School Leadership in the present situation:

….some thoughts

Acknowledging de Bono: Imagine a ship at sea that is in

trouble. The lights keep going out. The engine is faltering. The rudder

is unreliable. The first mate is drunk.

The crew is very demoralised. The service is appalling.

The passengers on the ship are very dissatisfied.

Then a new captain and first mate are flown in by helicopter

Everything changes. Crew morale is lifted Service improves The engine is fixed The rudder is fixed The lights stay on Everything seems

fine.

But the ship is still headed in the wrong direction

Changes in direction !!!!!! Inclusive education: imparting quality

education to increasing numbers…developing learning metrics

Moving from the art of teaching to the science of learning

Building in the students the capacity ‘to learn how to learn’…learning kinetics

Adopting 21st century information and communication tools for enhanced learning experience and achieving desired outcomes.

Welcome to the year 2009 !!!

This is the year in which the fate of the world economies will be determined, maybe for generations.

Martin Wolf Chief Economics Commentator The Financial Times January 6th 2009

Disruptive change is the key phrase now and in future:

Climate, Environment and sustainable development

Energy Hunger Financial markets Stem cell research and healthcare

Founded in 2008 by :Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page and Peter Diamandis

Faculty include George Fitzgerald Smoot III, 2006 Physics Nobel prize winner

Supported by NASA and Google Projects that impact 10^9+…billions Nine week crash course on ‘saving

mankind’

Student selection criteria: Depth of the academic background Entrepreneurial and leadership skills Interest in solving global challenges Applying ideas and technologies to

solve mankind’s biggest woes

Rigorous courses—classes are to be held 8 hours a day, 8 days a week

Terms will be for 9 weeks (US$ 25,000) 10 Day Exec Program (US$ 10,000) Three Day Exec Program (US$ 8,000) The University has received 1200

applications from 70 countries for just 40 seats

SU hopes to ramp up the seats to 120 per year

The 10 tracks of the Graduate Studies Program: Future Studies and forecasting Network and computing systems Policy, law and ethics Finance and entrepreneurship Biotechnology and bioinformatics Nanotechnology Medicine, neuroscience and human

enhancement Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Energy and ecological systems Space and Physical Sciences

Goal is to study a set of exponentially growing fields and their effect on humanity

Create a new class of world leaders that understand rapidly accelerating technologies and how to deploy these to solve our largest global challenges

Our approach : Ostrich- like

What affects the rest of the world will not impact us

We are different

Shatranj ke khiladi :by Munshi Premchand

The story is set around the life of the last independently ruling Nawab ruler Wajid Ali Shah.

The two main characters are the aristocrats Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Raushan Ali who are deeply immersed into playing chess.

Their desire for the game makes them irresponsible in their duties.

They derive immense pleasure in developing chess strategies and ignore the real life invasion by the British

Their city Lucknow falls to British attackers as they are busy playing a game of chess

Unprecedented pace of change, uncertainty & competition

Emergence of Knowledge Economies Growing Populations Increasing Mobility Rising expectations Changed age demography Urbanisation…..in fact globalisation Social Inclusion

The skills of a lifetime become obsolete in an instant

New skill sets wanted; upgrading existing skills

Fall in demand of old skill sets Life time of particular skill sets

decreasing Learning how to learn is critical

AORTA: Assessment of Replacability by

Technological Advances Software is becoming more

intelligent (Digital Socrates) Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Robots are getting better (Saya) Gathering insights from large

amounts of data (periodic table; double helix)

Who will flourish and thrive ?

Prosperity will be directly correlated to skills

We are competing in a global skills race

Education is vital Open and distance learning

empowered with technology is the key

The criticality of teachers to learning

Common sense and research tell us that teachers are the single biggest influence on how well students learn.

Some transformational ideas…

Three ideas that made a huge impact on the way organizations work are Quality, business processes and their re-engineering and the importance of intellectual capital.

All three must be assimilated into the teacher training systems.

A teacher vs. a mere expert

An expert can do it; A teacher can do it but also knows

what it takes to progress from ignorant to novice to expert

The standard lecture predates the Gutenberg Press

The notion of a one hour lecture as the core of the educational process, needs to be replaced by participation in experiencing a series of ‘learning events’, which have a granular structure using small chunks of resources

Creating the Eureka moments…..

Designed to lead to moments of enlightenment in which the cognitive conflicts in the minds of the learner are removed, and he exclaims “wow, this is wonderful…I never knew this…isn’t it fascinating…...etc” in a spirit similar to the Eureka moment of Archimedes

Multiple roles of a teacher

must be content expert, a diagnostician, a rescuer, a motivator, a patient communicator, a manager and leader, a student of human behavior.

Independent educators: Just as it is legitimately possible for any

lawyer, doctor, engineer, architect, chartered accountant to work for a State Government, the Central Government, a large corporation, a small business or to work independently on his own, it should be possible for qualified educators to work independently outside the traditional Institutional frameworks on their own.

Separation of responsibilitiesbaron de Montesquieu : Like the separation of powers in good

democratic Governance, decoupling the responsibilities for laying down of standards, conduct of examinations, the teaching-learning processes, and maintain databases that are shared,holding the certificates in de-materialised forms like we do for de-mat shares, we can see lots of new roles for educators.

An educator’s network: learning community using web 2.0

Highly motivated teachers working together with a shared vision would overcome many constraints of the present system and unlock the large potential that we have in retired accomplished teachers or unemployed younger talented people.

A 10 point scale descriptor of a teacher: Level 9: Gifted Teacher Level 8: Passionate Teacher Level 7: Highly Motivated Teacher Level 6: Enthusiastic Teacher Level 5: Excited Teacher Level 4: Confident Teacher Level 3: Hesitant Teacher Level 2: Reluctant Teacher Level 1: de-motivated Teacher Level 0: Petrified Teacher

A 6 point scale of ICT fluency of a teacher: Level 5: Can do trouble-shooting, teach his peers

and update self with new tools and techniques Level 4:Is familiar with wikis, blogs, RSS feeds,

podcasts, and other web 2.0 stuff Level 3:Can create and manage basic web-sites,

and is aware of Security and safety issues Level 2:Can manipulate computers and allied

devices such as scanners, printers and cameras to upload information

Level 1:Can use computers to retrieve information

Level 0:Refuses to touch computers

A new possibility for Infra-structure policy

A laptop for every teacher

Sharable common computing resources at schools/CLS

A USB drive for every learner

A job that you never retire from:

Teachers need not ever retire and can continue to play a role in imparting education till they can do so effectively (incidentally there is no retirement age for politicians, lawyers, doctors and many other professionals).

A possible education council

The other professions have bodies such as the Bar Council, the Medical Council, the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

We can have such an Educational or Teacher’s Council, which may be a constituent component of NCTE.

Clayton Christensen :Class Disrupted

Filled with fascinating case studies, scientific findings, and unprecedented insights on how innovation must be managed, Disrupting Class will open your eyes to new possibilities, unlock hidden potential, and get you to think differently. Professor Christensen and his coauthors provide a bold new lesson in innovation that will help you make the grade for years to come.

Jay Matthews :Work Hard Be nice

Work Hard. Be Nice provides a fast-paced, engrossing and heartening story of two phenomenally dedicated teachers who demonstrate that low-income students, if given the right environment, can thrive academically.

Guy Claxton: What’s the point of school

What's the Point of School? takes the reader beyond the sterile debates about City Academies and dumbed-down exams in order to reveal the key responsibility of education today: to create students who enjoy learning.

Peter Senge: Schools that Learn

Deep learning cycle

Five learning disciplines

Shared vision process

Virtuous spiral

Youtube : a new learning tool

Now, it has become a house of learning as the University of California (UC), Berkeley has become the first university to transfer its entire course lectures and special events on http://www.youtube.com/edu

Also www.academicearth.org

So, what is the way forward?

Re-thinking education Its purpose The curriculum The outcomes The teaching-learning model

Drawing from the double helix model:

One strand is the academic knowledge/information

The other strand is generic skills of learning to learn, learning to think, gathering insights from information

There are links at several levels between the two strands

How will it get done? The academic strand through high

quality schools implementing mastery learning, personalised adaptive learning,

The other strand through web 2.0 and allied technologies, wikis, blogs, podcasting, twitter, second life and accessed through mobile hand-held devices

Thank You !!!!!!!! www.mmpant.net