As I plan my return to work, it is hard not to think about what I want to do, who I want to be as a professional.  I am reading all of this professional chatter.  Everyone is so passionate and convinced that they are right.  We need to focus on learning and not on assessment; we need to teach students to learn and not just to ‘take tests.’  We need to focus on assessment; assessment of learning, assessment for learning, learning through assessment.  We need to focus on ‘professional judgment’ and move away from standardization.  We need to be more standardized; teacher’s should be giving the same lessons on the same day, using the exact same hand outs.  We need to move away from our reliance on technology and return the basics.  We need to utilize more technology to engage learners and prepare them for a world that is reliant on technology to manage every aspect of our lives.  Wow!

What an incredible, and incredibly confusing, time to be involved in education.  There is so much passion in our profession, so much noise.  But, it is an exciting time to be in education too.  The only thing worse than too much passion, too much noise, is apathy.  As educators, we need to be passionate and passionately searching for where our profession needs to go.  We are preparing our students for a world that does not yet exist, we are preparing them for a reality that only lives in the mind of the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and/or Charles Branson.  As technology and social media networking speed up the rate of change, the reality of the world we are living in, and the one that we are preparing our children and students for, will be different from the one we live in today. 

How do you prepare for that?

The truth is…we don’t really know.  We act like we do.  We argue like we do.  We move forward with the grace and confidence of people who know exactly what we are charging ahead toward…but in reality we’re just hoping. Hoping we are right. Hoping we make a difference. Hoping that we can be a part of shaping the change makers, and in that, be change makers ourselves.