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4 sense thinking is uncritical, episodic, and disjointed, but it is also powerful because it is taken for granted”. Thus whilst the past ten years have undoubtedly witnessed significant changes in the technological practices and predilections of children, young people and young adults, it would seem sensible to reconsider the status of the ‘digital native’ description as a prima facie account of young people’s lives in the early twenty- first century. In particular, there is a pressing need to develop and promote realistic understandings of young people and digital technology if information professionals (especially librarians, teachers and other information specialists) are to play useful and meaningful roles in supporting current generations of young people. Against this background the present paper now goes on to question the accuracy and primacy of the ‘digital native literature’ in reflecting the realities of young people’s actual engagements with digital media and technology. IMPLICATIONS OF THE DIGITAL NATIVE DISCOURSE We should first examine in closer detail the broad body of work that can be said to constitute the digital native literature1, particularly in terms of how the conditions, capabilities and consequences of young people’s technology use are portrayed. In this sense, there are a number of differing practices and dispositions that are associated with the digital native condition: i) The empowered di

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.

Changing inertia into momentum, not waiting for someone to hand us the answer, taking responsibility ourselves rather than blaming others for our own inactivity - that’s what life-long learners do. That’s what effective educators do. That’s what we owe our children.

t’s not about us. It’s not about our personal or professional priorities and preferences, our discomfort levels, or any of that other stuff that has to do with us. It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.

Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.

Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction

Doctors understand expertise in the same way.

We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.

Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.

Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection.

“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.”

The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me.

Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.

Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores.

alifornia researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools,

Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time.

But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent.

Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective

Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching.

Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues.

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components

It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said.

The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.

Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice

I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down.

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology.

What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.

We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure

But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow.

“Most surgery is done in your head,”

we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance

Memory is the representation of the things that we ‘know’ as a culture

The worker was the original goal of the public education system.

The worker needs to remember things without understanding them.

Learning for a worker is about compliance.

Our education system currently does a very good job of creating workers.

The soldier

They are the defenders of memory.

They are the ones who establish what things we currently know that the worker should remember, and then establish the system by which we will measure that knowing.

They decide which parts of the past will be valued

soldiers really can decide what they want to have valued.

Soldiers defend the status quo

The nomad is trying to do what I call ‘learning’.

Learning for the nomad is the point where the steps in a process go away.

It is what Wynton Marsalis calls ‘being the thing itself’

In order to create an educational system that allows for nomads we can’t measure for a prescribed outcome.

Rhizomatic learning

It is designed for a world where there aren’t ‘things people should know’ but rather ‘new connections to be made’.

If we want a society of innovators, of creatives, we can’t think of success as an act of compliance