Because it is 2015!
Have you ever had that moment where you suddenly realised that a significant chunk of time has passed, leaving you with the feeling that you missed it all, that the months decided to click by without letting you join in?
A few days ago a stray comment from a colleague left me in the midst of that moment, fumbling with the fact that week two of November was upon us, leaving less than eight of 2015 to be enjoyed.
Like many of us, I have a vivid memory of counting down the last seconds of 1999, surrounded by good friends and empty bottles, hoping the lights would stay on and wondering what a new century would bring. That was fifteen years ago! Fifteen!!! The new century brought with it more than I personally could have imagined. So many changes. So many advances I would now be lost (quite literally) without - the GPS, the camera phone, text messaging, smartphones, Kindle, YouTube, Facebook, iTunes - all things I now DEPEND on for learning, listening, reading, communicating, connecting, and not getting lost. So many ways to do old things in new ways.
For my daughter, born in 2007, YouTube and Siri and GPS are the way she has always done things - they are not "the new way" of doing things, they are the way. In fact, for every student in my school, those things are the way they have always done things as they have grown up.
Over the past two weeks I have had the good fortune of sitting through days of instruction with some world experts on assessment and English language aquisition, whose underlying message is that in 2015 we know an awful lot about how learners learn because there has been a lot of research going on all over the world. The research has shown us better, more effective ways to help learners learn, and as such we should be changing what we do in our classrooms to ensure we are using those new approaches. Why? As Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian Prime Minister recently responded when asked a similarly important "Why?" question, the answer is because it is 2015!
When there is so much information available to guide best practice in your classroom, don't be the one where others wonder if they have missed 15 years when they step in to visit.