Rethinking the Learning Ecosystem

Special Educators and ELL teachers are awesome. When it comes to content,  they are jacks of all trades, learning each subject area at every level. They find out the information, translate it, and make it meaningful to our neediest students at a variety of levels. These teachers focus on the most important challenges by focusing on each child first and foremost. One of the most memorable Special Education teachers that I had the opportunity to work with was Pam. She knew each of her children's skills, needs, and personalities. Each day she walked in with four bags, 2 in each hand, filled with binders and papers. Often they would be put down three times as she walked the long hall to her classroom so that she could conference with teachers on the way into school. Each day in her classroom multiple student groups would be doing a plethora of activities. Each day, she would walk out with four bags filled with binders, papers, and assessment data as she worked to plan for her next day.

Pam spent many years in our field making a difference for students. She, like so many teachers, was an extremely hard worker who found ways to create connections from the silos of materials that we handed teachers in Social Studies, Science, Reading, Language Arts, and Mathematics. As a leader, mentor, and difference maker, each day she gave all that she had to change the lives of children and families. As district leaders, we certainly didn't make it easy. We purchased materials, this program for Math, that program for Social Studies, this basal for Reading but those Guided Readers go with. Each day, 4 bags of binders went home and 4 bags of binders came back. The digital age in education did not come soon enough for Pam.

So often in education, we confuse the resources with the curriculum. As teachers, principals, and district leaders we frequently say: XXX corporation Mathematics is our curriculum rather than in we are focusing this trimester on Geometry and we will be using tools from: XXX corporation, YYY company, and ZZZ conglomerate. Many of us have bought into the recipe rather than the entrée. As instructional leaders, whether it's because it's past practice, it's easy, or it's what our colleagues are doing, we purchase a recipe and say deliver this and our students will learn what they need to learn. Sometimes that worked, sometimes that didn't either way 10 years later we bought a new recipe book. However, in the digital age, this is no longer necessary. If we focus on developing solid curriculum objectives we can use websites to connect our objectives, our learning targets, our resources, and our assessment tools. We can make those "hyperlinks" that pull together the assessment data we have gathered with the best resources out there to help students master the next learning targets for that objective. These resources no longer need to come from one source, but instead we can choose tools that are the best activity for accomplishing that learning task. We can connect supplemental learning experiences, web quests, challenging games, and videos, to the curriculum objective. And whether we choose a google doc or a web page, we can wrap these great experiences together in one interactive document.

In the educational technology world there is a term called "App-Smashing." It means putting to computer applications together to make a better product. This may be taking a picture with the camera app, adding a voice to the picture using Chatterpix, and then making the product come alive in a video using Explain Everything or iMovie. We can develop learning ecosystems by "smashing" curriculum objectives such as integrating learning topics from Social Studies in with learning experiences in English-Language Arts by explicitly selecting materials that connect those curriculum objectives. The Internet provides a multitude of materials for us, it's simply do we put in the time as district instructional leaders to put the tools together to make this possible.

Pam may have taken 4 bags of binders home each night, generating shoulder pain and back pain, to make a difference for her kids. Perhaps this generation can carry one bag of student products along with their laptop and tablet while even having more resources than Pam did.

Bill & Ted & Lincoln's Excellent Adventure