Behind the Scenes at P.S. 21+
Learning, Teaching, and Leading in the 21st-Century School
...and the technologies that support it

Introduction

This document describes the educational concepts and technology infrastructure that provide the underpinnings of the school described in the slide show and podcast entitled A Day in the Life at a 21st-Century School. This document will make little sense if you have not experienced the slide show or the podcast, which describes the educational experience of a student at a hypothetical school called P.S. 21+.

The description of that school was inspired by a white paper from Cisco Systems entitled Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century, whose purpose was to "initiate an informed dialogue among education thought leaders and practitioners on the path to 21st century learning. " The slide show, podcast, and this document may be considered part of that dialog.

Cisco's paper, based on the experience of its global education efforts and conversations with key educators from around the world, observes that "With few exceptions, schools 
have yet to revise their pedagogy to reflect current trends and technologies," and goes on to suggest the development of schools that include:

	•	project-based, cross-disciplinary tasks that encourage innovation and cross-cultural collaboration.
	•	application of student their knowledge and creativity to solving real-world problems.
	•	the integration of collaborative technologies.
	•	technologies that allow individuals to create, adapt, and share content.

The school described in the podcast and slide show was designed to illustrate how these concepts would play out in the reality of an actual school day. Other ideas from the Cisco report that are manifest in P.S. 21+ include:

	•	The learner at the center: This approach caters to multiple learning styles and adapts education to reflect the learning needs of each individual. 
		
	•	The teacher draws from a repertoire of strategies and skills: Good teachers have always listened as well as lectured, but now this skill is more vital than ever. While traditional education systems fostered the obedience demanded of the manufacturing workforce, the Education 3.0 system must nurture creative and collaborative skills. Knowledge is available at the click of a mouse, but learning to apply it requires a teacher who can instruct, facilitate, guide, and support as needed. 
		
	•	Interdisciplinary and project-based work: Project work in complex areas, such as robotics or environmental change, can help students learn how to draw on multiple disciplines and recognize the interdependence of various systems. Interdisciplinary and project-based teaching is also particularly conducive to working in teams, and hence provides another example of the link between 21st century skills and the pedagogy used to impart them. 
		
	•	Authenticity: Delivering learning that is authentic is another way to engage students by appealing to their existing passions and interests. It is equally important to integrate real-life experiences into lessons: students do not just make an architectural drawing, they actually build a structure on the school lawn.  This also provides the opportunity for learning that extends beyond the classroom into the community, the wilderness, the workplace, and the virtual world.

According to the Cisco document, this new type of school is aimed at developing the kinds of skills the world needs in this new century:

	•	The best employers the world over will be looking for the most competent, most creative, and most innovative people on the face of the earth and will be willing to pay top dollar for their services. 
		
	•	they need employees to be far more adept at collaboration. As many as 70 percent of new jobs created in the United States from 1998 to 2004 were “interaction intensive” occupations such as insurance, banking, and health care, which rely on interactions between people and involve judgment, insight, and collaboration. 

	•	they need to increase performance in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. 

These ideas form the conceptual rationale for the program at P.S. 21+. But the operation of the school depends on far more than concepts: it's based on lots of hard work by the teachers, students, and educational leaders that form the school community, as well as an open and solid technology infrastructure. Teaching and learning at P.S. 21+ represents a change from the normal way of doing things, and the next sections of this document looks at these changes in learning, teaching, technology and leadership in turn.

Learning
The path followed by Sally Student at P.S. 21+ scarcely resembles that taken by most high schoolers in America today. Her steps covered different ground, and she ended up at a different place. What Sally learned, and how she learned it, reflect a rethinking of the purpose of school. 

What we learn. The knowledge and skills the people will need in the 21st century are different from the ones they needed in the 20th. While literacy and numeracy remain the price of entry to the new workplace, the key value is in the skills of collaboration, creativity, and innovation. General problem-solving strategies are more important than the knowledge of specific solutions.

And so Sally's assignments were grounded in reading, writing, and mathematics, but they also required collaboration with other students, extra rewards for creative analysis, and the expectation of innovative solutions. The problems assigned by the teachers in most cases had no single answer. To design this this new set of assignments was no easy task for the faculty of P.S. 21+. The had to craft carefully into each assignment a combination of solid content acquisition, along with collaborative problem-solving activities. And figure out how to evaluate the latter. And ensure that all the assignments taken together formed a coherent package that comprehended the full set of competencies called for by the 21st century.

How we learn it.  During her day, Sally spent much less time in a group of 25 in a classroom, and much more time with a group of five or six in a library or laboratory. She spent less energy on paper and pencil tasks, and much more energy on computer-based tasks. She seldom found herself performing the exact same task as the student next to her. She learned as much outside of the school building and day as she did inside. 

Sally's day reflected the ways people work in the world outside of school. The learning methods at P.S. 21+ stand in stark contrast to most high schools. And require a heightened sense of self-discipline on the part of students, along with self-motivation, and self-scheduling. Sally did not arrive at P.S. 21+ with these traits -- they were taught as part of the curriculum.

The methods of learning relied on technologies at every step -- not "educational" technology, but real-world computer and network tools, the same ones used in the world of research and business, including technologies often banned in American schools, such as instant messaging and web publshing. All day long, Sally applied common workplace  technologies to serious academic tasks.

This new form of learning calls for a different kind of planning and organization, a different set of expectations for students, a new role for teachers, and a robust technology infrastructure.

Teaching

Few high school teachers today are asked to assign a grade for collaboration skills or problem-solving ability. Few are asked to coach a small group of students through a problem-solving exercise and then grade them on it. Few are required to coordinate their every assignment with their peers in other subjects. Teaching at P.S. 21+ is nothing like teaching in a regular school. You must teach and evaluate not only the concepts of your subject area, but the new collaboration and innovation skills as well. 

A teacher's work at P.S. 21+ consists of two parts: standard subject matter teaching, and a project-coaching assignment. Both types of work are carefully scheduled into the teacher's day. And the subject-matter teaching is hardly standard -- it's very carefully crafted to mesh in time with the problem-solving assignments, and with the work of teachers in other subject areas. This scope of work calls for a wider range of skills on the part of the teacher: teaching techniques, curriculum planning expertise, and professional collaboration skills.

What we teach. The content taught at P.S. 21+ tends toward the applied and the practical. It focuses on those aspects of each subject that help students to confront the group problem-solving tasks assigned to them. (For this reason, the problems must be carefully chosen so as to require a wide range of content knowledge for their solution.) And thus the decision of what to teach, and when to teach it,  is much more in the hands of the P.S. 21+ faculty working as a whole.

How we teach it. There's more just in time teaching at P.S. 21+, and less just in case teaching. Just in time to apply it to the problem students are trying to solve in your group project. Just in time to bring concepts from several disciplines to bear simultaneously on a common issue. Just in time to provide a contrasting approach to what's being taught right now in another subject. 

And we teach in different places, to different sizes of groups. In the auditorium to 100 students, in a classroom with 25, in a seminar space with six. We teach in different modes: a lecture here, a discussion there, a coaching session somewhere else. This calls for a richer repertoire of teaching skills than we are used to.

The reliance on technology that we saw in the slide show -- for finding information, for analyzing it, and for presenting one's findings -- sets a high bar of expectations for the teacher, who must not only keep abreast of new technologies in his or her field, but find new ways to take advantage of them in the classroom. Even the teachers of arts and humanities would be lost at P.S. 21+ without a growing grasp of the latest technologies.

Technologies

This brings us to the technology infrastructure of this new school. It was built specially to support he kinds of teaching and learning that we saw in the day-in-the-life presentation. An information architect, working closely with the faculty, designed a system that would facilitate this kinds of open and flexible access to information and to other people.

The technologies are designed to help students and teachers to do three things:

	1.	Access information.
	2.	Communicate with each other and with outside resources.
	3.	Produce a variety of works essential to learning.

And to do them from any location:
	•	In the school.
	•	At home.
	•	On the road.

The infrastructure is built with three main elements:
	1.	A solid server.
	2.	A robust network.
	3.	Individual mobile devices connected to the network.

The server, actually a small collection of servers, runs the applications that students and faculty need to get their work done. It hosts a content management system that stores and presents course materials posted by teachers, and projects created by students. It manages information about students and faculty: who is enrolled in which course, when they are scheduled, what rights do they have to access information. It hosts an email and messaging service that enables (and encourages) easy communication among members of the school community as well as outside experts. Audio and video communication as well as text is managed through this application; in fact, these multimedia formats are supported by special streaming server applications that easy allow uploading and viewing of video, audio, and animations. The server uses open standards-based software and protocols for security, reliability, and ease of modification.

The network enables members of the school community to access the information and services they need from a variety of devices and places. A single secure log-in provides entry to the school site from anywhere, so that students can study their academic materials whenever they need to. The local area network in the school is tied directly to the internet backbone with a fiber-optic connection, with wired backup, to ensure 24/7 reliability and the high bandwidth necessary for the kinds of work described in the day-in-the-life. Within the school, wireless access points permit faculty and students to use a variety of devices wherever they are working. Outside of the school, a Virtual Public Network is used to provide members of the school community secure access identical to what they enjoy in the building.

The devices students and faculty use range from large fixed equipment such as smartboards, to small smartphones, and everything in between. The servers and network are specially designed to accommodate and encourage the use of such devices, and to integrate them into academic work. Some belong to the school, but more and more belong to students and faculty personally. Lightweight laptops, iPods, 3G smartphones, personal digital assistants, media players, MPEG videocameras, science probes, and desktop workstations are all configured to work with the network and the servers and each other, so they can be used for accessing information, communicating with others, and producing new works.

Leadership

Schools like P.S. 21+ do not develop of themselves. Thy are engendered by a well-thought-out vision, and implemented by a team of faculty and educational leaders. leadership of such a school is a tough job. At the outset, it consists of:

	•	Building a new perception of learning and role of school on the part of parents, students teachers, and community. While business organizations such as Cisco Systems, and educational groups such as 21st-Centrury Skills support leaders by providing a clear rationale for changing this perception, nonetheless the kind of schooling pictured in the slide show is far different from what the community is used to. Leaders must paint a clear picture of what the revised school looks like.

	•	Leading and supporting the faculty to build a new kind of curriculum, a new type of schedule, and a new way of working with students that supports this vision. Starting from a revised set of learning goals, the leadership must coach the faculty through the process of creating the new assignments, presentations, online resources, and facilities they'll need to open the school. And make sure they have the resources they need to do this work.

	•	Introducing the students  and their parents to a new set of expectations, a vastly modified set of learning goals, and a new array of technologies. Getting them started in a new school like P.S. 21+ requires more then a login password and a schedule; it calls for each student to rethink what school is about and how they work within it.

	•	Coordinating all of the aspects, especially facilities and information technology, with the faculty and students so they combine as they should when they should.

As the school settles in and grows, leadership remains critical as it:

	•	Nurtures faculty and students as they learn the ropes in a new environment. This involves monitoring  their progress, listening to their concerns, and supporting their unanticipated needs. 

	•	Ensures the full functioning of the technology infrastructure, encouraging users to point out ares of improvement, and communicating directly and often to the technology staff (which reports to and is evaluated directly by the school leadership.)

	•	Monitors the perceptions of students, parents, and faculty of how well the school is achieving its goals, and communicates with them frequently, and addresses their concerns.

Conclusion

There's more going on behind the scenes at P.S. 21+ than meets the eye. The 21st-century school depends on self-disciplined studnts, a creative faculty, a responsive set of technologies, and careful leadership to permit the kind of education we saw in the day-in-the-life presentation.