Top Ten Ways to Predict the Future

Educational leaders often wonder how to prepare students for the 21st century.  The reality is that the 21st century is literally today.  Here are some ideas to help you ‘predict the future’:

1.  Advocate for Bandwidth and Hardware

If there weren’t enough textbooks for a class of students how mad would you be or how much hot water would you be in?  Guess what, I’m willing to bet you that you don’t have enough bandwidth to use Web 2.0 tools and even if you do, you probably don’t have the hardware available to teachers and students to use them.  So where is your urgency?  Bring the lack of bandwidth up at higher levels, don’t accept the way that it is.  Pursue grants, talk to your PTA, relocate funds to figure out how to get up to date hardware in the hands of your teachers and students.  How can you start a fire if you have no match?  The biggest obstacle for teachers who wish to use Web 2.0 apps is a lack of bandwidth and modern hardware.

2.  Expect innovation

When you evaluate teachers are you expecting merely effectiveness or are you advocating for innovation?  If you are focusing on effectiveness, consider that the amount of information being produced in the world each year is doubling and educational standards are always rising, what kind of long term growth are you expecting from your teachers to meet the rising demands?  Be constructively critical and suggest to your ‘effective teachers’ that effectiveness is a like building a house in a flood zone, as the water rises eventually all that effectiveness will be washed away.

3.  Support your pioneers

Did you know that Christopher Columbus’s men wanted to throw him overboard and sail back to Spain, till they saw the Americas and thought again.  How often are innovators thrown overboard in your school and what message does that send to the rest of your staff?  Before you judge a digital pioneer, consider that his/her success may be just over the horizon, if you can keep the mutineers at bay long enough.

4.  There are no one shot deals

Educational change takes time and it takes a sustained investment in long term innovation.  Schools took this long to get to their current state, they wouldn’t change overnight.  There are no quick fixes.   Doing a lot today will overwhelm your already overwhelmed staff, create a long term plan to change your school through sustained innovation.

5.  Align to students, not to standards

Are all of the students in your school the same?  How many different sets of educational standards can you name?  The reality is that your students each need a special challenge and a special support system.  There are so many different standards that by focusing solely on standards alignment, you are bound to miss align teaching and learning in your school.  The answer isn’t asking teachers to annotate lesson plans with standards, rather it’s asking how are they differentiating and challenging each student.  If you are worried about what your teachers are teaching then the problem is your teachers not your curriculum.  Teachers need to focus on their craft; creating learning opportunities and be involved in the discuss of curriculum (including but not limited to alignment).

6.  Practice what you preach

If you don’t blog, twitter, use a wiki, share, or collaborate, why should your teachers?  When students have a problem, do you want them to have to make an appointment to see their teacher?  Be the change you want to see in the world, don’t just talk about the change you want to see in the world.

7.  Manage Failure

Did you know that most major software projects fail?  Do you know how many projects at Microsoft, Apple, and Google never went anywhere?  Last time I checked those companies were still very successfully and they were successful because they they are safe places were employees don’t feel afraid to fail, moreover many innovations we have today are the result of failed projects.  For example, the idea of the iphone is build on an earlier idea that Apple failed with called the Newton.  Everyone remembers the Apple II, but if there were no Apple I then there would have been no Apple II.  Success is a long winding (and windy) road.

8.  Professional Development is a micro NOT a macro process.

Each teacher is responsible for his/her own growth because they are a professional.  Each school needs to grow into a “community of practice”.  As a leader, you can take ownership of creating that community within your school and create opportunities for collaboration, but you need to make each teacher responsible for his/her own growth. Develop a personal learning network and model how you are growing, but keep the locus of control for professional development on the individual not the school.

9.  Balance competing interests.

Each student, teacher, parent, or superior has an agenda and hopefully an interest in learning.  It is always difficult to balance these interests and easy to get caught up in the moment to satisfy someone.  Real satisfaction is knowing that you are helping students become successful by teaching them how to learn, collaborate, and solve problems, not just imparting skills and knowledge. A wise man once said that “school shouldn’t be preparation for life, it should be life”.  If school is going to be life and life is full of problems, then so will education.  As a leader, you have to take a proactive approach to problem solving and not be reactive to the problems you encounter.

10.  Share

Everyone has something to share and by sharing we empower others to learn what works, what doesn’t, and we become a unified community of practice rather than working in isolation.  Start today with Twitter or a blog.  If your not sharing, why should people share with you and if people don’t share with you than you will be saddled with reinventing the wheel each day and hopefully you are a great thinker b/c all your ideas who will have to come up with on your own.

The Bottomline -Alan Kay says that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”.   Are you empowering your teachers and students to invent the future?

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