“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”  This opening sentence of “A Tale of Two Cities,” by Charles Dickens, then referring to the time of the French Revolution is as prophetic today as it was then.  It does not mean that our state of affairs is wrong or bad, but it does mean that we are in a flux of extremes in time and change that demand not a reform or alteration but rather a time of revolution and transformation of our educational system. 

 There's a story exchanged by educators and business people alike:  Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices; young people sit at home on sofas moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with pacemakers in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls—every place Rip goes just baffles him.  When he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are white."  While I am sure Rip, like many in our society, would take comfort in the known, we cannot take comfort that much of our educational system today is exactly like a 19th century system designed to support an industrial revolution.  

OVERVIEW

As the First Lady of West Virginia, an educator, a parent and grandparent, passionate about the opportunities we offer our children, I have had the occasion to share conversation and observe some highly innovative and creative educational “happenings.” Earlier this year, the Microsoft Foundation invited me to visit the Future World School in Philadelphia, PA, along with policy leaders and educators from across the country.  It redefines “state of the art” and is an oasis of learning within an inner city neighborhood.  I was also included in a national discussion of 21st Century skills and technology by US Secretary Margaret Spellings, along with educational specialists and leaders from across the nation.  More recently, in March, 2007, the Governor appointed me to serve on the West Virginia State Board of Education with eight other highly committed individuals to provide a conduit between the Department of Education and the Governor’s office.  All of these efforts reflect the seriousness and urgency of our endeavors.  

From these interactions and discussions, I realize that West Virginia schools, as well as American schools, are not exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids still spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand and reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed.  Much has been printed on “Why is education trailing the course of events rather than leading them?”  Obviously the business world is compelled to stay one step ahead in the global market due to the competitive nature of their enterprises—a “sink or swim” analogy.   Public education for many years has been a monopoly attempting to offer every child in West Virginia and across this nation the opportunity for a ”quality” education from kindergarten through 12 grade.   However, with this one size fits all approach, we have not been successful in the global marketplace. Therefore, for the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. There has been an ongoing, big public conversation to determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English. As I found from all the national forums I have attended, there is a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. 

Fortunately in West Virginia, we realized that we had been aiming too low. Competency in reading and math—the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing—is a minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what we call 21st century skills.  Therefore, in 2005, Superintendent Steve Paine and Governor Joe Manchin signed on as only the second state in the nation to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  This unique partnership of education, government and business leaders seeks to help schools adapt their curricula and classroom environments to align more closely with the skills that students need to succeed in the 21st-century economy, combining a new sense of rigor and relevancy to both students’ development and teachers’ professional development.

 SEEDS OF CHANGE

The governor realized early on in his administration that leaders from education and economic development were not coming together in a meaningful way to address the needs of West Virginia, nor were pre-k, K-12 and higher education working simultaneously to insure a seamless education system that would encourage life-long learning.  It is not unusual for individuals with particular capabilities in a specialized field to often work within their field only; never looking beyond the “fence” to see what possibilities lie beyond the boundaries that field is contained within. Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft says of Partnership for 21st Century Skills, "This unique partnership of education, government and business leaders seeks to help schools adapt their curricula and classroom environments to align more closely with the skills that students need to succeed in the 21st-century economy, such as communication and problem-solving skills." Therefore, in 2006, the Governor created the P-20 Jobs Cabinet, which connected all of the arenas to create a 21st Century vision and innovative ideas that combine knowledge and multiple strategies—an intersection of a broad range disciplines that encourages creativity. The first result of this powerful team is a new initiative called SEEDS (Student Educational & Economic Development Success). The purpose of SEEDS is to create a pilot project that will strengthen the business partnership approach pioneered in West Virginia by the Education Alliance and test new means to allow business leaders to contribute to their neighborhood schools.  SEEDS will create a communications channel between business leaders and school principals so that tools and resources from the business world can be shared and applied in educational settings.

The P-20 Jobs Council provides not only a critical opportunity for integration between business, labor, higher education, pre-school, health care, k-12 and community leaders but also provides a model from state government on the necessity and success of sharing information rather than guarding it. This initiative will be housed and evaluated within The Education Alliance. The initial million dollars of funding for this initiative was designated by the Governor’s office and will be matched by the private sector to afford participating schools the necessary dollars needed to promote, develop and implement. Ralph Baxter, CEO of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe LLP, which has expanded, diversified and extended its geographic reach, transforming from a domestic firm with California origins to one of the world’s largest and most prominent law firms, with more than 900 lawyers in 18 offices in the United States, Europe and Asia,  Co-Chair of the P-20 Jobs Council has agreed to spearhead the fundraising from the private sector significantly due to his commitment to enhancing the quality of education in West Virginia.

As a model of collaboration, we can provide the incentive for others to begin this discussion on business, community and parental involvement that is critical to the outcomes and success of our students. From both the teachers and students perspective, we can shift the end point of teaching and learning from simply knowing about topics and ideas to one of developing conceptual frameworks of understanding about knowledge and ideas. In addition, students and educators need a familiarity with appropriate technologies but also must be able to apply sifting, sorting and scanning skills to the vast information resources that they are confronted with, as well as the ability to work well together, both in a face-to-face and a virtual environment.  

TRANSFORMATION WITH TECHNOLOGY

We have clearly reached a turning point. As I have the opportunity to travel this country and listen to world leaders like John Chambers, Chairman of CISCO (a proud West Virginian and an honorary co-chair of SEEDS) and Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, we are hearing a common message all over this country, we see evidence of a new excitement in education, a new determination, a hunger for change. The technology that has so dramatically changed the world outside our schools is now changing the learning and teaching environment within them. John Chambers has said that it's not how well you are doing, but how much better you can be performing and what improvements you implement before the competition passes you by.  “Jobs will go wherever the best workforce is…(and that increasingly hinges on) ability.” 

Sometimes, as it should be, this is driven by the students themselves, born and comfortable in the age of the Internet. America’s students and West Virginia’s students are our ultimate constituents. We need to listen to them. They have demonstrated that they have a better understanding of the intricacies and opportunities presented by the technological revolution than many of their leaders, including a generation of teachers and administrators who did not have the advantage of growing up with the Internet. Today, our students are the critical users of technology. In the future, they will be the inventors of new technologies.

Those who know technology best are also painfully aware of its ability to be misused. "Computers in a classroom with no thought given to the curriculum and outcomes are educational junk food. Kids love it, but there's no nutritional value to speak of," says Dr. Terry Crane, Apple’s senior vice president of education. Rapid technology advances mean that the classroom environment, unchanged for centuries, could and must quickly transform beyond recognition.

Despite the best efforts of many committed educators and administrators, our high schools are simply not adapting to this change quickly enough. As any parent knows, however, our children have adapted; they are fully immersed in digital culture. As a result, while most students enter high school wanting to succeed, too many end up bored, unchallenged, and disengaged from the high school curriculum—"digital natives" caught up in an industrial-age learning model.  According to Bill Gates, "In an economy in which computing has become central to innovation in nearly every sector, this decline poses a serious threat to American competitiveness.” "Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that every significant technological innovation of the 21st century will require new software to make it happen."

FUTURE VISION
One technology that could be enormously powerful for a student’s learning is sometimes overlooked in our educational system, despite the successes it has to offer.  Simulation is not just another in the long line of passing fads in education technology but rather it is a real key to helping our students understand the world.  Because so many of the things we need to understand these day are either too complex, too vast,  too small, too far, or too dangerous to be experienced directly, simulations provide us a solution.  Simulation is absolutely fundamental to education.

How do we know it works?

Take a look at who uses it:

• We train our NASA Astronauts through simulated events.
• Airline pilots go directly from a simulator to the yoke of a 747
• Medical students learn the physical relationships of body parts and how systems work together through physical and on-screen simulators.
• The corporate world gives us useful data about simulations designed to change behavior and obtain results.  Research shows that corporate leaders who had employees participate in a simulation called “Virtual Leader,” by Simulearn, beat the teams whose managers had learned through the standard method of coaching by a margin of 22 percent.  

My husband is a pilot, and during these years of flying, he has gone to many “classes” and “schools” to train on new equipment or as a refresher to enhance his flying capabilities.  In all of these situations, his training and testing mechanisms included simulations, which could create anything from plane malfunctions to weather related scenarios. Obviously, I am most appreciative that he had this as an option! 

Simulations have proven to be an important key to producing learning and understanding; it will play a big part in much of the student’s professional life, and in addition is a teaching tool that demonstrably works.  It would certainly make sense to embrace this concept as a way of moving the K-12 classroom into the 21st century. Research shows that of our 2.2 million teachers across this country, less than 1 percent use simulations in their classes.  In addition, simulations could be extremely beneficial in professional development for teachers, both for existing teachers and for use in the higher educational arena for pre-service teachers.  Many teachers have never experienced simulations as learners and are unaware of its power and importance.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in our school systems across America simulations are being used only in isolated and nonsystematic ways compared to other teaching tools such as textbooks, videos or the traditional science manipulative.  This small usage is indicative of the lack of transformation of our classrooms and schools in general.

Also, as we continue to burden teachers with extensive curricula that teachers feel needs to be covered through lecture, time will be a barrier.  In addition, the significance attached to testing, which often causes everything in the class schedule that does not directly apply to the test to be eliminated, exacerbates this condition. As with many initiatives that are “outside of the box,” cost is often sited as a barrier when looking at school budgets.  It becomes an issue of re-prioritizing how and where money is spent, including outcomes which can verify the success of dollars spent.  Doing things the way we have always done them is certainly not the recipe for transformation.

Educators from K-12 and higher education must heed the fact that simulation is how today’s REAL scientists actually work and  how many other professionals actually learn their job skills through simulated learning environments.  Fortunately, here is West Virginia; we now have a teacher simulation program dealing with classroom management and discipline that is available to all of our teachers and pre-service programs, at no charge, to exemplify the old adage that “experience is the best teacher.”  With the upcoming shortage of principals, superintendents and educators in all areas, we have to be creative and inventive in how we prepare, develop and sustain our future education force.

In summary, the value of simulation is that it can, paradoxically, bring more reality into learning, and it can do this for just about any subject or content matter.  As with all educational technologies, the two biggest resources for using it are our teachers and our students.  Obviously, in workforce development, it could shorten training time while increasing the aptitude and expertise of the student population, which is extremely critical to industry expanding or moving into this state.

SUMMARY

Innovators and innovation do not just require knowledge bases and understanding but they also require a raft of processes for continually building new understanding as new knowledge becomes available. There is a new balance emerging between knowing, understanding and also having the capability of engaging in the wide range of different processes which underpin the concept of “lifelong learning.” This will continue to put added pressure on the amount of “content” which can be “delivered” by any school.  Truthfully, as Rip Van Winkle noted, the notion of delivering education via the school system is still very much a book-based education paradigm concept.  In order to rapidly migrate into the 21st century, schools increasingly need to discard this teaching and learning concept and immediately adopt a more facilitatory role in the classroom.   

Increasingly we will need to engage our young people in activities that combine wide-ranging skills and competencies, integrating ideas from across the different disciplines, encouraging them to make new connections and applying creativity in entirely new ways. Once again, these learning ideals are time-consuming and require rich personal learning environments within which learners can live and work. Empowering West Virginia learners with the capability of being independent lifelong learners so that they can develop new understandings of ideas that are not within their current knowledge framework must be the inherent goal of our educational system from pre-school throughout life.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” May all of our challenges become our greatest opportunities!