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Our friends at the Teacher Leaders Network, which connects accomplished teacher leaders from across the country, hooked us up with two of their dazzling teacher/bloggers:  Nancy Flanagan and Bill Ferriter, two award-winning teachers who have built national reputations as both thought leaders and practitioners. 

What resulted was a pointed but always respectful debate on the promise and perils of teaching with technology.  In guest postings today and tomorrow, Nancy and Bill will sketch out the contours of this debate.

Nancy Flanagan: Brave New Curriculum - or More of the Same?

Nancy Flanagan, a National Board Certified music teacher, is a 30-year classroom veteran and former Michigan Teacher of the Year. Her blog Teacher in a Strange Land appears at the Teacher Leaders Network website. She is also a regular contributor to Education Policy Blog. Flanagan facilitates an on-line national course, "Teacher as Change Agent," through Virginia Commonwealth University, and works as a consultant for the Center for Teaching Quality

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In the brief but exciting window when Napster emerged, then collapsed in legal entanglements, my middle school music students were among its most enthusiastic users. They showed me how I could download and share songs (should I wish to risk losing my job and my integrity) and troubleshoot Napster's rampant glitches. It was conversations with my students, who were spending hours with Napster (and it was hours, using dial-up), that inspired me to originate a sequence of lessons on music as cultural product and intellectual property.

We used print resources, small group discussion and on-line data-gathering with a simulated legal case format, which allowed students to develop arguments around some core questions: Can music be owned-or is simply part of human culture? If something is technologically possible, does that mean it's morally OK? Should people be paid for the products they create-even if those products are ideas or sounds, which can't be seen or touched? It's worth noting that "music as intellectual property" was never a topic on my school's music curriculum (which is reviewed/rewritten every five years, if the budget allows), nor was it part of the technology or civics curriculums.

Intellectual property is a fairly sophisticated concept for 12-year olds, but the topic was highly engaging. It was also risky. Many kids learned how to download "free" music by watching their parents, and my instructional resources and concepts were continuously evolving, with no certain outcomes or answers. My students' initial beliefs and assumptions ("all musicians are rich, so they're not really losing money") were deconstructed, and the impact of technology on artistic expression and commerce considered.

In the end, my classes decided that the best solution was walking a line between fair compensation for artists and wide access to music. Polled on the price they would pay to own a song, every class landed somewhere around 75 cents - iTunes could have used my 8^th graders as a focus group.

This was before "21^st century learning" became an everyday part of the national education discourse, but I think these timely lessons were examples of that vision, even though designed and delivered without using a single Web 2.0 tool. These simple activities and conversations addressed issues at the heart of learning in a rapidly changing world: How do we make sense of and evaluate the deluge of new information, images, ideas and products? What emerging skills, tools and opportunities shape the way we think and work? What does it mean to truly learn something, in ways that involve application or production-and what does it mean to be a successful contributor to a balanced world?

These are not the big-picture questions being asked by many of those who would reshape American schools to meet 21^st century needs. As my TLN colleague and fellow blogger Bill Ferriter notes, we are "scrambling for immediate solutions to a poorly defined 'problem.'" We are trying to get a grip on a tenuous future by raising (old) standards, testing (old) objectives and attempting to push more students into old models of academic success - more 4-year university degrees, more "rigorous" text-based coursework in math and science, quantifiable and uniform achievement goals - all overlaid with technological bells and whistles. Worse, some opinion leaders have suggested that resistant teachers with obsolete technology skills are the primary barrier in preparing our children for a future we cannot fully envision or forecast.

The foundational step in meeting our future challenges revolves around this question: What does it mean to be an educated person-what should we expect of our schools?

We need to re-examine our very American assumption that we can meet all educational goals faster and better through technology. A national curriculum and standardized testing to measure achievement are technologies, too, and the more we become locked into amassing data with costly investments in hardware and programming, the less flexible our curriculum and instruction. Training teachers to become fluent users of Web 2.0 and other technology tools will have an impact only if those teachers also experience a radical shift in their beliefs about the purposes of education, and a new focus on students as responsible for their own learning. Otherwise, learning how to use the tools will become the primary goal.

And what should we expect of our students? Bill Ferriter says "the most successful citizens of the 21^st century will be those who can generate original solutions to complex challenges." While foundational skills are important, the cultivation of imagination, curiosity, collaboration and judgment will open our students to their full capacity as citizens in this new world- citizens who are capable of generating original ideas, making flexible connections, building international teams.

We can no longer assume that America controls the international supply chain or dominates global thinking-our position in the world has shifted. We must prepare our students to take advantage of their individual strengths and unique talents, so they can work anywhere in the world. This may mean that studying cultural understanding and effective communication are vastly more important curricular goals in developing our national economy than trying to raise math scores by five points.

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Bill Ferriter:  Lost in a Digital Fog

National Board Certified Teacher Bill Ferriter teaches sixth grade English and social studies in the Wake County (NC) Public School System. Ferriter's blog at the Teacher Leaders Network, The Tempered Radical, was voted best teacher blog in the 2007 EduBlog Awards competition. A former North Carolina regional teacher of the year, Ferriter also keeps a blog, Voice of a Teacher Leader, at the National Staff Development Council website.

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Have you ever been completely blown away by the inner workings of the twelve-year-old mind?

It happens to me on a daily basis!

Most recently, I was explaining the troubles that our military has had in bringing the diverse tribes of Afghanistan together into one cohesive country after thousands of years of commitment to regional leaders. "It's just not that easy," I explained, "to convince people with a long history of deep loyalty to their community to value governments like ours that emphasize loyalty to one nation."

"Well, didn't we know that before we invaded?" my kids asked. (Great question! Where were they when Rummy and the boys were scrambling fighter squadrons and drones? Barely out of diapers.)

I had to think carefully before answering. Touching on an issue that might be politically controversial-especially in an election season that is just starting to heat up-requires responses based in fact rather than personal bias. So I did a bit of digging through articles written by military leaders reflecting on the reasons for our continuing struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The officers' growing consensus: We overestimated the potential of technology.

In perhaps one of the most interesting articles, Army Colonel H.R. McMaster described the military's addiction to digital solutions as borderline delusional. Consider this quote:

First, military forces must abandon the dangerous and seductive illusion that technology can solve the problem of future conflict. Even a cursory examination of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon should debunk the myth that technology is capable of 'lifting the fog of war' and delivering a high degree of certainty in combat.

Now, McMaster doesn't believe that our military acted with bad intentions. Instead, they were simply driven by the "doctrine of firsts" -- a desire to "see first, decide first, act first, and finish decisively."

Sifting through McMaster's commentary, I realized that his conclusions about our military's overreliance on technological solutions to inherently human problems could easily translate to schools. Heck, I can even imagine a Nancy Flanagan paragraph reading something like this:

Educators must abandon the dangerous and seductive illusion that technology can solve the problem of struggling students. Even a cursory examination of the limited changes to instruction in many digital classrooms should debunk the myth that technology is capable of 'lifting the fog of learning' and delivering a high degree of certainty in results.

And while McMaster would probably describe me as a "doctrine of firsts" kind of guy who is likely to jump at digital tools (which I love to use in my classroom) without question, I'm starting to believe that careful thinking about educational technology has been replaced by a fantastic sense of misdirected hope in response to our panicked belief that American children are falling behind in the 21^st century.

Generally, the line of thinking goes something like this: The world is rapidly changing. We have no idea what it will look like in the next three decades. Our schools haven't changed at all, though-which means our kids are going to fail.

China wins. We lose. Game over.

In response, school superintendents feeling heat from the public spotlight scramble for immediate solutions to a poorly defined "problem." Passionate arguments for packaged programs or instructional tools preoccupy communities driven to "reform our schools." Classrooms are filled with interactive whiteboards and LCD projectors that cost thousands of dollars. Laptops are purchased for everyone. Educators are swamped by student responders, web cams, document cameras, digital cameras and streaming video. 

Yet teaching and learning doesn't ever change because we wrongly believe that simply investing in technology will improve the chances of our children!

So what's the solution?

Let's start with Nancy's central question:

The foundational step in meeting our future challenges revolves around this question: What does it mean to be an educated person-what should we expect of our schools?

For me, I think schools should prepare students to manage and evaluate information. One of the most obvious shifts that we've seen in the past 20 years is that content surrounds-and sometimes drowns-us. The best students of tomorrow will be those who can efficiently access ideas, judge their worth, and use them to study topics of deep personal and professional interest.

Students of tomorrow will also be capable of heavy mental lifting-inventive creators of innovative ideas that can address issues of local, national and international importance. The most successful citizens of the 21^st century will be those who can generate original solutions to complex challenges.

But most importantly, students of tomorrow must see themselves as contributing members of a global community. Collaboration across borders will become the norm as companies seek to pair the best minds regardless of location-succeeding in this environment will require individuals who can build consensus, embrace differences, find connections, and comfortably function as both leaders and followers.

At first glance, none of these ideas are particularly new, are they? The most successful members of our society have always been evaluative, inventive, creative and collaborative.

The difference is that these skills-once required of only the elite in any organization-are becoming the "new normal." Students leaving schools lacking in these areas will be increasingly unemployable. The other difference is that digital tools are playing an increasingly important role in the work of successful individuals primarily because they make evaluating, inventing, creating and collaborating more efficient. Without a fluency in using technology to facilitate productive endeavors, students truly are unprepared for the future.

At the end of his reflections, Army Colonel McMaster argues that to succeed, the military must begin working beyond the "so-called transformational technologies" by embracing a strategy "grounded in social and cultural realities, focused on achieving clearly defined objectives...[and supported by] resources adequate to achieve those objectives as well as cope with unanticipated conditions."

I'd argue that it's time for schools to begin doing the same thing.