A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

A Program of Practice

Let us frame basic objectives with a sense of historical perspective. In the 21st century and after, education will significantly differ from education in the 20th century and before. The Institute's objectives aim to abet this transition. Historically, changes in technologies change what people can do in life. New technologies do not determine the particulars of human fates; they alter the spectrum of potentialities within which people act. People acting determine their actualities; technologies, along with other conditions of action, determine their possibilities. The new communications technologies significantly alter the possibilities open to people thinking. They change the five conditions limiting the value and power of ideas in human activity. New communications technologies facilitate the production and reproduction of ideas; they expand the storage of ideas and make their retrieval faster and more adaptable to the constraints of situation, time, and place; they improve the transmission of ideas, expand selection among them, and strengthen the human capacity to use ideas to process information intelligently. As communications technologies change how people can reproduce, store and retrieve, transmit, select, and process ideas, they transform the range of options within which people determine their lives. Technologies facilitate many modes of collaborative interaction in working with ideas and information. As collaboration with ideas increasingly pervades daily life, both work and leisure in the 21st century will increasingly resemble idealized models of academic scholarship -- they will be collaborative; focused on inquiry, innovation, and design; engaged in producing new knowledge, ideas, and experiences. Mentefacture displaces manufacture. If 20th century life was the era of industrial democracy, that of the 21st will become the era of intellectual democracy. The values inherent in the house of intellect will be central to the emerging commonweal. Creating an era of intellectual democracy is a worthy mission for educators, but to fulfill it, they too must master the possibilities of the new technologies. Formal education must adopt a new pedagogy, oriented not to text-bound subject matters, but to dynamic operational skills and collaborative modes of inter-disciplinary thinking. Students will require new languages to interact with information systems -- they will require a multi-modal literacy combining video, audio, graphics, animation, and simulation, along with text. Students will require a more refined ability to handle the language of inquiry, knowing where and how to formulate and frame their questions, to obtain useful information, and to create empowering ideas. They will require the capacity to produce new knowledge by discovering, selecting, and combining previously unrelated data in novel ways. Education will increasingly be judged, not only by what the well-instructed prove to know, but more fully by what people are empowered to do in fulfilling their lives and contributing to the greater social good. Knowledge is power, and in an intellectual democracy it must be power for all. Schools -- K12, colleges and universities - should increasingly use methods that engage students in inquiry and action. Teachers should become intellectual coaches, helping students to interact with diverse databases of networked multimedia resources and to participate actively in cultural work. Traditional teaching through extrinsic manipulation or reinforcement -- in practice more random than planned -- should give way to involving students meaningfully in task-oriented learning projects connected to their life-experience. Assessment should be through portfolios and performances rather than standardized tests and impersonal grade-point averages. Such assessment should encourage performance mastery, more than test taking or laboring at set assignments. During the 20th century, educators created the large, comprehensive school as the norm of service. During the 21st, they are replacing that with a smaller, more personal place of education, the essential school -- schools that students, parents, and teachers can find to be engaging, committed, meaningful, and moving. Efforts to effect educational reform are nurturing small, effective schools, committed to equity and engagement. These work well, and should become the norm of good practice. Critics worry about an either-or, however: small, essential schools will either prove very expensive or they will be unable to provide effectively for a diversity of individual needs, something the comprehensive schools were designed to do efficiently. This worry will disappear as educators develop advanced technologies to create a networking infrastructure for education designed to enable students and teachers in essential schools to employ, at low cost and large effect, the full range of powerful educational tools, cultural resources, and social services available electronically. These technologies can enable small essential schools to provide comprehensive yet compelling opportunities for their students far more effectively than large, impersonal schools have done by working, all-too-well, as alienating instructional factories.

Educational change is not, and should not be, technologically driven -- but it is, and always has been, technologically enabled. Over the past five centuries, printing enabled the transformation of education from a system of apprenticeship into one of universal schooling. It did so because its provision of mass-produced texts altered the limiting conditions under which people engaged in the advancement of learning. As with printing, new communications technologies will enable the complete redesign of educational practice because they likewise thoroughly alter the constraints conditioning the creation and use of knowledge. Digital technologies are enabling a new wave of educational innovations, not by bringing historically novel pedagogical principles in their train, but by changing the ecology of feasibility with respect to known principles. Technologically enabled innovation occurs as new commonsense practice emerges from obscure, peripheral procedures that savvy practitioners traditionally held to be too difficult for general practice, however attractive in principle these might have been. This is the way of historical change. Communication innovations alter the ecology of historical effectiveness. Dominant practices become marginal; possibilities that were difficult under traditional constraints become more feasible. The once marginal becomes dominant. New communications technologies create challenging opportunities. But opportunity is not tantamount to actuality. Educators must grasp the opportunities. Their educational innovations will determine the cultural and social characteristics of the resulting arrangements. The Institute seeks to implement such innovations according to progressive educational principles, holding that these will enable a greater proportion of people to attain an education that is both personally meaningful and culturally significant. The Institute's program of practice seeks ways for schools, universities, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions to capitalize on opportunities emerging through current innovations, to extend their educative resources deeply into the community, and to make them available to the broadest possible audience through effective use of information technology. New communications technologies are facilitating once hard to practice pedagogies -- learning by doing, inquiry-based education, project methods, autonomous study, in short, educators' great humanistic hopes and unfulfilled progressive aspirations. These have been the aspirations of the enlightenment tradition and the Institute believes that in the 21st century Teachers College and Columbia University should and will be at the vanguard of their historical fulfillment. Towards this end, the Institute seeks to advance four basic objectives:

• Technology configuration -- ILT seeks to configure advanced technologies in everyday educational settings, especially inner-city schools, to support constructivist curricula and pedagogies. The objective here is to empower the work of students and teachers with digital tools in ways that make an intellectually rigorous progressive education feasible for all.
• Curriculum innovation -- ILT acts to promote the reconfiguration of knowledge into an integrated, comprehensive resource, open to all, for bringing ideas and understanding to bear in the conduct of life. The objective here is three-fold: to make all the elements of knowledge accessible to any person at any time and at any place; to render the questions and concerns animating the creation of culture open and active for all; and to enable each person, as is his or her birthright, to participate meaningfully in the advancement of learning.
• Professional development -- ILT works to help teachers adapt to a setting in which students will exert substantial control over their educational work and have direct electronic access to all the resources of their culture and in which teachers will exercise influence primarily by posing powerful questions and by guiding student inquiry towards the frontiers of knowledge, understanding, and reflective practice. The objective here is to extend and deepen the professional challenges engaging educators in the 21st century, making the work of students and teachers central determinants of the common weal.
• Policy formation -- ILT aims to sustain public policy initiatives that rally broad coalitions of interested parties from academe, government and industry committed to transforming education through the astute use of information and communications technologies. The objective here is to mobilize the civic commitments requisite for the public to translate new possibilities into historical achievements.

These are large objectives, as befits the premise of historical engagement.

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