Kimberly Moritz BlogPosts

What’s it mean to be literate today? David Warlick was the keynote speaker at this year’s HSNF and this idea really hit home for me. You think of reading, writing and arithmetic, right? Or you may have thought of speaking, reading and writing effectively. Warlick delivered his keynote in a way that made every participant really think about what literacy means today. If our students are going to be literate NOW, then we have to consider what it is that they’re reading and where.

David talked about reading on-line and redefining literacy. I don’t know about you, but my first stop in looking for additional information when I’m researching is either google or the NYSED website. My main sources of news are the RSS feeds in my bloglines account and have been for about three years now. As we teach our students to ask questions, we’ve got to teach them to consider the source, to dig deeper and to investigate everything.  Warlick says it takes the following.

Exposing What’s True,

Employing the Information

Expressing Ideas Compellingly

I guess it depends upon what you do for a living, but I can say those are three of the skills I most need to be successful every day in my work as the superintendent. They’re definitely skills that every effective teacher must employ and if we want our students to be successful, are we teaching them these literacy skills through the work that we ask them to do each day in our classrooms?

Warlick’s keynote alone was worth the price of admission. Have to also give a shout out to our very own Randolph teachers, Chad Skudlarek, Jessie Perison and Lauren Carnahan who took a risk and shared their own skills by teaching at High School’s New Face. This is the kind of collaboration we need to see within our own district–like we’ll be doing in our Thoughtful Classroom learning clubs next year. Which got me to thinking. . . what about a learning club where teachers meet after school to share the use of 21st century skills with student based projects to teach our content? Mr. Skudlarek, Mr. Perison and Mr. Carls as teacher leaders and participants sharing ideas. . . hmmm. Stay tuned, much more to follow.

And last, I have to say that the Leadership session offered by Neil Rochelle, Sushma Sztorc, and Bonnie Smith also provided some great ideas. We took NYS learning standards from all of the content areas and easily matched 21st century skills to the standards. So if you read the last paragraph and thought “I don’t have time! I have to teach my content and that means standing in front of the room and telling them all that they need to know” then you absolutely should be the first in line to learn more about 21st century skills and learning today. If we don’t change while everything around us is, we’ll be obsolete and irrelevant. What’s the use in that?