Role of the 21st Century Teacher

Dear Colleagues:

Typically, teachers are referred to as classroom teachers, fourth grade teachers, high school teachers, mathematics teachers, college professors, or home school teachers. These conventional descriptions focus on where they teach, what level they teach, or what subject they teach. And they tend to sustain the roles and images of teaching in the past!

In the 21st century, we envision an ever-changing and disruptive learning improvement vision and role for all teachers.

• The role of the 21st century teacher combines what people do best -- nurture and support learners -- with advanced digital technology to do what it does best -- process data, information, and knowledge at the speed of light.

In this role, people will become dynamic learners -- to be their own teachers, able to ask themselves good, new questions and guide both online and collaborative face-to-face efforts in answering them. In this role, 21st century teachers focus on the following vision of teaching as they increase both collaboration and learning:

• Moving from one teacher and many learners to thousands of teachers for each learner!

The preliminary characteristics posted here and in our WikiTask begin to describe this emerging vision and role in the field of learning improvement. What do you think about the vision and role of the 21st century teacher? Add your ideas to this WikiTask in LearningFront!

Nick Hobar

What If School Was More Like Twitter?

Dear Colleagues:

What if school was more like Twitter?

I discovered this question in a LinkedIn discussion group for Twitter-Using Educators. It motivated me to envision what a learning venue like that might look like. Well, here are my thoughts for two purposes as part of teachers' daily on-the-job tasks:

For Communication and Information Sharing. Teachers would use social media tools such as Twitter or Syzygy in LearningFront to communicate throughout the day with their followers or colleagues. For example, to find a place to park at a staff development session, share a vision for quality learning, identify what they're reading, share a web link, describe a cool activity in their classrooms, or ask for help on meeting student needs. Teachers would just have fun and learn from their colleagues as a part of their daily workplace! They might post something as simple as "off to eat lunch with my instructional team" or as complex as "what is data-driven teaching?" Simply put, Twitter or Syzygy are social media tools for teachers to communicate with each other when something is relevant and timely to share or inquire about.

For Teaching and Student Learning. Teachers would access and use online templates to construct lesson plans that integrate social media tools such as Twitter. For example, they might adapt the following templates or design their own lessons:

• Using Twitter for Teaching Estimation
  
  
• Using Twitter for Teaching Problem Solving
  

Payoff. The values of this approach are the pre-planning, delivery, and results from using Twitter to achieve a specific content standard. Once the Twitter session is started, teachers would adjust their Tweets to meet the differentiated needs and ideas of the students as the Twitter-generated lesson is taught through online or blended online and classroom settings.  Moreover, the examples demonstrate how a scoring tool would be used to assess both student performance of the content standard and the efficacy of using the Twitter timeline instructional strategy. Now, that's transforming what a lesson plan looks like!

"School as Twitter" is an exciting and evolving concept -- and highly inviting for us to improve upon as we collaborate to engage our students.

All of this thinking stimulated me to raise a new question: What would a standards-based curriculum comprised of "School as Twitter" lessons look like?

Nick Hobar