I really enjoyed getting the chance to speak with Michael and encourage you to consider reading the post he wrote about WA Mash.

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Mr. Morse couldn’t be here today so he asked me to step in on his behalf, and welcome all of you to the start of the 176th year here on the Hilltop. 176 years. Have you ever stopped for a moment and thought about what it means to be a part of a place that has been around that long? Go back in time with me for a moment and think about how much our world has changed in that time. Consider for a moment, that back then, in the early to mid-1800’s there were a group of creative thinkers, some would call them rebels, who were pushing the envelope by rebelling against what they saw as the current situation and what they were trying to be different from. They were call the Transcendentalists and another way to look at them is to see them as a generation of people who were struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings that the time they were living in made available to them. This movement brought us some of the most important and influential thinkers of their time. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And while this moment in history was unfolding, in real time, Worcester Academy students were taking classes and learning from one another and their teachers. It was all happening right around them.

Or think about the fact that just shortly after the civil war, Worcester Academy students were watching the Headmaster at the time, Dr. Daniel Abercrombie, slowly expand the campus to include the buildings we use today. Kingsley, Walker Hall, The Megaron. But more importantly, they were experiencing a curriculum, which he brought to the school from Europe and was considered progressive and innovative for its time. It included the study of science and mathematics. And again, while that moment was unfolding, in real time, Worcester Academy students were gathering around the quad, much like you do today. Engaging in conversations, making steadfast friendships, competing in athletic events and performing on stage. They may not have realized at that time, in fact, I am pretty sure that like most teenagers, many of them were completely unaware that they would become the leaders of tomorrow. These same students, very much like all of you, would go on to become the founder and first editor of National Geographic magazine. Or create companies that would dominate industry such as Merrill Lynch. They would help break important social and racial barriers and go on to compose music that will forever be woven into the fabric of the American experience.

But back then, they were just ordinary students, being told to tuck in their shirts and avoid being late to class, and whether they realized it or not, they were living during extraordinary times; the industrial revolution, the Great Depression, World Wars I and II.

And in my opinion how lucky they were.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be a student at Worcester Academy when amazing and profound things were happening all around you? Just think for a moment what it might be like…

Climate change, world conflict and war, global economic challenges, the first African American President of the United States, the first Latina to be appointed to the Supreme Court and here at Worcester Academy, the first latina to be elected Head Monitor. Imagine how amazing it would be to live during a point in time when we would see advances in technology, medicine and engineering bringing us iPhones, hybrid fuel efficient cars and advances in the detection and treatment of breast cancer.

It would be pretty amazing.

So here we are, at the start of a new school year. And while this moment begins to unfold, in real time, those of us fortunate enough to be a part of Worcester Academy once again have a unique opportunity. It is our privilege to be living during a moment in time that I strongly feel, and many others believe, will be looked at as historic, some might even say revolutionary. And while others might disagree with that statement, what matters and what makes living during historic times so amazing is that they stand out. They represent moments that future generations will recall and for better or worse, will define those of us who lived during them. Students looking back at this time 100 years from now, in the year 2109, sitting where you are sitting today, will either look back and remember us as having collectively risen to meet these historic challenges or having missed the opportunity to seize the moment and truly be the change we wish to see in the world. I for one, firmly believe in all of you. Every adult who is a part of Worcester Academy believes in you, all we ask, is that you believe in yourselves.

Have a historic year. Thank you.

(Presented at the all school assembly 9/3/2009)

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I blogged earlier in the summer that the warm (albeiet not so warm this summer) months are where I find the best time to refuel the creative tank and get my own brain thinking and churning in new ways. It’s when I find the time to try new ways of working personally like my recent re-adoption of Evernote, which is fantastic by the way! To spending time reading, researching and engaging with my extended network of colleagues through a variety of social networks online and in person. And as the summer starts to turn the corner, it dawned on me that through all of these conversations, it isn’t that we can’t engage in new models of teaching and learning, and it isn’t even that some of us haven’t, with success. I have come to believe that the issue is that as institutions and living organizations, the reality is that unless the critical mass is ready, we will have but small and modest success in rethinking how our schools should look. By critical mass I mean a majority of the people in our schools must embrace a new way of looking at themselves as teachers and professionals. They need to embrace the notion that their roles have changed. As Wendy Drexler put it in her wonderful video “The Networked Student” are teachers going to start seeing themselves as synthesizers of knowledge, connected learning incubators, modelers and information sherpas? Or will they continue to see themselves as content driven authorities who must cover material in order to reach the “end” of the book?

If you take Howard’s comment that his role is NOT about integrating technology but about leading the use of digital tools and practices that enhance, extend AND support the teaching and learning process, you need to be ready to rethink what technology means in your school. You need to be looking at resources like Creative Commons so that you can reassess how students understand the use and remixing of content. You need to be engaged in the conversation about how your graduates obtain and demonstrate the skills needed for our “new media culture” and the media literacies that will be required to not only be successful in the workplace, but to become thoughtful, creative citizens.  Your curriculum committees need to be reading the work of Henry Jenkins and his work in New Media Literacies and your humanities departments need to see themselves as HUMANITIES departments and not isolated islands. They must engage in a rethinking of what the New Humanties are and explore the work of Richard Miller at Rutgers University.

It is simply not enough for us to sit back and start having conversations about this brave new world. It’s here and we better start doing something, because I for one don’t think we have the luxury to wait around and keep talking about it.

Photo Credit: Pete Ashton

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http://bit.ly/tnlWL(note this link will open your iTunes Application)

A colleague recently posted a discussion on the ISENET Ning urging others to push Apple to release the FirstClass iPhone app. While I share the frustration of the group, I find myself more puzzled by the strategy FC has employed. Rather than have to go through the process of getting a proprietary app approved, why not make FC more easily integrated with the iPhone as well as other mobile devices. This has been one of my biggest frustrations and criticisms of FC since the Palm conduits stopped syncing my calendar back in 2006! Since then I have have had limited success with Blackberry and moderate success with email on my iPhone. I have since been forced to use iCal, which I like better for my calendaring option.

Seems like the more strategic approach would have been for FC to have made the new release more mobile friendly. Just my 2¢. These were my thoughts earlier in the week when it appeared that the app would never see the light of day.

And then this morning I recieved a Tweet from a good colleague and friend @traviswarren informing me that the app was out. So naturally I downloaded and it installed it immediately.

A few initial reactions:

Installing/setup was easy. Mailbox is nice and the respond to email outside your own mail domain appears to be fixed. An issue that the IMAP mailbox never seemed to be able to get right.

Conferences work nicely, and the ability to read them is a plus. Search appears to still be ineffective.

HOWEVER, the biggest complaint I have and will continue to have is that the calendar is still NOT available. This has been the longest running issue for me personally for the past 5 years. It’s unfortunate to see the calendar missing from this first iteration but I am willing to cut some slack given that some of the other features appear to be working nicely.

So there you have it. A complete recap/ review written on my iPhone using the Wordpress mobile app and copy/paste while on an AT&T wifi connection, sipping iced coffee at Starbucks. Now that is cool mobile technology.

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Last week I attended the “Meaningful Faculty Evaluation” workshop given by ISM in Philadelphia. For those of you who are not familiar with MFE, it is a process of engaging faculty through conversations and personal growth that is intended to strip away the focus and obsession with weaknesses and focus on what teachers are good at. Now I know that many of my administrator colleagues are thinking “Wait a minute, what about those teachers that need to improve on X, Y or Z?” It’s all there, trust me. And if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you should.

But the purpose of this post is not to focus on MFE as an evaluation tool but rather on one small, very simple exercise that lives within it that caught my attention. It was, in fact a very zen like exercise when I stepped back for a moment and reflected on its purpose and outcome.

At the very start of the MFE process, teachers are asked the following question “Other than making a living, why this, now with my life?”

Go ahead. Take a minute and re-read it.

Thought provoking to say the least and applicable to not only those of us in the field of education but just about everyone out there who has seemingly struggled with the question of why am I doing this work? It can be at times a challenging, thankless, exhausting exercise to wake up every morning and ask yourself that question. And you should. We all should. It is simply not enough to be working in education as a means to an income or 3 month summer vacation.

My last post focused on how I personally reflect on the year that has just ended, and it seems only fitting that I would follow that up with a post that looks upon the start of this new “year” by sharing my own personal mission statement with all of you.

“Antonio Viva exists to provide mindful leadership, raise a thoughtful, caring and successful son and reshape the world, one creative thinker at a time.”

Consider sharing/writing your own!

Photo Credit: ambergris

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I was invited to speak with administrators from the Asheville School this week by my good friend and colleague, Peter Baron from Admissions Quest. The conversation lasted about 30 minutes and we discussed a variety of topics including; using social media in the classroom, understanding how to leverage the potential of social media technology in your communication strategy and changes in school culture.

I hope you enjoy it!

To find out more about Admissions Quest visit http://www.admissionsquest.com/

For information on the Asheville School, visit their website at http://www.ashevilleschool.org/

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Can we harness the power of social media to provide students with a vehicle for exploring and creating original content? WA Mash (Worcester Academy Mashup) is an online magazine where the power of social media is captured to provide creative writing students with a platform for exploring ideas and fostering and contributing to the larger global conversation. By exploring the possibilities offered by the use of social media tools, we explore how one teacher is defining the New Humanities at the secondary school level. Built off the work of Richard E. Miller at Rutgers University, students blog in a timely fashion about a wide variety of cultural, political and economic issues. Most importantly, it is about creating original content and redefining the role of student and teacher. They compliment their work with audio, video, photos and micro-blogging by integrating social media tools like YouTube and Vimeo, Twitter and Flickr. Think Slate or Salon for high school. The conversation will explore the nature and role of the New Humanities in education. How do we define it? What does it look it? What role does it play? And how do we move forward with implementation?

The resource wiki for this presentation can be found at educon21.wikispaces.com/211-3

Using Social Media to Define the New Humanities Classroom from Antonio Viva on Vimeo.

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We recently held a professional development day where a portion of the morning program was devoted to the topic of differentiated instruction. Our very talented and capable Center for Learning Director worked with her equally talented and capable staff to design an hour long presentation intended to serve as a follow up to their presentation at our pre-sessional meetings in late August. Differentiated instruction is not a new concept to those of us in education, and its underlying premise is that rather than expecting students to fit their learning to the curriculum, curriculum and instruction are flexible so that they can better meet the individual needs of individual students. Teachers who are practitioners of DI believe that their teaching is shaped by the students they have in their classes.

In the midst of our conversation together on this cold January morning, one teacher asked a very powerful and thoughtful question. “Given that we are a college prep school, how does differentiated instruction fit into the reality that students will face once they reach the university level?” It was a very good, very pragmatic question. How does it fit? Then I came across an article that appeared in the New York Times which highlighted some of the changes happening in colleges and universities around the country. The article “At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard” focuses on how members of the Physics department at M.I.T are rethinking the way they teach the subject to undergraduates. In response to increasing absenteeism rates and failure rates in these traditional lecture based courses reaching 10 to 12% the faculty at M.I.T knew they needed to do something different. Furthermore, the article states that physicists across the country were continuing to push universities to do a better job in preparing young scientists entering the field.

The result is that large lecture halls where students sit in rows with wooden desks where the professor is at the front of the large lecture hall, filling blackboards with copious amounts of information have given way to smaller classes that “that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning.” The article goes on to state that

“M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.”

The image we hold in secondary schools as college preparatory institutions is being challenged by the very colleges and universities we claim in our mission statments we are preparing students to attend. M.I.T has given this new approach its own acronym, TEAL, for Technology Enhanced Active Learning. Read that again. Technology Enhanced Active Learning. Say it out loud. Imagine for a moment what that might look like at your own school. Consider the possibility that our view of what it means to prepare our students for “college and beyond” no longer holds true. Will we be putting our 21st century students at a disadvantage by continuing to conduct business as usual? Are we willing to challenge our view that classes should be held for 47 minutes and follow each other throughout the school day only to be capped by several hours of homework every night?

Regardless of what kind of school you teach in, the first step towards embracing the full potential of teaching in the 21st century requires us to abandon our view of what it means to prepare kids for college.

Photo Credit: Night Owl City

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One of the first things I remember learning in my graduate work in education was that no matter what I did or how well I planned, there would simply never be enough time for me to get everything done. It just wasn’t possible, there were too many demands, too much work, not enough time. In the 14 years since, not much has changed. Regardless of the school you work for, or whether you are a teacher or administrator, the same mantra pervades most discussions that there is just not enough time to get everything done. The demands on students have not decreased, if anything, they and/or their parents inflict additional stress to be in every club, to compete at the highest athletic levels, to take 5 AP courses. It feels like not only has life gotten more complicated, but we try to pack 27 hours worth of “stuff” into a 24 hour day.

I am sure many schools have spent countless hours in faculty meetings discussing this schedule over that schedule and in some schools, the way we use time with students looks more or less the way it did 20, 30 even 50 years ago. Let’s face it. With the exception of a few schools around the country, the majority of schools function on the old agrarian based calendar where students were sent home for the summer months to work on the farm or in the fields and then sent back to school after the harvest in the fall. in fact, prior to the Great Depression, a few year-long schools popped up in mostly urban areas but they quickly lost favor in light of tough economic times. And since WWII our society has become less agrarian with each passing decade.

Yet, we continue to try and pack 10 lbs of potatoes in a 5 lb bag. We are pressed to find time to making meaningful changes in teacher practice; be it integration of technology, service learning opportunities, real-world experiences and multicultural education. Many schools regardless of their public or private designation are driven by standards based testing pressures, MCAS, SAT, AP exams etc. Students and parents are told by colleges and universities that they must have a breadth and depth of extra-curricular and co-curricular activities on their high school resumes as well as multiple AP courses and a commitment to community service. When will we pause for a moment and reflect that it is simply not possible for us to do it all.

Here in the New England we are only about 6 weeks into the winter season and many schools have lost significant time due to ice and snow, some as many as 8 to 10 school days. It has reached a point where the Massachusetts Secretary of Education is needing to weight adding school days to the year. The point is this; we need to rethink how we devote time to teaching and learning. Continuing to try and do it all in a 160 or 180 school days is only one component we must look at. Rethinking what we do with students during the school day is the second major task. Segmented, structed blocks be they rotating or non-rotating create learning environments that more accurately reflect the industrial age rather than the information age. Starting classes prior to 8:00 am for teenagers and after 9:00 am for elementary school aged children seems backwards to me. Rethinking the priorities and expectations parents and colleges place on young people also needs equal time in the conversation.

Regardless of your opinion of year-round schooling, breaking up the year into smaller and more reasonable chunks of time with breaks spread out over the entire year rather than during the winter, spring and throughout the bulk of the summer months would address issues of summer learning loss, provide extended time for meaningful real-world experiences and field trips and lastly, remove the pressure those of us in education feel to “cram” it in or “get it all done.” Embracing the notion that learning can occur outside the confines of the four walls of a traditional classroom and beyond the hours of 8am and 3pm will allow us to embrace the reality that is the 21st century we are now fully living in and can no longer simply continue preparing for.

Photo Credit: ToniVC

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When I started teaching in 1995 the faculty room was the epicenter of conversation among colleagues. You would walk in, there would be a half pot of 3 hour old bitter coffee, folks grading papers, a water cooler and the drone of a photocopier working diligently in the background. Meetings took place in the library or in classrooms and occasionally we would head out on Friday afternoons for some pool and wings at a local spot in town. I remember clearly that some of the best talks I had were with a colleague named Pat Smith as we sat at the end of a long hallway on “hall duty” during lunch period. Pat was a music teacher who had toured with Barry White during the 70’s and he was a smooth, old school daddio who knew how to make kids and colleagues laugh and he loved music and teaching. He shared stories about touring in the 70’s, his experience as a teacher and he provided insight and mentorship on challenges I was experiencing at the time developing my own, young teaching practice.

Pat is not the only “conversation” I remember from my early years in teaching. There were many others, conversations with students, one conversation with a parent that will remain forever etched in my consciousness and the most transformative, the most revealing about life and society in general with other teachers who on the whole genuinely cared for kids and sought to make the world a better place. Regardless of your career choice, the conversations you have daily with friends, family members and colleagues shape your view of the world and I would contend, the way you ultimately end up interacting with it.

This week it dawned on me that the conversations I am having now are at the core, similar to those I had back in 1995, albeit topics like social media, disruptive classes and wikis were not part of our dialogue. However, the vehicle for having those conversations has systematically changed. On Thursday, I worked from home as Verizon was scheduled to come and install new FiOS service to my house. I had a marketing meeting scheduled for 11:00 am and rather than simply miss the meeting or conference call in, I asked a colleague to log into her Skype account and I as able to attend the meeting as if I were in the room. The body language, facial expressions and “tone” of the meeting were not lost and it gave my wife a real sense of what I do all day. Kim Cofino tweeted this morning about some photos she had posted on Flickr of her students Skype experiences and their ability to have conversations with students from around the world. (Kim is located in Bangkok, Thailand) More importantly, Kim regularly contributes to Twitter and while she may be half a world away from us here stateside, she is as active a contributor to the conversation as if she were sitting in the faculty room across the table drinking 3 hour old bitter coffee.

I am guilty, as I am sure most of us are of not having done a good enough job staying in touch with old friends and colleagues over the years. Email worked well for a while but with Facebook, many of my old friends seem to be reconnected in a way that feels very much like we picked up where we left off. Some of the old jokes are still funny, sharing photos of our kids and posting 3rd grade class pictures from 1979 seems to make the connection feel more real. My Wall conversations are an eclectic mix of current friends, work colleagues, relatives and high school and college friends. And while many of these Facebook friends have never met one another, they are able to organically join the conversation I have been able to initate by posting a funny video, interesting article or whitty attempt at a status update.

Similarly, my professional learning networked has grown to include individuals I have never actually been fortunate enought to meet in person and for a while, I was unsure about how it would work to cultivate a friendship or professional relationship with someone whom I had never meet face to face. The “conversations” I follow are not always addressed directly to me, but by being able to observe and absorb the content, they help shape the way I look at important issues, my thoughts about my teaching practice, and my philosophy and approach as a school leader. The art of conversation is shifting and while social technologies will never replace stopping at your favorite coffee shop with a friend or a pre-dinner glass of wine with a colleague, the ability to engage with each other more regularly has made me appreciate that I have been fortunate to develop a personal network of friends, colleagues and family members that enrich my life daily. So don’t take these digital conversations for granted they are as important and as meaningful as those you have in person.

Consider keeping the conversation going by following me on Twitter!

Photo Credit: eye2eye

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