the greatest teachers you ever had. Do you think they would still be using chalk on slate if they had access to the kinds of tools we have at our disposal today? Great teachers adapt and learn throughout their lives. Great teachers are never satisfied with yesterday’s success. Rather than holding fast to an old paradigm, they help explore and define the new shift in thinking. Honor those innovative teachers who instilled in you a love for learning and a desire to be a teacher yourself; carry on their legacy as a pioneer and innovator in your own time.