U & D

It would have been rude to blog our meetings of the last two days during the meetings. I could never say that about a meeting of teachers, half of whom are generally checking email while I or someone else is talking.

This group was different. For starters, Jana Boody did a wonderful, professional job of chairing the meetings. She was directed, firm and polite in striking the right balance between knowledge-seeking and decision-making. I have been in that seat myself – someone has to ask to the hard questions at the risk of looking ignorant or provoking offense – I appreciate how skillfully Jana handled the task.

That’s not to say she was without support. The attending educators, tribal leaders and MITSC leaders were likewise focused on information-sharing and on the success of this venture (it’s not my place to provide the attendance list – trust me that it was quality). With no exception they were articulate and forward-thinking; they listened as well as they spoke. Some thin ice was crossed, especially today, but the children of the state of Maine will benefit from this group’s ability to be frank about issues that do not make their way into the textbooks.

Unfortunately, the “next steps” will come slowly, at least that is the prediction. Being an unpatient person, especially in the light of the pressing need I see for education, let me make two proposals. The first I will make here, the 2nd in the next post.

It was a bit surprising to me to hear from many of the other educators at this meeting that there remains widespread district ignorance of LD 291 and of the very content we were discussing and hearing. Perhaps some bandaids can be put into place while we are waiting for a documented statewide scope and sequence, with accompanying professional development. We are all suffering from local budget cuts, but that does not mean that we can not be inventive about sharing our knowledge with a broader base of teachers and students. The Internet provides us with the tools for doing so.

There are already educators in the state, such as Joseph Charnley and members of our Native Studies Committee (including myself), and a certain USM adjunct professor, who are successfully teaching lessons that they have presented at local and state workshops. These lessons have been vetted by the Committee and “peer reviewed.” The DOE Committee (Jana’s group) is being careful to align lessons to LD 291 and to the MLR for SS, 2007. The content is “Wabanaki” and not solely specific to a tribal group – it is not quite clear how that will play out in the final document. The lessons that I refer to would fall within these boundaries.

What we need to do is to film ourselves, in our classrooms and/or addressing our colleagues around the state, and post short videos to TeacherTube or Vimeo. Both social media tools are free and are (currently) unblocked by MLTI and most other school filters. This would be a teacher-to-teacher “social action collaboration” – what a nice way to model the 9-Diploma MLR A2: Making Decisions Using Social Studies Knowledge and Skills: Students make individual and collaborative decisions on matters related to social studies using relevant information and research, discussion, and ethical reasoning skills.

The cool things about a video library such as this are that:

• it fulfills the need I mentioned in the last post for resources available to students directly;
• it archives best practice
• it networks our teachers
• it can be used to inform the Legislature
• it is collaborative, digital initiative and thus in the spirit of both the MLR and the ISTE/National Council for the 21st Century Skills and Social Studies Map (the actual link to the .pdf document seems to be down as of today, but I have downloaded the document successfully from it)
• it is a model that can be used to capture “lectures” by our tribal leaders as well – we lost an opportunity to do this today, but we can certainly rectify that.

There is no need now-a-days to make a DVD; education is going mobile. It would be wonderful if our Maine students presented their learning to our Legislature some day – first as students, then as political leaders. Isn’t that a goal of action committees such as this one? Their teacher can get the ball rolling on their own.

If you need a camera and a download cable, let me know. I am big on freely sharing.