Last night I watched the Chris Lehmann’s keynote for the closing of ISTE 2011.

Chris is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy which is a public school in Philadelphia.

These are some of the comments I took from the video.

Our school endeavors to be the best of ourselves everyday.
Ethic of Care – means to care about and care for students.  School is a family; siblings, parents and mentors.

Schools should become second homes.

Academic Core Values – These core values are built into every unit.
inquiry
research
collaboration
presentation
reflection

Bring voice to the word – empower the youth and ourselves.
Build systems and structures around what we believe.

Accountable to the question- how do you learn? and how do we sustain and unlock the student’s passion.

School isn’t preparation for real life, it is real life.  Students are engaged with their world.  Our goal is to help our students become the 21st century citizens we need.

Goal – To create thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind students.
students who are truly full of thought, wise, have passion to care about their world and find humanity in the all around them.

Technology is Oxygen – it is ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. 
We need to use it all of the time.  We have already won the technology war.  Teachers know the power and necessity of technology.  Technology is powerful productivity tools.  We need to dream bigger and dare ourselves and students.

This keynote made sense to me.  Here is a principal from a public school, someone working in the field. I like the idea of caring – although I do believe that all schools care about students, but this seems to go a step further by providing the mentorship aspect and the mentor stays with the student for all four years.  I think it is important to let students know that we care.  Being a second home for kids is a wonderful learning space.

The academic core values also makes sense to me.  I can tie this into all of my units, some may be more inquiry based than others.

Chris’s statement about the technology war being over may be a little grandiose as I do not believe that all teachers get the importance of technology, but it does work for me.  I was worried that I need to change my teaching practice for the one to one initiative, but really I made many of the changes during this school year in preparation for the one to one.  I began putting all of the materials for my units online.  I still need to continue with this process, especially for my units in the fall, but I since I had worked through the process, I know what I need to accomplish.

I was also worried about the configuration of my class.  I do not want my students to be sitting in neat rows all staring at their laptop screens (as I saw represented in the news).  My students need to collaborate and work on creating documents, projects and assignments together, not in isolation.  I especially like his analogy of technology and oxygen.  This is fantastic and makes total sense to me.  I try to infuse technology into my lessons already and as they have been stored across the hallway from me, we always try to use them.  There still will be some structural issues such as what software we will be using and how we will set up our digital notebooks, but these are possibly not static choices either as we may find that some things just don’t work for our needs at the time.   I have some decisions to make on how the technology will be used but it still just an everyday part of our class.