Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Why Educational Change Management?

Why another blog to further clog up an already crowded blogosphere? I am a teacher of 28 years with a passion for change in education. For the longest time, I have asked myself the question, "Are we preparing students for the future?" Not just in recent years. Have we as teachers being doing well as a whole. I had that sinking feeling that I was not and we were not.

Recently, I have read a ton of books about or directly related to educational change such as Alfie Kohn's, "Schools Our Children Deserve", "Wikinomics", "The World is Flat" and, more recently "What Would Google Do?". All of these books and many more tell me that educators need to "Reinvent Education in the Age of Technology" (Collins).

For three years now, I have attended the IT Summit in Saskatoon. Every year I walk away thinking that while we have pockets of excellence in 21st century teaching and learning, it seems our division is slow to set definite goals to adapt to 21st century learners.

This blog is and attempt elicit change in the way we think of and practice education the world over, but more particularly, the Saskatoon Public School Division.

My goal is to attract readers and contributors from all walks of life and all locations, but I would especially like to get educational stakeholders in the city of Saskatoon and the province of Saskatchewan to be a catalyst for educational change in our schools, so that our goals we set, skills, attitudes and literacies we teach are more oriented to meet the needs of 21st century learners.

I plan on basing my entries on research; blog posts, current books, conferences and conversations. I look forward to developing a large community of readers and rich conversations about educational change in our school division and others.

I look forward to your comments and to writing regular posts on what I am learning from colleagues and research.

You can view my own personal platform for 21st century learning in my classroom at :

http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=253244

tcomfort

3 comments:

  1. Hi Tim,

    Great idea to start this blog, and the research base focus should be very helpful. I have followed your class blog for a while, and I think this one will be a nice place to explain why you are advocating for specific practices, which is harder to do a class blog. Given that some of your readers may not be technical people, it might be nice to have a brief post that teaches us all how to subscribe to a blog if we aren't sure.

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  2. Tim, I was reading one of my blogs this morning and thinking it reminded me of some of the things you are thinking about. Check out http://www.joebower.org/

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  3. Mr. Tim Comfort,

    I stumbled upon this entirely by chance and I have a question. Are you an elementary school teacher in Saskatoon Saskatchewan? If so, I do believe you were my fifth grade teacher at Victoria Elementary in 1997.

    I'm Azien Munro and I'm now living in Vancouver BC and exploring different colleges in the city. Feel free to drop my a line, my email is azienmunro@hotmail.com

    Best regards, "100% list" student, Azien M.

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