I know that if we are really trying to reform education and have it meet the individual needs of each and every student and it is a real challenge to put in place an assessment that can be applied fairly for all students. As an aside, I read an interesting post this week about students not being as concerned about making sure every one was treated the same as a measure of “fairness”. Have lost the reference (poor data tracking I know but I am on the road a lot this week)! Still, we know from the success of programs that map how our kids are doing in real time against others, that kids love to have a bar set for them and will work to leap over it.

How about your project-based/challenge-based/inquiry-based units that you are setting for your students? Do you think that you can set a bar that is really clear and visible for your students and that they have every opportunity to try to leap over it?

Photo: Arched http://www.flickr.com/photos/kc_jake/493579403/

I had a short, online conversation with David Warlick about this on the Learning 2.0 08 Ning. David mentions the need to have some artifacts of what 21st Century Learning looks like. I am looking forward to carrying this conversation with David a lot further when we catch up in Hong Kong in September. In the meantime, I really think that we need to think about these artifacts and try to get our heads around how we can show all stakeholders what we are trying to do to shift schools to places of genuine, engaged, authentic, 21st Century Learning.

I decided to turn this into a few powerpoint slides as I often talk about teacher take up of technology and limit myself to showing the diffusion of innovation curve below.

or even the Gartner Hype Cycle:

I am not sure that I really want to draw reference to this article that I was recently pointed to about K-12 teachers being part of the most “Technology lagging sector”. This is a PDF where you will see on slide 21 that “The lowest IT-Intensive industry sector was Education…well below coal mining and every other sector!”. The accompanying data from the report are on pages 57 and 58 of this report. There you will see Educational Service proudly sitting at the bottom of the Bottom-Half Less IT-intensive Industries table, ranking below such worthy competitors as “Amusement and recreation services”, “Rubber and miscellaneous plastics products”, Water transportation” and of course “Stone, clay, and glass products” (”coal mining” is at the bottom of the Top-Half table, way out of our league…).

Anyway, back to the ACOT study, which is much more positive and i think I would like to use some of the ideas from the table to show what is possible to get teachers to move through more quickly with support from someone like myself. Here is my attempt at putting these stages into a Powerpoint.