Live-blogging the Network of Michigan Educators Conference

It’s 9:00 a.m., December 4 at the Lansing, Michigan Radisson—the first day of the annual Network of Michigan Educators conference. I’ll be live-blogging, posting sporadically over the two days of the conference. Normally, as secretary of the Network, I take minutes, which are archived in The Place Where Minutes Go to Languish, before they’re routinely approved at a meeting three months down the road. But the focus of this group (more about us, in a minute) has been increasingly on 21st century learning here in Michigan. What teachers can do to reshape the workforce and the economy in Failing Auto Industryland? In a week when the well-being of the state we love and call home depends on bailout plans submitted by Big Three execs (whom our president-elect called “tone deaf”), there are big questions looming like clouds over the room. So it seems like the right thing to be reporting out on what happens in these two days via blog.

The Network of Michigan Educators was founded in 2003, after a couple of earlier incarnations, attempts at forming an independent network of recognized educators. This is our sixth annual conference, and we are emerging as a productive network of exemplary practitioners, focused on both policy and practice. Our membership includes Michigan Teachers of the Year, National Board Certified Teachers, Milken winners, Presidential Math & Science awardees, Christa McAuliffe fellows as well as Principals and Superintendents of the Year at several levels. We have a data base of about 400 educators, 100 or so who are attending this two-day conference. Many of them had to negotiate or outright beg to be here—but it’s about the chance to network, to rub elbows with other teacher leaders and hang around with creative, vibrant and fun people. We always learn interesting things at the conference, but the #1 incentive to be here is the people.

Our opening keynoter—Philip Power, founder of the Center for Michigan takes the stage and opens by telling us that Michigan is in terrible crisis, the worst shape it’s ever been in. Our politics and industries are broken—the Center for Michigan (Power’s think-and-do tank) is a citizen’s movement to reshape the future of the state.  To those to whom much has been given, much more is to be expected, says Power. He is speaking personally, but I am thinking about how this relates to us, as accomplished educators. Great line: Thinking without doing is pointless, and (as the mayor of Detroit discovered) doing without thinking can get you into a lot of trouble.

In Lansing, legislators are re-arranging the deck chairs, worrying more about their egos and partisan influence than innovative thinking about productive change in Michigan. The Center for Michigan is not interested in creating a third party—the answer is not about accruing political power. What we need is a new competent, pragmatic, functional leadership paradigm—the radical center, getting rid of the winners-vs.-losers mindset and focusing on change.

Power asks us to write down one or two points on how we would change moderately successful schools to take them from B- to A. If there were no limits or restraints, how would build school models from scratch, optimizing effectiveness and innovation rather than just getting by and staying out of the headlines?

Power then shares a model—Community Conversations—for developing a shared vision. We will be doing these community conversations together this afternoon (yes!)—and compiling our own rich data base of productive ideas. Power calls this deliberative democracy—radically different from political and advocacy groups. In the political system we have right now, extreme positions on the left and right get amplified and ordinary citizens are marginalized, even alienated. The system does not represent us, teachers—foot soldiers in creating futures.

(Emotional temperature of the room: faces are sober, attentive. There is a sense that the room is full of concerned adults. A little different from most education conferences, where speakers are judged on the entertainment factor and whether they give the audience free stuff to use tomorrow in their classrooms. Even our fourteen interns are looking like they’re in the big time. Some of the people here don't want to take on responsibility for Michigan's problems and are wondering why we don't have an "education" speaker--but others have already pulled back their mental cameras, seeing the bigger picture.)

Power just used the phrase “flat, hot and highly competitive” to describe our future, and put responsibility on the shoulders of teachers in the room to be an active part of…what? Rescuing our state? Stopping a tide of failure? Creatively turning things around in schools? In the next two years, the Center for Michigan will host 10,000 citizen conversations, what they see as a critical mass of citizen input. They’re developing a strong bipartisan plan to move Michigan forward. NOTE: Michigan is not presently moving forward. Power just used the phrase transformation caucus—a group of policymakers who are willing to be pragmatic and non-political.

Now Power's speaking about dependency and entitlement. Michigan citizens are risk-averse. In other states, entrepreneurial spirit dominates. And worst of all for this crowd, Michigan citizens disrespect learning. How can we re-tool Michigan’s economy and climate when we’re not willing to invest in education?

The two best things about Michigan: our environmental beauty and abundant waters (note: we now rank dead last in environmental protection and investment)—and our (formerly) world-class universities and education systems  (we are now disinvesting in education). We are on the wrong, wrong, wrong track. We are at a hinge in our history—what kind of state will we have? What kind of state will our grandchildren have? Our students? We have the ability to turn the tide. It’s a moral imperative, in fact.

I find tears in my eyes as we watch a short video on the magic of Michigan. I’m a lifelong Michigan resident. The image that started the waterworks was a shot of Hitsville, U.S.A. in Detroit, with the Temptations. If there were ever a metaphor for finding the genius of Michigan’s people, it's Motown in the 1960s. A vibrant Michigan not known to the rest of the country, these days—a place of hope and creativity.

Power takes questions from the audience—they want to know about their own cities' futures, and they ask about higher education. How are our colleges and universities addressing job training for this new economy? Power says—hey, they don’t know how to do this either. They are not entrepreneurial. Janet Lavasseur, an NBCT from Portage asks the key question: How do we fit it? What can we do? We’ll get to have our own community conversations this afternoon, but Phil will collect our thoughts about how we would change things—he can write a column. But that’s a small thing. We can iterate, invent and re-iterate and re-invent…and on and on. We can start our own community conversations, the places where we live and teach. And we can form our own advisory groups—maybe we’ve already done that, with this Network.

There is a sense of this being a weighty moment—in fact, the Center calls this “Michigan’s Defining Moment”—rather than the usual conference rah-rah. Nobody’s wiping their eyes, no residual chuckles. In fact, the mood is serious. What can we do?

Comments

[Theresa White]

Nancy - I have never done live blogging at a conference, but I think it's a spectacular idea. Are there a lot of people blogging during conferences now? Do the speakers ever have issues with it?

[Nancy Flanagan]

Hi Theresa--thanks for dropping by Teacher in a Strange Land. This was our first live-blogged conference, but technology-related conferences have been live-blogged for years, since blogging began.

Last year, our keynoter (the estimable Dr. Yong Zhao) let us put an edited version of his PPT on our website. It's all part of the movement to free-share content and ideas. I think we're in a transformative phase here, between personally "owned" content, and the desire to be a change agent.

We didn't tell any of our keynoters that their presentations were going to be live-blogged, beforehand. The decision to blog was made the night before the conference, by the Steering Committee. As I note in the blog, as Secretary, I would have been taking detailed notes for the minutes, anyway. This was just a chance to insert some perspective into the presentations, and let attendees talk back. These are new ideas, too.

The response was generally positive (it was a great conference anyway)--but many of the attendees who read the blogs commented to me privately, rather than posting on the blog. I think teachers are VERY cautious about publicly saying what they think. Something to work on.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Nancy