Change - Time - Knowledge

Our High School Action Planning Committee has spent the 2006 - 2007 school year organizing and familiarizing themselves with the authentic applications of technology in our classroom instruction. It would be irresponsible of me to avoid mentioning several key obstacles we as a district face, when trying to build on the momentum of change so many of us have begun throughout this past school year; however, I have given it much thought and wanted to share with the readers of this community of practice, several important points that must be identified and addressed, in order for our work to continue down a positive and productive path. The hope and intention of this comment is to begin an open discussion, that would search for a solution to the problems of change.

• Educational change, and the pace of change, is driven by technological innovation and the pedagogical demand to accommodate individual learning styles (thoughtful education), and a growing need to engage students, amidst growing cultural awareness of global competition. Failure to maintain a pace in one area, creates a ricochet effect.

• One often misunderstood element of change that convolutes progress is the concept of synchronization and horizons of time. Districts that pursue multiple initiatives cannot expect a complete synchronization when the pace of change is inherently based on desynchronization. The culture of change that our community of practice is striving for, cannot sacrifice research and development, experimentation, trial and error, to meet imposed deadlines, which are often imposed by outside forces, whether political or economic. The culture of change becomes more complicated when change involves multiple levels of the organization, each with its own ecology of time. In a nut shell, fights over synchronization disrupts operations, especially the most important partnership necessary in educational change, the partnership between administration and the teaching staff.

• The reality of any culture of change rest on the facts that educational change traditionally responds on a ten or twenty year schedule, affixed to industrial time tables (bus schedule, bells, periods, yearly budgets, standards, etc). The emergent economy driving much of the change within education, operates on radically different temporal principles. Personalized markets and products create personalized time tables.

• So what does this all mean beside the now famous phrase "shift happens"? Our greatest challenge for the 2007 - 2008 school year lies with the need to come to some understanding that desynchronization is quickly becoming a part of the educational evolution of the Iroquois School District. How we as a group, committed to providing the most authentic, engaging, fulfilling educational experience for the students of the district, manage the manner in which we as a group, building level, department, and individual, approach our role in this effort of change. This will more than likely thrust many of us outside our comfort zone, inherent to our industry. Teachers and administrators will need to focus on engaging in revolutionary instructional practices, that move beyond traditional roles, and focus on a more student-centered learning environment.

• Furthermore, we are operating in an era where knowledge is not longer finite; rather knowledge is configured into broader and higher levels. The economics of knowledge in the 21st century cannot be looked at as it were in the industrial age, where knowledge was perceived as a scarce resource. Essentially, with digital technologies, knowledge has become inexhaustible. The industry of education must move beyond the mass production and consumption of knowledge, and begin to leverage the technologies to administer differentiated instruction with an understanding that the knowledge supply is expanding exponentially.