Dinner with David Warlick

Thanks to the dynamic Donna DesRoches, digital resource consultant for Living Sky School Division, I had the good fortune last night to have dinner with David Warlick along with other members of the division instructional technology in-school teacher support (or something like that – we just call it the iSiTS group for short), a couple of our superintendents and some school based administrators. I was impressed not only with David’s grasp of many of the opportunities for improving student learning using some new digital tools (I’m trying to avoid the “21st century” prefix or “2.0″ suffix wherever possible because I still don’t know what those *really* mean) but also with his ability to find the right questions to provoke a really good conversation.

My short-term memory being somewhat diminished as I grow older, I wrote down a few well-stated ideas that came up during the evening.

I think this one came from Kelly Christopherson. Teachers have become used to, indeed they have traditionally been trained to although that is starting to change, being the expert on what happens in class. Teachers like to master not only the content of the class but also the processes, including the use of newer devices like interactive white boards. Adapting ourselves to new ways of doing things might mean giving up that feeling of control. The change in paradigm might be temporary as new generations of teachers move into the classroom gradually replacing us old dogs. Or it might be a permanent change. New tools are developing so quickly that we might be in an era of perpetual change in which this year’s new tools become next year’s old tools. I’m not advocating change for the sake of change but I feel pretty sure that some of the new tools that get developed will be beneficial for our students’ learning. As a professional, I’m going to need to be open to embracing new ways of teaching if it’s better for my students.

That was David’s comment regarding developing rubrics for assessing student creativity. There was discussion of teaching/encouraging creativity in students’ work, including how rubrics could be developed that can be used to assess creativity. David says he prefers to use the term “inventiveness”. He didn’t give any sort of method to assess it, but he did say that his instruction to students to encourage inventiveness is “surprise me”, a directive I often give my students.

With regards to implementing the change in teaching to include digital tools, there were multiple perspectives regarding how mandatory the change in teaching should be as well as how teachers will be supported. One of our superintendents pointed out that in every other profession or job, there is no opportunity to opt out of using new ways of doing things. Health care workers, for example, are not given a choice of using the mandated health care record system. Personally, I’m pretty happy with that being a non-negotiable edict. It was pointed out, by Kelly once again if memory serves, that in every other profession or job, there is sufficient support and training given to the workers to do the job. (My wife works in health care and she disputes the literal accuracy of that claim.) So how can teachers be supported? Time always seems to be included as a limiting factor, often described as “time to play” with the tools we are being asked to use.

Play is tough to assess. What can we set as expected outcomes for playing? (I encourage your comments if you have any answers). But it is vitally important if we want to continue to learn and develop as professionals. It’s also important for our students’ learning as well. I like very much David’s aphorism on the importance for play so I’ll give him the last words for this post: