Techlearning blog

When I was teaching lessons in our elementary school computer lab, as part of our daily classroom routine, we were supposed to write, talk about , and have students verbalize the mastery objective for the day. Sometimes it would work but most days it just didn't fit in my “wallet”. I wanted to find a way to make it work and help my students identify the purpose for our being together.
In 1997, the Maine Learning Results were adopted by the Legislature. Then, they were considered among the most rigorous and comprehensive in the country, of the United States. (Maine Sunday Telegram 12/10/2006
The Legislature also made a recommendation that the standards are revised each decade. Let's assume that most states have made similar recommendations. So, basically, we have a vision and a road map of where we want to take our students. Then, and this is very simplified, we added accountability to this vision in the forms of standardized tests. However, in doing so, we limited the road maps and got rid of many wonderful side trips. Then the standardized tests were linked to release items, and the release items began to dictate the instruction the teachers must incorporate into the curriculum.

Around this time, my mastery objectives just didn't fit into my 21st Century lessons. Instead I looked beyond the standards, beyond the performance indicators we have in Maine. I found what I needed to make sense of my road map, I found my purpose and began sharing with my students.

Maine's Guiding Principles

Each Maine student must leave school as:

A CLEAR AND EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR

A SELF-DIRECTED AND LIFE-LONG LEARNER

A CREATIVE AND PRACTICAL PROBLEM SOLVER

A RESPONSIBLE AND INVOLVED CITIZEN

A COLLABORATIVE AND QUALITY WORKER

AN INTEGRATIVE AND INFORMED THINKER

The guiding principles were principles I could relate to, I could get my students to relate to and most of all I found purpose in the principles as well as the 21st Century Skills I was ready to promote. Since then, the document for the Maine Learning Results has been trimmed down from 1,131 indicators to 558 indicators. The Guiding Principles remain. Maine is on the right track.

In December 2006, Time magazine published an article, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century
By CLAUDIA WALLIS, SONJA STEPTOE
the article was so powerful it was like I was listening to a podcast and shouting back at the speaker, but this time I was shouting back at my computer as I read the online article!
I was saying yes to LESS is MORE, as evidenced by "Countries from Germany to Singapore have extremely small textbooks that focus on the most powerful and generative ideas," says Roy Pea, co-director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning.

I was saying yes to my choice of using the guiding principles instead the too numerous to count performance indicators. I was saying yes to my students' ability to verbalize, “my job in the computer lab today was to create a blog page on Think.com with a survey question and to leave a comment on 3 other blog pages” fully supporting the principle of the collaborative and quality worker.

The process of change is slow and more of us are speaking and shouting back at our iPods and computers. I know this scenario is outrageous and I still chuckle when I am shouting back at my iPod, but I can say that my purpose is to share a vision with my students and for them to share their vision with me. The guiding principles are more directive than all the performance indicators I have had a chance to work with. The guiding principles are in my wallet of instructional tools! What is in your wallet?