ICET Day 2

Day 2 at ICET was filled with meeting lots of people, attending some sessions, and a fun dinner that ended with our Scottish tablemates getting all of us up and singing with them. I had a nice breakfast with my UCAR colleagues John Ristvey (Spark/UCAR Connect) and Tony Murphy (Globe) along with James O'Meara from the National Louis University. He is also the President of the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET). James wanted to learn more about UCAR, our projects, and what connections we wanted to make here at the Global Assembly for ICET. He suggested I learn more about:

•  A school in the Chicago area called Gems World Academy 
• The African Virtual University because he believes they have a similar system like the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS) that I work with
• MESH guides and their resources
• The International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA) 
• The World Council for Curriculum and Instruction 
• Core New Zealand which I think is officially Core Education. 

I need to more fully explore all of these. James was great at listening to our projects and interests and finding connections. He then spent the rest of the day introducing us to many people, it was great! I hope that we can make some great things happen with the connections we have made.

The sessions I attended were good and I have some overarching thoughts from the day. First, the international community is doing some pretty cool work and applied research. I noticed that often they were talking about similar work and struggles and findings as I have had with my research, but using different phrases (not always the buzz words I hear in the US-which is ok). I have to point out a few that I think were great. I'm hoping to find access to their papers soon, but so far they are not up on the conference site but should be available in the the 2014 ICET Yearbook.
Here are some presenters and their papers/topics that I'm hoping I can read:

• Jia Li - Urban teens' perspectives on social networking media and its applications for literacy instruction and learning (She said that 8th grade students are more critical consumers and had a more pragmatic approach to technology use)
• Mariette Newman and Carol Gentles: Ideas for a framework to guide teacher growth and development in Jamaica (They have a great qualitative methodology for longitudinal work. Their framework includes six concepts from idealistic to realistic ideas about teaching: "good person/morally upright, role model, carer, change agent, coping with a variety of challenges, recognizing the need for support, ameliorating the effects of disparities related to human development and learning and adding value, committed to growth particularly improving their own academic qualifications". From the discussion in this session, which included other papers, there were two take aways: If we don't do things to make actionable changes for practitioners and policy makers why do we do what we do? Strong teachers know how much they don't know or in other words strong teachers know what questions they need to ask
•  Tashane Kenesha Haynes-Brown - Assessing the value and contribution of the e-learning training on teacher classroom practice. It focused on students becoming creators of knowledge instead of consumers as well as professional development for teachers and the use of ICT in teaching.
• Keshav P. Mandadi - Multimedia and modern classrooms. One liner from this talk that stood out to me was this: Teachers who use technology will replace teachers who do not use technology.

The keynote for today was Tony Townsend from the University of Glasgow. One notable line from his talk was: "If we want to change student achievement we need to focus on students and teachers." He mentioned the seven sins of educational reform referred to by Kai-Ming Cheng in a 2013 interview and previous essay. John Hattie's 2003 paper about teachers making a difference and teacher quality was referenced and quoted "It is what teachers know, do, and care about which is very important in this learning equation." He said out challenge for the future is creating effective learning time and teaching matched to student learning needs. He mentioned learning together and relational learning and their importance in classrooms today. I found this interesting publication called Learning Together to Build Social Capital that is related, as well as the Center for Relational Learning. Of course I haven't had time to read through all of this and make any sense of it. Hopefully I will be able to sometime soon. But anyone familiar with this work and ideas I'd love to hear your thoughts. Tony Townsend did mention that he is developing a Coursera course on teacher education, so that is something to keep an eye out for to see what it includes.

At some point during the day someone brought up the idea of what students today know, what they are used to, and what they have never been without. Of course that sent my mind to the Beloit College Mindset List. I had a good laugh reading through the list for this year ("Their parents’ car CD player is soooooo ancient and embarrassing."), but was a little surprised by some of the entries ("They have known only two presidents." and "They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal.").

It was a very busy day and despite my surprise about how small this conference is, I've had ideas challenged, learned about some new things, and met some new people.