Let’s Stop Revolutionizing – and get on with teaching

I’ve been teaching for sixteen years. I’ve heard over and over how one technology or another will save education.

I’m still waiting.

Let me first say, I’m not one to distance myself from new technology. I don’t hold it at arms length, I embrace it. I love technology. It’s fair to say, I’m a nerd.

I had a smart board a decade before our county embraced them. It was awesome. Sure, the markers were too big to hold. The adapter would often fall off the board, and I still  had to stand at the front of the room, but I loved it.

 

 

I bought a touch screen convertible laptop back in 2005. The stylus worked great, when it worked. It was a little slow. It would bog down a little when I used massive programs like Notepad. The screen was finicky and often the entire system crashed, but I loved it. It was rumored I could even share the screen wirelessly, but that never panned out.

 

I could go on and on with new technologies I’ve tried, but they all pan out the same for me. I use them, some I keep, others slowly fall away if they don’t help much. But for  each one, the change is iterative. Not one has “revolutionized” the way I teach. The bad ones waste time for me or my students. The good ones help me do my job better, or help my students learn more quickly or with more depth. None of them though have lived up to the buzz that surrounds them.

We, as educators, move from one technology to another and get caught up in the shininess and potential, a potential that is often visualized by those who are selling it.  Then we embrace the potential and dive in. Administrations spend money on the new thing. The good administrations invest in training, and then ask or compel teachers to get on board with the new tech. Then we all wait for the new tech to change everything, and it never does.

As Derek Muller points out, we’ve been doing the same thing since the blackboard, and we’ve yet to see the revolution.

It seems that the information age has brought even more claims of the technology elixir that will cure all our woes. I understand the excitement. New technology can help us change what we do. It can make our jobs easier, help us connect to students outside the classroom, appeal to multiple modalities of learning, give students control over pacing and direction of learning. All of these things are good, but none of them are revolutionary. We’ve always been able to do them, it’s just that technology provides so many new tools to do it. We have new tools every day rather than every year, or decade.

But that’s just it, isn’t it. Technology provides us with new tools to do the same job. We can use them to improve education for our students, but the change is iterative, not revolutionary.  The electric drill didn’t revolutionize building, it just helped improve the time it took to build things.

Anointing technology as the savior of education is fraught with problems. Not the least of which is teachers are weary of the grandiose claims that never pan out. Teachers also don’t have to feel like it’s an all in proposition. Let them try new technology like the try new tools. Let them see the little ways it can improve their lessons or their students learning. Those changes will give teachers the confidence to try the next tool, and we will all slowly and with deliberate purpose change the face of education.

Ed Camps / Honing the craft

An Ed Camp in Roswell, GA focusing on the teaching of English

I’m loving the new movement towards Ed Camps. The idea of taking control of our own staff development is a long time overdue. I’m so excited, a colleague and I are going to host our own Ed Camp in March.

I don’t mind that administrators try to ensure that we continue honing our craft. In fact, I think it’s an often overlooked component of what we do. We talk about being “life-long learners,” but with a family, attempts at outside hobbies, papers to grade, lessons to plan (even if only in my head), and life to live, it’s tough to get find time to work on being a better teacher. Sometimes I’m blown away by the books others read, the conferences attended, and projects completed by so many of my peers. If I’m honest, they make me somewhat self-conscious. I don’t like having my inadequacies pointed out by someone else’s competency.

So, I’m glad that we have staff development, excuse me, professional development. No one asked me, but I would have gone with Staff Training and Development just for fun.

The problem though is that this well intended element of our profession is dominated by people who don’t do what we do. They taught one to twenty-five years ago, but we all know how quickly teacher amnesia sets in. Heck, I forget how to teach over Spring Break.

So Ed Camps are the way to go. To be clear, not the Ed Camps that are really Staff Training and Development with a new name, but the REAL Ed Camps. Those lead by teachers with teachers as students and collaborators.

Ownership and relevance are important for meaningful learning.

We know that ownership and relevance are important when learning. If we do our jobs right, we’re trying to give these things to our students. The question though is if we know what’s important for learning, why am I sitting in a theater listening to someone go over differentiation for the fifteenth time without the presenter even attempting to discuss relevance.

Jack Hussard says meaningful learning comes from the following:

• Non-arbitrary, non-verbatim, substantive incorporation of new knowledge into cognitive structure.
• Deliberate effort to link new knowledge with higher order concepts in cognitive structure
• Learning related to experiences with events or objects.
• Affective commitment to relate new knowledge to prior learning.

Ed Camps, by giving teachers control of their learning, do these things. I’m going to my first Ed Camp next weekend. In my sixteen years of teaching, I’ve never been more excited about a training or conference.

There are many ways teachers can take back control of our profession. I’m excited to be a part of whatever comes next.