21st Century Teachers

My child participated in Destination Imagination last year. The task was to build a structure that could hold a certain weight and have certain forces act upon the structure. He and several other 9 year old children worked for weeks engineering a structure. Like many children, he has a younger sibling. In the first five minutes of the group working on the first day, the younger brother walks into the room, takes a shoebox, flips it over, places the weight on it and states, "Like this?" He is immediately shouted out of the room and his structure ignored. Months later, the children still didn't have a structure as the now long forgotten 5-year-old's product.

In education, like many professions, we often miss the forest from the trees. We get caught up on the next challenge, such as "college & career readiness" or "PARCC" that we lose track of the greater goal. We, like the children working diligently building their structure for Destination Imagination, are so busy looking for solutions to the next challenge that frequently we forget the tools that we have in front of us. For school districts, typically 60% of the budget is teaching staff, 85% of the budget is personnel overall. These are our biggest assets, yet frequently we are looking for the next software, the next publisher's program that will be less than 1% of our budget to provide the solution. Yes, we miss moving the big rocks because we are distracted by the newest pebble.

The overall goal of Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards, and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning is to prepare students for a world that we cannot predict. The challenge is for children to be able to manipulate information, utilize skills creatively, collaborate together to make new innovative solutions, critically analyze situations, and communication internally and externally to ensure the challenge is solved appropriately. These skills aren't partial to any particular time period, but rather products of all time periods. The most innovative members of every society demonstrate some of these attributes. Furthermore, societies have risen and fallen based on their capacity to implement these skills.

What I don't understand is why we as educational leaders believe that in order to build these capacities within children that we should provide children with a lock-step path requiring teachers to teach with the same recipe provided by a software developer or textbook publisher. The dialogue goes like this:

Administrator: "I want you to teach or children to be innovative and critical thinkers."

Teacher: "Great, we are going to have lots of challenges and problem-solving activities at their level."

Administrator: "Absolutely, they are all in this book. Just follow a chapter at a time at the same pace as your colleague in the other school. Each chapter contains appropriate challenges for children each from a different diverse ethnic minority that is thematically appropriate for your children's age. Also, there is a specialized software program that complements each chapter."

Teacher: "Ok, so how are they supposed to be creative."

Administrator: "Each unit has creativity challenges."

Dutifully, the teacher goes into her room, follows the pacing guide, and executes the same learning experiences in the same order as her colleague in the other school. Children receive the same experiences and create the same outcomes. Clearly, while having a consistent experience that exposes the children to knowledge, none of the actual 21st century skills are developed by either the adults or the children.

If we want our students to be 21st century learners we need to embrace our classroom leaders as 21st century teachers. District and building leaders need to outline the challenges, analyze the data in partnership with their instructional team, and cultivate the opportunity for the team to create innovative solutions. We need to embrace the publisher materials, whether traditional or digital, as tools to help us accomplish the learning and growth for our students rather than full-scale solutions for all of learning. 21st century teaching requires leaders to trust their teams to work together, share, innovate, and try new things in order to promote growth. We can't expect these skills in the students if it is not part demonstrated by the classroom leader.