High School’s New Face 2009

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?

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3 Comments
  1. You notion of creating a Thoughtful learning club for interested teachers to search out the topic of appropriate collaborative learning experiences for students is rally commendable but how about also including students in the discussion as well…

  2. Learning club is a good idea, you may also want to consider to leverage internet for enhancing the teacher skills, this has helped me recently. Many use blogs and wikis in almost every situation we can think of. However, sometimes when we see a pattern to a certain type of communication it makes so much sense to innovate a customized communication, else we will end up with wikis and blogs which not only takes away time but also becomes very ineffective mechanism. Take a look at this collaborative platform for online learning – http://www.funnelbrain.com, this is a great example of how effective teachers and students can be with minimal effort!

  3. Kim,

    First off, I want to thank you for your support at High School’s New Face! It was a great experience to go and present there!It was even better to have two familar faces in my session. Thank you!

    As I sat in David Warlick’s opening, I realized that there is so much more to be learned about not only technology, but just the hidden skills of literacy. Are we spoonfeeding our students too much? Sometimes I wonder this and it really opened my eyes to redefining the basics- Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. In fact, this may bring a chuckle to some, but the song “ABC” by the Jackson 5 popped in my head. “Reading, writing, arithmetic are the branches of the learning tree.” Isn’t that the truth. It’s time to go deeper in these areas. Like Warlick said “Exposing What’s True,Employing the Information, and Expressing Ideas Compellingly” are where it’s at! It’s go time! : )

    The part about Warlick’s opening that really got me was that we as learners read what is handed to us, but do we truly understand it? I for one, do not always. We need to: find, critically evaluate, organize, and apply. This is true contemporary literacy. We have to embrace it or we will be left behind. This can be scary in the changing times of the 21st century. After all, the 21st century has style! Thanks again!

    P.S. 35-40 miles a week! : )

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