The new millennium is well underway and demands are present for schools to meet the vision of relevance in the 21st century. For example, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2008) describes the urgency for major changes to create consequence in schools. These include the need to emphasize lifelong learning and the learning process itself in order to prepare students for the knowledge economy, the need to personalize learning and use formative assessment as well as expanded information sources to prepare students for acceptable levels of global achievement, and the need for more professional collaboration networks to inform educators as to how to fully develop student potential. In addition, the Re-inventing Schools Coalition (n.d.) proposes a vision for relevance that includes self-directed learning and student empowerment, varied use of peer and teacher assessment, and student demonstrations of mastery as the basis for promotion. On a broader scale, Darling-Hammond (2010) advocates for policy reform that will alter schools to the point that “will enable students to learn how to learn, create, and invent the new world they are entering” (p. 3). Furthermore, the National Science Foundation (2008) calls for the use of cyberlearning to transform schools by providing students with “a mix of diverse content via the combined technological capabilities of the Internet, high performance computing, advanced networking, in-home electronics, and mobile communications” (p. 6). Certainly, these ideas are very exciting for the future of schools.
This article presents an informed commentary on the state of 21st century vision for schools. A broad overview of the need for school reform and the use of continuous improvement as a conceptual tool to drive instructional improvement is presented first. This is followed by a discussion of the potential of instructional technology as a tool for change. In addition, a brief presentation of a relatively new body of knowledge and practice for education known as lean is provided along with a description of how a demonstration site, an at risk high school, benefitted from lean analysis to highlight where to improve instruction through screencast technology (Green, 2011a