A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

Overview

Entering the 21st century, Americans embark on an era of historic change in which they are using new information technologies to renovate education and society for the betterment of humankind. The Institute for Learning Technologies seeks to help advance these changes by exerting educational leadership through innovative projects, seminal research, and enlightened counsel. It aims to nurture, in a sustained manner, the humane application of information technologies, expanding educational opportunity and achievement for all. At the turn of the century, a new strategic context for educational policy and practice emerges. Government, corporations, and philanthropies are investing substantial resources, opening access to information and research for broad use in schools, colleges and universities, and through libraries and other cultural and public service institutions. These large initiatives, together with secondary public and private funding, will invest many billions of dollars in information technology and its cultural uses over the coming decade. To achieve the educational and cultural potentials of such investment, educators need to step to the forefront of the effort, asserting leadership and taking responsibility for initiative. Educating America for the 21st Century presents a strategic plan through which Teachers College and Columbia University can exercise educational leadership. By tradition, they must seize the opportunities presented by the flux of history to help shape a robust and humane information-based society. In the 21st century, information and knowledge will arbitrate the fate of both individuals and institutions, and, more than ever, an enlightened citizenry will need to be intellectually empowered to provide for the common good. The Institute for Learning Technologies exists to help shape the effort by Teachers College and Columbia University to grasp these historic opportunities, and the Institute's program of practice follows from this purpose. To educate America for the 21st century, educators need a firm, astute agenda -- a strategic vision that can inform the kaleidoscope of practice with purpose and direction. Established educational arrangements constitute a complex system of immense scale. A bright innovation here, and another there within the system, will not change it. A diversity of large, sustained efforts, working in many different domains, all bound together through shared vision and energy, all combined over time, will result in transformative improvements. Here then is the essence of the Institute's strategic plan: use technologies to enable educators to address the intractable pedagogical problems, seeking their clear correction; implement sustainable projects, each with the potential for evident success at the local level; use institutional alliances to pursue systemic results that transform practice at all its levels; and throughout all, chart, not correctives, but the fundamental betterment through education effective for all. This document presents the Institute's strategic plan in three parts. A Program of Practice addresses issues of technology configuration, curriculum innovation, professional development, and policy formation -- the four basic objectives that the Institute works to advance -- and it explains why ILT holds these to be of compelling importance. Effecting a Strategic Vision addresses the problem of means, the challenge of generating significant historical force so that the Institute can work towards its objectives. How can a small group achieve resonant effects, advancing difficult objectives? This plan develops an answer to this basic question by addressing four key components to a strategic vision: a proof of concept, a driving force, a moving social vision, and tangible institutional leverage. Imperatives of Implementation concludes the plan by setting out proximate goals against which observers can assess the effectiveness of ILT's effort over coming years. Through this plan, the Institute invites all who share its vision to participate in the effort to help all people use information technology to fulfill their aspirations and potentials.

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