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Elizabeth Helfant Archives

Making a Mantra
by Elizabeth Helfant

This week the hoopla started. The banners were unfurled and the celebration was underway. It is a milestone and worthy of attention and it has nothing to do with technology and yet it has everything to do with our choices in defining our future direction. Our institutional birthday cake now boasts 150 candles. That equates to 150 years of tradition, of sustainability and of change. The hoopla started on another front recently as well. It is time to create the technology strategic plan that will guide us for the next 5 years. We need to define the future while celebrating the past.

The strategic plan committee has made great progress and I think it might be worth sharing our work. As we developed our thoughts, we have discussed what is unique to us and what is or should be a universal sentiment. Below you will find our first pass at a vision.

We aspire to create an innovative, contemporary learning environment comprised of an engaging, rigorous, and developmentally appropriate curriculum that acknowledges evolving skill sets and litercies, supports differentiation, provides opportunities for global collaborations, and facilitates meaningful assessment. Teachers consistently and intentionally employ technology in an increasingly student-centered, interdisciplinary, learning environment that develops critical and creative thinkers with the ability to ethically manage and manipulate information as they tackle real and relevant problems in order to construct understanding. To this end, our students and faculty will have access to and support for a range of tools and strategies that foster the acquisition of the knowledge and skills required for lives of service and purpose.

• Technology selection, deployment, and maintenance are more decentralized and open to the diverse needs of the users
• Innovation occurs where and by whom it is needed and not solely through the leadership of tech evangelists
• Members of our community embrace and adopt moral and ethical conduct as it reshaped by advances in technology
• Users are secure in their privacy and safe from anonymous attacks, both personal and against their machines and data
• Technology opens opportunities for learning so much that boundaries of classroom, place, time are secondary to learning goals
• Students reach out across the globe to take advantage of opportunities for learning, collaboration, and service everywhere they occur
• Learning will be student centered with teachers of secondary importance in the classroom, as guides and facilitators of available resources and best methods
• Technology will afford truer differentiation to meet the needs of as many learning styles as there are learners
• Technology will break down barriers between disciplines and allow them recombine as they serve inquiry based learning
• Technology will sharpen critical thinking and higher order cognitive skills and create a more active learning environment
• Students will express and create, share and reflect through technology rather than be passive consumers of it
• Technology will disappear as a separate department and area of emphasis. It will be as pervasive and essential as books, buildings, and light.
• Students, parents, and educators will agree on the use of technology as a best method for learning
• Every teacher will have the commitment and skills to use technology optimally in the pursuit of teaching and learning
• Technology will be integrated and so integral that questions of whether and where will end and questions of how and which will be more relevant

The above strands of a vision which are now within our means to approach become part of our collective responsibility and mission.

While it is a little wordy and still has some revising to undergo, the basic sentiment is there. Knowing that we want to breathe institutional life into the document, we decided that we need a mantra, something that would fit on a pencil, something people could refer to and readily understand as they develop curriculum and implement change in their classroom. Common vocabulary and understanding are essential for changing institutional culture. Currently the leading mantra  is “Making Innovation Tradition.” The mantra is consistent with a community that is embracing change while celebrating its 150^th year anniversary. It is consistent with the fact that wikis and blogs have a routine place and they are boring in the Clay Shirky sense of technological boring.

"Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen."

We also discussed using “Learning without Limits” but decided that was a mantra that really worked for the Math Department. I’m not advocating that every department have a mantra but certainly every department should have common goals and if those goals are readily expressed as a mantra, go for it!

At this point you might wonder what this all has to do with you, the reader. I think it is good to articulate a vision and a strategic plan, to think through what you want to do, why you want to do it and how you are going to make it happen. I think it is even more important to turn that into something that can live and resonate with the community at large, something that doesn’t require a page number or a note card to remember. The very definition of mantra, a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of "creating transformation," gives insight into why having one is so important. Our mantra will be our marching orders into the future, into the next 150 years. We’d love feedback on our thoughts on vision and mantra.

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.