Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast number 78. This is my third podcast of this school year and, I am happy to say both our campus school and our distributed learning schools have been very healthy and growing. I want to correct some information about our campus school from last week's podcast. I said that we have experienced a 5% drop in enrolment but when the numbers finally came in after my podcast was broadcast we found that we are at the same amount of students we had last year. This means that our campus school is actually growing because, as I pointed out last week, British Columbia is experiencing a decline in the population of school age children.  Our campus school administrators, teachers and staff have been working very hard in marketing our school as well as continuing to bring together a community of families who are dedicated to discipleship-based Christian education.  I just want to give huge a public, "well done" to this team.  Many of our podcast listeners who have either worked in or enrolled their children in Christian campus schools can appreciate the enormous amount of work that goes into sustaining enrolments. In our Distributed learning schools we have developed a model of employment that is funded on a student by student basis and we have come to expect constant growth, this year is no exception. In the more traditional model of campus school education our staff's position are directly linked to arbitrary class sizes and tight budgets. Thus maintaining enrolment in a declining population of students is, in fact, growing enrolment. Let me say it again, "well done" campus school staff.

Of course our Distributed Learning schools, Heritage Christian Online School and BC Online School don't just grow themselves. Although, at times it certainly feels that way. Our team continues to work hard in both our Individualized department working closely with home educators and in our Online courses.  We still have another week of enrolments coming in but, to date, we have grown another 20% in our full time program with over 1500 students and our part time program in BC Online School has more than doubled from this time last year. At this time we had enrolled about 300 students while this year that number is over 700. Keep in mind that our Summer school almost tripled from last year to this year and we are enrolling students all year long. BC Online school will exceed all of our predictions this year and pass the 2000 student mark if things continue in the same pace of our start up.  Our newest initiative, The International Christian Online School, ICOS, launches Oct. 26th in Hong Kong. I will be traveling there next week to get things prepared for our start up. This program is taking our expertise in online educational technology and combining with some exceptional Christian ESL teachers. It is our plan to begin a Christian English as a Second Language program. We are using dynamic online course-ware and trained Christian young people as language tutors using Moodle, Skype, Facebook and other technologies to reach out to various global communities with English, the Gospel and eventually online Christian k-12 schooling. 2009-10 has had an amazing start for our schools.  Glory to God!

In my address to our campus school staff back in August, which already seems like a long time ago, I spoke about the three key educational reforms we have been involved with at Heritage Christian Schools.  The first area of reform has been something that we have been working on and talking about in Christian Schools since I began to be involved with Christian education. It is what makes us immediately distinct and different from our public school counterparts. It is this approach to education that creates and lays a foundation of a truly Christian worldview in our students. Of course I am talking about the reform of teaching every subject and discipline from a comprehensive and all-encompassing Christian Worldview perspective. This involves teaching our subjects and disciplines using the techniques of Biblical Integration. We can't just paste Bible lessons and scriptures onto a secular perspective the topics and skills we are teaching. We have to see these disciplines and topics in the light of revelation and Christian worldview. We have to start from this perspective and teach out from there. In many cases this involves a different curriculum but more importantly it requires our teachers and home educators to understand the things they are passing on to our children, as best as they can, from a God given perspective. We have assumed that if we use a different text book or curriculum we be teaching from a Christian perspective. Though Christian textbooks can be helpful the real work is in how we present our own worldview and response to the reigning ideologies in the subjects themselves. In fact we will often use the recommended public school textbook as a point of contrast. It is then the educators role to unveil the Christ centered perspective. I wrote about this and podcasted these ideas in episodes 15-24. I have also published a paper on this entitled "All Truth is God's Truth" that can be found in the articles section of The Christian Educator web site.  I would also recommend Harro Van Brumelen's work on this topic entitled "Steppingstones of Curriculum."

The second area of reform has to do with the Educational Experience we give our children. I would suggest it is not enough to just teach and pass on Bible knowledge to our children without reaching deeply into their hearts and creating transformative experiences. Our schools whether at home or on the campus need to have creative and life changing moments that allow us to experience Christ in dynamic ways. This comes through deep relationships that teachers develop with their students or teachable moments that Mom uses to demonstrate powerful life lessons. We have to experience life and creation and God with our kids and not just teach them about these things. Does our school program include times of humbly seeking of His presence. Our secondary principal at our campus school, Steve Smith, speaks over and over to our staff, our parents and our kids how that every student at Heritage must "discover their gifts, find their passion and calling and serve their world." What is compelling about this mission statement is how he does this with our students on a day by day basis. Every chance he can he has the students on retreats, field trips, walking to Tim Hortons, and our ultimate high school experience in Global Citizenship Program. This is a six to eight week trip with our kids to a third world environment where students are challenged to use their gifts to serve some of the less privileged in world. Our kids come away with a completely different sense about themselves, the world and even their relationship with God after an experience like this. I appreciate that is costly both in finances and man hours. But consider the commitment and sacrifice on Steve and his families part. To bring transformative experiences to our children we must break away for our safe traditional ways of "doing education." Dietrich Bonheoffer called it the "Cost of Discipleship." Invariably it cost the discipler much more than the disciplie. For true transformation to take place there must be a unique transference from teacher to student. We need to ask not just the question, 'Does our student know more after their course with me?" but also, 'Is my student different after their encounter with me?"

We have been speaking of the third reform in the last two podcasts. We have been looking at the innovation of online educational technology and how this is becoming both disruptive and reforming in our systems and methods of education.  What has been fascinating to see is how our two very different methods of education seem to intersect in the new technologies we are beginning to employ and how each group seems to assume that the other type of schooling has a corner on the technology. As we have tried to introduce new technological solutions into the classroom one of the complaints of our teachers has been that the classroom model doesn't work well with an individualized approach, something which is the hallmark of home schooling. On the other hand our home schoolers often complain that our online courses are a bit too schoolish and are preventing our students from learning in a more open model. Home schoolers also often assume that the school has all these technological resources for students when in fact most home schoolers have more access to online options than do our campus schoolers. Conversely, our campus schoolers assume that our home schoolers are far more innovative in their programs when, in many cases, they are limited in the types of curriculum and resources they are using. What has actually been happening in our schools is a blending of both the home educational program and our campus school program. Both communities are beginning to find common ground in the technology that we are using to bring education to our students no matter the method. Our technological solutions using online courses are allowing home schooled students to access quality teachers, engaging student interaction and consistent standards within the BC educational program all of which have been available to our campus school students. These same solutions and courses are allowing traditional campus school students to have more flexibility in their schedules,  work at a different pace of instruction and have more control around individualized instruction. This is and will become a major shift in how both types of education are conducted in this next century.

The digital world is upon us and it will change everything. It is my passion and perhaps my call to help Christian education make the transition into this digital world. This digital reform is happening worldwide in every and all educational sectors. I don't want to see our message and call to discipling this generation marginalized because we have failed to communicate in the genre and methods of the generation we are called to teach. The children that started kindergarten this year with us will graduate in 2023. That almost looks like a year far away in some science fiction novel yet they started their educational program with us just two weeks ago. Are we ready to reach them? Will we be able to prepare them for this distant future of digital change?  Not only should we participate in this reform but perhaps we are called to be leaders in it. As Christian schools we are in a unique position because we can avoid much of the bureaucracy that our public school counterparts  have to work through. Here is a comment from Laura Klassen, one of our individualized teachers in our online school from last week:

"I have several friends still working in the public system, either as teachers or custodians.  While I am glad to see them employed and providing for their families, I wonder if they feel threatened by the current trends.   I try not to brag too much about the successes of our DL school, but I can honestly say I am thrilled to be part of an organization that is perhaps less shackled down with financial overhead costs, and commitments made to the Teacher's Union.  It is my prayer that our leaders will continue to recognize the value of DL schools whose aim is to prepare individuals to be all that they can be, rather than sticking to old, self-sustaining systems."

As we are talking about this reform in both our individualized approach and our campus school approach we have been saying that we want to "build a hybrid" approach to education. I am not sure that this is the right way to say it. We are not advocating that our home schoolers build a more "schoolish" style of program nor are we suggesting that our campus school become so decentralized that students don't have any classroom experiences. I think what we need to begin to do is look for new ways to enhance our educational programs to bring a new element into our pedagogy. Let me quote from Clayton Christensen in "Disrupting Class" on what the new role of the teacher might look like in the digital classroom:

"As the monolithic system of instruction shifts to a classroom powered by student-centric technology, teacher's roles will gradually shift over time, too. The shift might not be easy, but it will be rewarding. Instead of spending most of their time delivering one-size-fits-all lessons year after year, teachers can spend much more of their time traveling from student to student to help individual with individual problems. Teachers will act more as learning coaches and tutors to help students find the learning approach that makes the most sense for them. They will mentor and motivate them through the learning with the aid of real-time computer data on how the student is learning. this means, however, that they will need very different skills to add value in this future than the skills with which education schools are equipping them today. Since customization will be a major driver and benefit of this shift to student-centric online technology, increasingly teachers will have to be able to understand differences in students and be able to provide individual assistance that is complementary to the learning model each student is using."

We are working on a number of projects and some pilot programs this year that will begin to implement some of Christensen's ideas in the classroom. I believe we are finally developing courses that are going to enhance the classroom experience with very innovative tools. My son Richard and his wife Chelsea have been writing very creative math curriculum in the upper grades using flash technology that leads the student through very complex mathematical instructions on a step by step basis, with every concept  carefully demonstrated on the student's computer. The student can stop, go back and listen to things they might miss. They are able to build their own personalized study lessons and work with the teacher on the specific issues they are struggling with. They have access to previous year's lessons so that they can fill in the missing components to a very linear subject as math. This course has enabled them to reach a much larger classroom than what is traditionally acceptable and they have seen exceptional results in student achievement. Later this year one of our other HCS alumni, Jeff Therrien will be re-writing our Chemistry 12 course and will work closely with our campus science teacher Pat Hayden to create an interactive, flash animated course. Neither of these courses use or will use the traditional text book but rather give the students an interactive experience in the subject matter.  If we can begin to use this interactive technology as our textbooks in our campus schools we will bring our costs down considerably especially as computer hardware continues to get better at a much more affordable cost. With $300 net-books available this actually becomes a cost saving approach to the thick and expensive textbooks our kids have to lug around the campus. More importantly, we are now providing interactive educational experiences that will enable our students to have more freedom, different paces of instruction and teach to different learning styles and abilities.

We are also starting curriculum projects that will use the blessings of online technology to help our home school moms. Janet Rainbow, our Director of Individualized in our online school is beginning to visualize and plan an online program for the home school mom. Instead of going far and wide for good structured curriculum our home educators can use online technology to download lesson plans and workbooks that help and guide the home school mom in here role of educator and discipler. Mom can use this on a day by day basis or simply take the resources she needs for the month. We will have online projects and educational games that fortify the Christian worldview and subject matter they are learning in the home. Eventually we have a variety of learning objects and programs that will meet the needs of multiple types of learning styles and intelligences.

We are on our way to a 21st Century style of education both in the classroom and in the home school. As Christian educators we want to be leading the pack.

Please email us your comments and thoughts on today’s podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book or send you the download link for the audio version of, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.