You’re right about the conversations. I’d like to see large blocks of time available at all conferences where nothing is scheduled. This would give more people an opportunity to be involved in these sessions instead of choosing between the informal conversations and the sessions. Maybe the mornings should be session time and the afternoons be conversation time – time to reflect on any learning that might have taken place at a prior time.

I love the idea of the Blogger’s cafe – will there also be such a thing in Shanghai 2010? Hope to hang out there…

Learning can be messy, and loud, and chaotic. I find there is no cookie cutter recipe for teaching high school students today. You have got to be flexible and creative.

I like the idea of virtual school for the use of credit recovery to get students back on track to graduate.

The social skills of many kids I see are lacking and dramatically need improving. This is just my take from teaching in a metro Atlanta, Georgia public high school.

Now, how would this look in our classrooms? That’s a bit more complicated. We are teaching in a very hostile environment. We are required to “teach” a prescribed curriculum and when our evaluators walk into our classroom they are looking for directed lessons, students under control. But even with this as a requirement I DID find myself going outside the box and allowing MY students to engage in conversation around learning. I still have a long way to go but as I am reminded by fellow elementary school teacher Brian Crosby “Learning is Messy” and it’s just fine by me.

He was attending a conference where there were many strong speakers and presentations. The conference had been totally built around these plenary sessions but he began to notice that after a while people that had been in the sessions for a while were leaving. What he found was that they were outside in the hallways, at cafes in the conference area or just standing around talking about what they had heard.

Thornburg went back to his hotel room and came up with three learning environments.

1) Campfires – the traditional way of presenting information -most of our schools and classrooms are still set up this way.

2) Watering Holes – what we refer to as the water cooler talk – this is where we process what we have heard.

3) Caves – this is our alone time, our solitude, our time to process on our own and this usually leads to creativity.

Later a friend suggested he needed to a fourth environment which he refers to as Life. This is the application part. The area where we show what we have actually learned.

A quote from his book really hit me.

“Learning takes place in multiple environments, and if, any of these environments is out of balance, learning suffers and people will do something to try to restore the balance themselves.” (Thornburg,1996 pg.50)

If you apply this idea to our conferences and our classrooms think of the amazing knowledge that would be developed and created. What you are experiencing and what you are involved in at NECC applies to these environments. I wish our schools did.

Thornburg, David D. (1996) Campfires in Cyberspace. Star Song Publications. San Carlos,CA.