This week, we’re looking at the 2017 Horizon Report (Freeman et al.), a document outlining issues and trends in technology and K-12 education. I’ve just got a new job at a brand-new school of Integrated Arts and Technology, and I think it will be interesting to look at the issues that could come up in that specific, unusual situation. This will be full of speculation, since the school hasn’t opened yet and I am not the teacher-librarian, just a regular classroom teacher.
Long-Term Trends
The two long-term trends in the Horizons document are advancing cultures of innovation and deeper learning approaches. I’m in luck here – this school is built from scratch to centre innovative teaching and deeper learning through authentic, experiential projects and integration of disciplines (Haller & Carroll, 2020). They have used lessons learned at other schools like High Tech High and School 21 to build this program and adjust it to our own public school, BC curriculum context. The Learning Commons is being modeled after many inspiration LLCs in other schools in BC to be a true hub of collaboration for all stakehholders.
Freeman et al. say that “districts and schools need guidance and concrete goals in order to sustain innovation” (p. 13). We are fortunate that the vision and institutional support is in place to continue building and refining the program around these two approaches to learning.
Outside of these trends, getting
Mid-Term Trends
Measuring learning through technology and analytics may be an area of stretch, from what I’ve seen. When we are focused on collaborative, project-based learning, how do we efficiently assess what we need? What data will actually be useful in creating action for our students? On a classroom level, I see competency-based assessment and a focus on growth as the way forward for this school, but I am not sure where that data fits into broader school planning or how to efficiently quantify it. How can the library fit into this and facilitate data collection and analysis on a school level? Something for me to consider moving forward.
Redesigning learning spaces is not likely to be a problem at this school, since it is being designed from scratch with flexibility and collaboration in mind. What will be a focus for us is experimenting and making best use of the space we have. I found this to be one of our biggest challenges when the middle school IAT program opened this September – how do we teach 90 kids in a building that functionally only has two teaching spaces. Through trial and error, we found that stations and independent work across the whole building were two methods that made our space manageable. The LLC itself could be a model for solutions and a solution in and of itself.
Short-Term Trends
Coding as literacy is something I will need to push for as a technology leader. With the Arts/Tech focus, I’ve found something of a split between the Arts people and the Tech people in the middle school program that opened this year. I feel like tech sits comfortably at the “Substituion/Modification” level of SAMR in a lot of project work right now, simply because building a school is hard and I as the tech specialist have neither the time nor the social capital to help everyone include it in a meaningful way. I feel like this will be less of a short-term goal for this school than a mid-term goal. With all the logistics of opening a new school, I don’t know that computational thinking will necessarily be a priority for everyone in Year 1. I am also not sure whether or not technology leadership is something that is within the skillset of the teacher-librarian, but I feel that this is something that I could contribute to the broader community by taking ownership of it within the school in collaboration with the LLC.
STEAM learning is something that I think will necessarily come naturally in this program as an Integrated Arts and Tech program. The plan is to include integrated cores with an Arts/Humanities specialist and a Math/Science/Tech specialist team-teaching 60 students. Certainly, there is a role for the TL to be a facilitator, collaborator, and leader, but we are set up for the team to naturally integrate STEM and Arts.
Challenges
Solvable challenges:
- “Sustaining innovation through leadership changes” (a wicked challenge according to the document) is something that the school district has gone to great lengths to address in this new school, with a clear framework and vision for IAT K-12, as well as the hiring of innovative personnel at both the school and district level to put that vision into practice. It may be a wicked challenge on a macro level, but at least within this school, the supports are (hopefully) in place to make this sustainable. My one worry is that in times of difficulty and discomfort, it is easy to fall back to the comfortable, but being aware of that tendency certainly helps.
Difficult challenges:
- Building a culture of computational thinking outside of me. There is one major barrier to computational thinking with non-specialists and it is perception. This includes the perception that computational thinking is purely the domain of ADST and has no relevance to arts/humanities/science/etc., as well as the perception that computational thinking is really hard and inaccessible to them as a teacher. These perceptions become reality if they are believed. A challenge will be to break these broader beliefs so that computing can be accessible and relevant to all teachers.
Wicked challenges:
- Almost everything else – we don’t have a history to get a read on school culture, staff strengths and stretches, gaps in achievements, etc. As we have been this year in the middle school, we will be building an airplane while it’s flying. There is a lot of information gathering to be done before we can even identify our challenges.
Questions
Where do I even start? How do I as a teacher with specialist knowledge leverage the LLC to help my colleagues? What are the considerations for building a collection from scratch?
Sources
- Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., & Hall Giesinger, C. (2017). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K–12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2017/11/2017hrk12EN.pdf
- Haller, B., & Caroll, J. (2020). Imagining Imagine High [White Paper]. School District #33 – Chilliwack. https://arts.sd33.bc.ca/sites/arts.sd33.bc.ca/files/2021-01/Imagining%20Imagine%20High_0.pdf.
- School District #33. (2020). Learning at Imagine High. https://arts.sd33.bc.ca/learning-imagine-high