The Guy Who Gets It

Ferdi Serim has a dream. In it every school in America would have an "information and technology team," a group focused continually on educational improvement and on using technology to support that goal. Who'd be on the team? The school's principal, of course, a lead teacher, and a technical specialist. And last but not least, says Serim, the team would also need a library media specialist.

What's impressive, if not extraordinary, about Serim's including a librarian in his vision is that he himself is not one. But then Serim is not your average educator. Now the manager of curriculum, instruction, and learning technology for New Mexico's Public Education Department, his eclectic career has included stints as a jazz musician, systems analyst, teacher, technology coordinator, author, magazine editor, educational technology expert, and board member of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a nonprofit organization that advocates the effective use of technology in schools.

Perhaps it's his varied background that makes Serim less averse than many educators to reaching across professional lines. Ten years ago when he started teaching at a school with great technological resources but a technophobic librarian, he found other media specialists who schooled him in using computers to teach information literacy. A devoted follower of the "Big 6," a popular problem-solving strategy, Serim knows that a large part of making kids information literate means getting classroom teachers to work closely with librarians. He'd also like to see media specialists at the center of any efforts at educational improvement.

So if Serim is such a big fan of librarians, is there anything he thinks they could do better? Yes. Serim exhorts media specialists (and teachers) to get out of their cubbyholes and start working with other educators, such as the technology coordinators who belong to CoSN. He's also a strong proponent of "evidence-based education"—using educational research to drive school decision-making—and of the need to teach students "21st-century skills," which refers to a mix of higher-order thinking skills and the mastery of information technology. (For more details, visit www.21stcenturyskills.org.) After nearly two decades of working in schools, Serim joined New Mexico's department of education last year as a top-notch administrator. It's a job that's letting him test his ideas on a bigger scale. For instance, he's helping to revamp the department's grant process to focus more on evidence-based instruction, turning each grant into a mini-research project, the results of which will be shared across the state. He'll also work with grantees to tailor the department's grants to their educational goals, instead of the other way around.

We asked Serim to reflect on the current state of technology in our nation's schools and how librarians can play a greater role in using technology to promote student learning.

Are superintendents and chief information officers aware of how much librarians know about using technology in learning?

In the best school districts, you will find people who serve as a sort of bridge between the instructional side of what's happening and the technical side, and very often those people are either the librarians or the curriculum and instruction people. They have an understanding of the learning process and the role of the teacher, and they make their decisions about the technology based on that. But in most places, the conversation between those groups hasn't even begun yet. For example, what should drive technology purchases is that you've identified what you're trying to do educationally and you have enough knowledge to select the tools you need for the job. But instead, what often drives these purchases is [someone saying], 'We should have a computer ratio of x to y.' It's almost as if an administrator says, 'We have this much money available—what do you want to buy?'

What can media specialists do to make themselves heard?

The first thing I would say [to librarians] is, understand the contribution that you make to students' success, and make sure your building principal understands that, too. Librarians need to use their own knowledge and their own insights into what's needed [educationally] right now. So if they're looking at their schools, they ought to be looking directly at the student performance data and saying, 'What's the pattern that we see here?' And their library might be able to give them information like that. For instance, what's the Lexile level of the stuff the kids are reading? And [once they know that, they could say], 'You know, that seventh-grade textbook you've got there is really nice, but most of the kids in your class are reading at a fourth-grade level. So you better rethink your approach.' There isn't another person in the school who's better positioned to have the big picture than the library media specialist.

How well do you think schools are doing in terms of using technology to improve learning?

Schools have been really good about understanding that you can't do the technology without the machines. But they haven't been equally good about understanding why they need those machines in the education process. Today we have administrators who are being asked to look at all kinds of data, all kinds of research, and they have not a clue about the kinds of things we've been talking about in Information Power, which has been around for about 20 years…. The idea of technology in too many schools is, 'Well, we just have to put computers in the classroom, and now we just have to connect them to the Internet and our job is done.' But just because the bits are flowing doesn't mean that there's value flowing, or that there's learning flowing.

What are you doing to help change that?

One of the things I'm working on is coming up with the top 10 things you can do to find out if your kid is a 21st-century learner. My challenge is to come up with them in terms of tasks, which would become performance assessments. For instance, I'd like to have kids go to a simulated search engine. They'd come up with 10 hits on a subject and you would say, 'Pick the two best from here and the two worst, and tell me why they're best and worst.' Then the secondary task would be to synthesize in a paragraph what these things are saying—you know, what does this mean? And if you were arguing for or against one of these things, which points are in each of these documents that you can use?

Is it crucial for librarians to stay abreast of what educational technology specialists and groups like CoSN are doing?

Everybody needs their own language. And teachers have their own language and their own buildings and their own little cubbyholes in which they live out their professional lives. Then some people we call professionals also have the language of their professional organization, which is why we see so many ed-tech folks in ISTE [the International Society for Technology in Education] and so many library media folks in AASL [American Association of School Librarians] or ALA [American Library Association]. You should be a member of ALA or AASL or whatever [organization] is dealing with your needs as a library media person. But you also need to be present [at other gatherings] where people are doing good work about moving education forward, because then you're the ambassador for that knowledge. The knowledge is not going to be in the room if you're not in the room.

The notion of being actively involved in other educational associations seems like a new idea for some librarians.

If librarians just speak to themselves, the room's going to be less crowded over the years; there are going to be fewer librarians to speak to. That's a sad reality. But another way of looking at it is as an opportunity. Because the people who learn not only their own job but how their job makes other people more effective, they're in the position to make their schools more effective, and that's what's really needed. You don't go in and say, 'I'm the answer to all your problems.' That turns people off. What you need to say is, 'As I look around here, what I see are some trends. Here are three trends I see in our school where, if we were able to improve what's happening in these three areas, a whole lot of opportunities would open up to us, and we would become more effective. And here's what these three areas are, and here are some things the research says schools have done that have been effective.'

What can librarians do to make that happen?

A lot of it may involve one-on-one conversations, where you go talk to the special-ed person, or whoever it is. You work with the willing first. You find out who your potential teammates are, or if maybe there's already a team that you just need to join. Or it may be that you have to be the person to create that team. It's like sticking your toe in the water—you don't really know how bad that water's going to be until you jump in.