Notes from the NCTE

Karl Fisch's notes from the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) Convention in the States:

• If we really want students to succeed in the future, we have to allow them to work in a participatory and collaborative way.
  
• They did all this work outside of school because our filters wouldn’t let them find these things.
  
• We invited the superintendent, adminstration, etc. – not one of them took the invitation. That was disappointing.
  
• Teachers will incorporate bits and pieces, but it was still the same basic curriculum – we needed to change the whole thing.
  
• 'They’re on a computer, that’s not English' – but they were doing more reading and writing than in their other English classes.
  
• I didn’t feel like our department had a vision – so I changed schools. At my new school, there was a different way of talking about students, a different way of viewing students.
  
• We believe kids can’t look critically at the world until they figure out who they are.
  
• We should think of ourselves [teachers] as the Designer of the Learning Experience.
  
• Every teacher will have to be tech savvy.
  
• They (the teachers) don’t have to be where the information is.
  
• Blogging is reading, with the intent to write. (Quoting Will Richardson).