Becoming a 21st Century School

[John Lottes]

We are hosting Dr. Perry Bresemann to conduct a site visit/assessment and lead a facutly development workshop on education in the 21st Century. We had an interesting administrative council meeting this afternoon where he gave us his first thoughts...and reminded us the old cliche' "when the going gets tough, the tough get going"; that's how we need to proceed...just my thoughts.

[John Lottes]

Our administrative team is very supportive (from the Head on down); the trick is to do this in the right way instead of just throwing more hardware out there; Dr. Bresemann's message was pretty clear in that regard, put the right stuff in the right people's hands for the right reasons and applications. As is typical for most school environments, we have people at every level of tech ability (with some that are already doing things in this relatively new model). The trick will be to, in a balanced way, get the people who are most ready to do it, then have others start in at lower levels. Thanks for all of the encouraging words.

[Rob Jacklin]

Blessings as you take on this task. Here at St. John in Ellisville we are blessed to have administrators who "get it" when it comes to how learning is changing. I assume that was one of the things Perry talked about: Not tat technology is making our current education models better, but that technology is restructuring the entire learning process. Kind of the like the "adding new wine to old wine skins."

Sounds like it was it was a very transformative day for your school! That's exciting!

[John Lottes]

The presentation session just ended. It was excellent! I believe that many of our faculty (even those who appeared a bit skeptical at the start of the day) grasped the urgency of why we need to do this and some of our people who are already at the front end of this process are more fired up to move onward. We are willing as an institution to take the next steps in supporting (and in some instances mandating) the staff development that will be needed to get our people where they need to be to look at curriculum development issues and ultimately implementation. (maybe you can, after all, teach a few new tricks to some of us old dogs...)

[David Black]

What is resulting for your school from this session?