Kitty Boitnott on 21st-Century Learning Skills

Kitty Boitnott, a media specialist at Chamberlayne Elementary School in Henrico County, VA, has spent the last year as president of the 60,000-member Virginia Education Association (VEA), the largest and oldest professional organization serving public schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

How is Virginia making sure students learn about 21st-century skills?
My most recent job was in Henrico County, VA, where in 2001, Henrico County Public Schools had just entered into the largest laptop initiative in the country with Apple. Every child in high school received his or her own iBook that he/she was allowed to keep 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during the school year. At the middle school level, students starting receiving their own laptops in the middle of their sixth-grade year. And for the first several years of the initiative, every classroom and every library in every school got at least five iMac desktop computers. 

My dissertation project involved surveying all of the 8th graders in the school division during the fall of 2006 about their various uses of their laptops. This initiative was an important step toward teaching students the 21st-century skills that they need in order to succeed in the 21st-century global economy.

How do you help VEA members understand the importance of 21st-century skills?
Teachers need to get out in front of this effort by becoming experts in the variety of technical/computer skills needed, and to help students become critical thinkers and evaluators of the incredible amount of information that is so readily and easily available to them.

How can media specialists best help students develop these skills?
In my position as the school library media specialist, I routinely took it upon myself to offer my colleagues assistance in developing new skills. Library media specialists need to get all of the training they possibly can and share it as quickly as they can so that the students in their respective school buildings can benefit from the latest technology advances as soon as possible.

Tell us about your painful experience getting National Board Certification. 
That experience was simultaneously the most beneficial and the most humbling of my life and certainly of my career. The whole concept appealed to me because it was steeped in the premise that this certification would enhance the teaching profession. Because I failed to achieve on my first try, I have become a better mentor to my colleagues going through the process, and I have a special connection with other advanced candidates who are going through the hurt and confusion of having always been successful in their practice and not passing their national board certification on their first try.

I now have three advanced degrees along with the national board certification in library media, and I have to say that the national board certification means more to me because my peers assessed my entries and I wasn’t just given a passing score for going through the motions and meeting all of the deadlines, which is often what happens in many graduate classes. I had to demonstrate unequivocally with hard evidence that I had met the rigorous standards of the program.

What’s the greatest challenge facing educators on a national level?
It’s the current paradoxical and contradictory attitude that the general public holds toward our nation’s teachers. There is an attitude among some, and it is often fed, it seems to me, by the mainstream media, that teaching is not such an honorable career. In fact, it isn’t a career at all, and it certainly isn’t considered to be a profession in the way that medicine or law or engineering are considered professional endeavors. Instead, teaching is a job that anyone can do, evidenced by programs such as Teach for America and others that take kids out of college who never thought about teaching while they were undergrads, or they take young folks who need a quick job while they “find themselves” or get themselves ready for their REAL career, give them a few weeks of boot camp training, and then send them into our toughest, hard-to-staff schools and expect them to be successful. We as educators have to take charge of the conversation in such a way that we change the public paradigm about what the teaching profession is.

What do you think about President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan’s stand on charter schools?
Since the inception of charter schools as a concept back in the 1980s, proponents have argued that we need to have schools that are “freed up to experiment, to be innovative, and to be free of the bureaucratic strings that currently inhibit experimentation in our public schools.” If that is the case, then please, just free up ALL of our nation’s public schools to become public charter schools where each school division and each school faculty decides for themselves what is in their best interests and the best interests of the students they teach. Why must innovation be reserved for charter schools only?

How would you like your students to remember you? 
I would like to think that I played some small role in introducing the wonderful world of books and the innumerable pleasures of reading to the many, many students that I have come into contact with over the years. By my calculations, I have had contact with thousands of students in the 33 years that I served as a library media specialist in three different school divisions. I often get stopped by young adults who look at me quizzically and ask, “Did you used to be the librarian at ____________? (Fill in the blank.) They remember me even if I don’t always remember them right away because they change so much over the years. It is gratifying to think that they may have had a good experience with books and literature because of the small part I might have played in their overall education.

What’s your favorite picture book to share with students?
Who can pick just one? I used to get tickled at myself because I would start every storytime with the introduction, “This is one of my favorite stories,” and it was always true! As far as picture books, I always loved sharing the Native American tales, The Story of Jumping Mouse (HarperCollins, 1989), and The Rough-Faced Girl (Putnam, 1992). I also loved sharing The Talking Eggs (Dial, 1989) and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (HarperCollins, 1987). I liked the pictures, but I also liked the lessons that these stories conveyed about the virtues of bravery in the face of adversity, courage of the heart, and compassion for others. These are important virtues that are missing, it seems to me, in computer games and many of the more popular television shows. I would like to think that we can use literature to serve as springboards for conversations about life lessons that we all need to remember about the importance of showing courage and compassion when called for. I guess I am old-fashioned in that way.