One of the areas schools have tried to stay away from, and churches for that matter, is doing business with people, like a business. I've heard many a congregation member scream, "This isn't a business, it's a church!" Especially when it comes to the matter of internal infrastructure, money management, and the effective distribution of resources.

Now we could debate the merits of having congregational meetings every other month versus utilizing an administrative board to make decisions. Or how much oversight a school board should have over an administrator. Many of you could probably argue one side or the other very eloquently.

I do think however, teachers could learn a little bit from the executive world about how to run their classrooms. I know it's a pretty bold statement, but one that I think deserves a little fleshing out. This is especially true when utilizing technology to reshape "teaching" for the 21st Century! As the Ed. Tech. community spends time and energy focusing on how to prepare students to be 21st century learners, we should be equally on task (if not more) talking about what do great "teachers" in the 21st century look like. Because it's those 21st century teachers who are teaching, facilitating, and mentoring our learners.

Below is a link to an interveiw with J.P. Rangaswami from the FASTforward Conferene (a leading business and technology conference here in the US). http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/02/21/jp-rangaswami-cio-british-telecom/

I especially liked his ideas about control. The same thing could be said about classrooms. Innovation shouldn't be seen as a loss of control, as long as it achieves it set goals. Because a teacher's classroom is a little more noisy and more inquiry-based, doesn't mean she's lost control. On the contrary, there may be more "control" their than the average person recognizes.

Technorati Tags: JPRangaswami fastfoward08 21century learner teaching

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Tweet