Welcome and Public Comment:

Review of the Agenda: 

1. What are the primary issues or focus of your task group?  Have you broadened it?
2. What are the primary sources or references you are using?  Have you gone to the broader community to gather input?
3. Are you beginning to see overlaps and/or gaps in the areas with which you are dealing?
4. Given the unique characteristics of the Eugene School District, what design or characteristics do you see emerging?

Technology Task Group

Primary Issues

• What’s best for the student ?
• Impediments to keeping up

 with technology demands.
• Budget demands - could require 10% of 4J budget to do the minimum necessary 
• Rapid rate of change - need to update hardware every 3-4 years to keep up
• Difficulty of getting sufficient teacher training
• Focus on 5-year time frame

• 4J Five-Year Technology Plan
• 3,000 of 4,000 district computers are 4 or more years old
• Infrastructure is good
• Northwest Educational Technology Consortium
• US Department of Educational Technology
• Two local organizations
• International Society of Technology and Education
• Center for the Advancement

of Technology in Education
have been good resources.  Les hopes to have the founders of these two organizations make presentations at a future public meeting.

Members feel their work is dovetailing nicely with the Educational Programs task group.  They are trying to take a more holistic view, to anticipate how  people will learn to process information to become more literate.  What kinds of skills will teachers need to have in order to facilitate new modes for learning?  They will develop recommendations for how the two task groups might work together and not compete for resources.

Emerging Designs

• Focus on student learning and on what those who come through our  educational process will  look like.
• Focus needs to be on K-12, not just high school students.
• Staff development is a major issue.
• Importance of partnering with community groups and sharing resources - time as well as money.
• Concern that if public education doesn’t take the lead with technology, the private sector will; important to commit the resources or others may take over the education of our students.

• Process is one of trying to visualize the future in terms of the outcomes, and then working back from that; they are trying not to focus too much on the physical technology, but how the educational process might change.
• With new teachers, should we be looking to hire the skills we need in classrooms of the future?  Colleges of Education will have to change also.
• How much change, revolutionary vs. evolutionary, is necessary for children to have a sense of their communities and relationships with other people?
• Tapping into the private sector can have benefits in accessing cutting edge technology.  Keep the dialogue open.
• The outcome we may be looking for is turning out students capable of addressing successfully the most demanding aspects of new technology, to have the capacity to learn.
• The vision statement references students’ success in school, but for kids to be successful, teachers must be successful.  Maybe need to ask what teachers need.  Technology may provide a means to access their collective expertise to better problem-solve for their kids, and not feel isolated, to feel safe to draw on their successes.
• Is technology a means or an end?  The group feel it is coming to a view of technology as a means, rather than an end.

Community Engagement Task Group

Primary Issues/Focus

• Engaging families emerged as the most important focus.  Engaging parents is essential for school staff people.
• People need to feel that engagement is worth the time.  Engagement is an ongoing activity, not a one-time event.  Commitment needs to be made at the beginning of the process, with evaluation after.
• The most important thing from this committee would be to offer ideas about what is really required to establish productive relationships with our community.  Perhaps a model 

 or pilot project could be developed and located  in a particular geographic area.
What parents want more than anything is more time with their teachers.  A lot of things keep teachers from having time to develop those relationships.
• Suggest talking with professional organizations and public and nonprofits about  how they engage their audience.
• Related to governance in schools and site-based decision-making.  If relationships are the basis of community engagement, power is important to understanding any relationship, and governance is about power and sharing  it.

• Staff development and training will be needed to enable teachers to improve their abilities and skills for building relationships.
• Think in terms of  building relationships at the neighborhood level.  Trust is built over time and repeated exposures.
• Schools may be thrust more and more into the political arena.  Need to engage and educate our communities about the needs of students.
• Public schools will play a larger role in keeping this a democracy, and a place where equity is possible.
• There are indications that technology has been responsible for a breakdown in civic engagement.  Are there ways to have authentic community that is compatible with these new emerging communications tools?  We need to ask ourselves as public education institutions how to stay authentic under these compelling urges to withdraw.
•  Need to also remember that our resources are finite and we will need to prioritize and be pragmatic.
• If we want civic minded, engaged adults, we need to raise them.
• What is unique about “public” education?  What is the extra burden, or challenge?  We are challenged to communicate the importance of participating in learning and getting a public education.

Educational Programs Task Group

• group agreements
• rigorous meeting schedule, twice a month
• house-building analogy - foundation before rooms

Themes & Issues

Whole Child including wellness and life skills, social skills and citizenship. Responsibility to environment and community.

Computer and tech literacy vital

Process Skills

Organization that promotes "connectedness"

Problem solving

Learning in Context

Select best of past, meld with the future

Community Outreach & Public Input Plans

Resources

• Writings from Spady and Daggett
• Presentations by schools principals
• "best practices" research - Don Brown, Lane ESD

Key Questions

• What major challenges and trends will our students face in the next five to ten years?
• education, demographics, technological, economic, environmental, political, social, career, personal
• "Planning is not about predicting or controlling the future so much as

handling what it brings."
• What performance abilities, skills, and knowledge will students need to be successful?
A theme of connectedness emerging from the discussion is indicative of the paradigm shift going on in education right now, moving from the “factory” model to a “systems” or an ecological model.  However, our schools still seem to be organized on the  old model.  We used to be oriented  toward preparing people to fit into the existing economic system; perhaps we also  need to prepare people to examine and evaluate the existing economic system to see if it’s the one we want.
• What kinds of learning experiences do students need, and what kinds or organizational suport and structure should learning organizations provide to ensure that all students develop the abilities, skills and knowledge that they need?
• How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated for students and learning organizations?

Overlaps & Gaps, Features Unique to Eugene
 

Huge overlaps with other task groups provide tremendous opportunities.  Both an area of overlap and something unique to Eugene are issues of school size and choice.  Eugene 4J is challenged to make  the existing choice system more equitable and accessible.  Facilities:  what do our schools need to look like in order to support the kinds of technolo gical changes needed, the kinds of teaching methods that promote community.
 

Questions/Discussion

• In order to move from the Industrial model to the ‘new’ model, it will be necessary to educate legislators as well.
• Comments on school choice would be very helpful to the Choice task group.
• Challenge the groups to think about who is the professional in our public education system, and how is that going to look in the future.  It is important to elevate teachers to the level of professionals, be persuaded of the level of expertise required of teachers.  This will also contribute to the way the connectivity occurs.  Consider what keeps them motivated, inspired, not going to other districts - willing to make sacrifices.  Currently, there are not ways of differentiating or according status for accomplishment or contribution or value added.
• What if the most highly valued activity in our society was contribution to the well-being of other people, instead of acquisition or higher rank or more material things?
• Is teaching about having a lot of expertise and knowledge and being able to deliver information, or is  it about the art of eliciting from individuals their own ability to discover and synthesize and create.  Perhaps the answer is - both.
• The personal and interactive process, directing one’s learning including planning, carrying out complex projects, etc., is essentially right out of John Dewey.  Chet Bowers says that John Dewey is the problem.  The challenge is to develop a contextual program that demonstrates that it improves the community.
• In order to generate the changes needed to create schools in the best interests of kids it will be necessary to be political, to fight in the political arena for a non-politicized educational system.

Closing