Meeting the Superintendent

I thought it might be a good idea to meet with the School Board's only direct report, our Superintendant Dr. Ric Dressen. He was very accomodating and we had a good conversation. In other meetings with school board members, parents and teachers, I have not heard one negative word about Dr. Dressen.

Granted, you can't be all things to all people, but he seems to have very broad support in this community. And best of all, he's from Browerville and knew right where my hometown—Herman—was. I think he had even been there!

He's very much about the transition to personalized learning. This is and has been the hot topic in education, but it is a term that attempts to contain a large number of trends and subtopics. In general, the disintermediation effects caused by the internet/Digital Age are going to sweep through education the way they have through other content driven sectors, like publishing, music, entertainment, etc. Teachers will still be the primary source of learning, but they and their lesson plans will have a lot of competition.

As a parent, I'm comforted to know that our children will be surrounded by more education opportunities than I had. A good example of this is the Khan Academy that is available on You Tube. Excellent, short, digestible explanations of math and physics. There are a growing number of teachers who are using resources like this to either supplement or completely "flip" their teaching methods. They can assign the outside content as homework, leaving them free to spend classroom time with individual instruction.

All this is easy to say, but disorienting for anyone involved. I remember attending a speech by the economist Lester Thurow who said, "Nobody likes change. Anytime someone says they like change, or embrace change, what they really mean is they like to watch other people change."

How will schools organize these various "learning opportunities"? How will colleges make sense of it? How will teachers' unions respond? What will parents do with the burden of helping schools develop indiviual education plans for their children? Obviously, there's a great deal more to this.

I'd like to explore personalized learning (or individual instruction) in this blog to greater detail, hopefully with some contribution by you, my gentle readers.