I live in a rural, poor, conservative area. I am grateful for my job and hesitant to jump without feeling I would have some sort of job security. I am also not in a position to move (we own a 3rd generation farm). But my frustration might put me there.

Michael, I would love to be a teacher under your administration. What you propose is what it should be. Students should have an opportunity to explore, learn and collaborate in projects they are interested in and serve a purpose for their future (vocational so to speak). But, connecting students globally to become better citizens - can you imagine what the future of the world could be like if enough of these schools existed globally?

I, too, am continuing my quest this year to expand my teaching and learning and have enough bravery to make the leap too.

Louise Maine’s last blog post..A real model?

Might the Montessori method be an answer to many of these questions of individual alignment that many of us have?

“Deep wisdom about the meaning of the 21st century will be essential. A serious problem of our time is the gap between skill and wisdom. Science and technology are accelerating furiously, but wisdom is not. We are brilliant at creating new technology, but are not wise in learning how to copy with it. To succeed in today’s world, people will need intricate skills in narrowly specialized areas. Skills need detailed, narrowly focused study of subjects that are rapidly increasing in complexity, whereas wisdom needs the synthesis of diverse ideas. Wisdom requires judgement, reflection about beliefs and thinking about events in terms of how they might be different.

Today, deep reflection about our future circumstances is eclipsed by a frenzy of ever more complex techniques and gadgets and preoccupation with how to increase shareholder value. The skill/wisdom gap is made greater because skills offer the ways to get wealthy. Society’s best brains are saturated with immediate issues that become ever more complex, rather than reflecting on why we are doing this and what the long-term consequences will be.

University education today is much more pressured than when I was at university. The curricula have become overstuffed, the subject matter intensely complex and the examinations frequent and demanding. The student sticks to the curriculum and can deal with little else. The professors stick to their discipline; they are judged by the papers they publish in the professional journal of that discipline. Most areas of education have almost no interdisciplinary scholarship. As disciplines become deeper and more complex, the brilliance expended on them is formidable, but we don’t think much about its consequences or what impact it has in other areas. In specialized areas, computers will become vastly more intelligent than people, but such intelligence is not human wisdom. As computers become more intelligent, with intense self-improvement of non-human intelligence, the skill/wisdom gap will widen at a furious rate.

We have vast numbers of experts on how to make the train work better and faster, but almost nobody is concerned with where the train is headed or whether we’ll like its destination.

Wisdom is essential and comes from the synthesis of a large amount of knowledge and experience that may take much of a lifetime to acquire. Not everyone can handle such synthesis. We must ask where the broad wisdom about the future will come from. The answer is, we must set out consciously to develop it. Wisdom, like advanced civilization, will come when we learn to relax. Our best brains need to stop chasing the most highly paid careers, the fastest boats and the smartest country clubs. A mature society should exhibit deep respect for deep wisdom.

We need to set out very consciously to foster and nurture the wisdom that the 21st century will require. This should be a task for our greatest universities.”

Martin, James (2006) The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for ensuring our Future. London: Transworld. (pp. 292, 293).

Jonathan Chambers’s last blog post..The Skill/Wisdom Gap

Even though Seton Hall is providing a great education for me and my cohort, they do not utlize one tenth of the technology available to them for use; blackboards, document repositories, etc. Many of our professors still use overhead projectors and video tapes - in rooms where projectors and Internet access are staring them right in the face. One nationally famous professor who is the guru of class size studies (anybody know him?) actually boasts that he will not accept emails or electronic files. Everything must be mailed to him in hard copy. Rather than posting articles for us to find and read, he hands out pages and pages of photocopies and printed Powerpoints. And these guys are teaching us how to be Superintendents in the 21st century.

Michael Parent’s last blog post..Near Criminial Activity

Unless something changes, universities train the bulk of our teachers, whether they go traditional route, or in NJ, “alternate route to get their certification.

I teach as an adjunct in a university in Northern New Jersey. In my classes, I try to model my vision for what classroom instruction in schools should look like; inquiry based learning, a dose of reality and a dose of futurisitics; 21st century communication tools (blogs, podcasts, mash-up movies); I made 1/3rd of my course an online experience; there was no required textbook. Instead we watch short movies (Fisch, and others), read online articles and excerpts from current authors (Pink, Friedman, Shmoeker), and had students devise curriculum that meets student needs for the 21st century.

Some observations:
1. Most of the students are so grounded into the system that their “vision” (with a chance to be totally creative) wound up being a “rearranging of the deck chairs” as Ginger mentioned. We need to inspire teachers more at the university level.
2. When I walk down the hall at this university, even though it is a brand new building with technology tools out the gazoo, the vast majority of professors are still using the lecture with handwritten notes on the whiteboard method. They made their classes read a number of books that they can purchase for lots of dollars in the bookstore. A great deal of college, especially teacher’s college is still teaching the same way it did 50 years ago as well. The ivory towers need to get digital.
3. Far too many grad school students (in education at least) see graduate school not as a path to learning, but steps to take to get certification to move to the next level (usually administration). As an administrator myself, and knowing there is an administrative shortage, we need forward thinking administrators who aren’t afraid to “stir the pot” as Michael does instead of those who do the dance and maintain the status quo.

Public schools can work. It requires personnel; the RIGHT personnel. Who were trained by the right folks at a university.

Barry’s last blog post..On Getting Knowledge and Using Knowledge in the 21st Century