Big IDEA

Radical schmradical: Just how “out there” is EdTech?

16 May 2007

This is a more-or-less off-the-cuff rant inspired by Justin Reich’s recent commentary in the Christian Science Monitor, Laptops in the classroom: Mend it, don’t end it. While I don’t have a problem with the basic premise–that the failure of laptops in education is a failure of imagination–I am concerned about the suggested notion that the edtech he envisions is somehow radical: “Instructional changes in today’s classrooms need to be as radical as the technological innovations that spark them, and university administrators must recognize that upgrading the network won’t deliver results without upgrading the instruction.”

What does Mr. Reich consider radical? Let’s look at his description of what a classroom with successful integration of laptops looks like.

Students are working individually or in small teams to solve engaging problems or answer compelling questions. They are synthesizing their own experience, ideas from the professor, and sources that they can find on the Web. They are talking with classmates, but they are also collaborating with people outside the classroom walls by e-mailing experts, posting to blogs, or editing pages on wikis (websites that allow users to add, remove, or edit content). The teacher has come down from the lectern and is moving throughout the room, watching what students are doing, asking questions, posing challenges, and brushing shoulders with the student who just checked the scores on ESPN.com.

Periodically the action is stopped. The teacher instructs the class to close their laptops, except perhaps one designated scribe. They talk. They share their insights, their solutions, and their obstacles. The Socratic exchange is fueled by the insights developed through electronic inquiry. The powerful face-to-face questioning isn’t competing with the laptops; instead, it depends on it. When the dialogue ends, the teacher encourages students to reopen their notebook computers and summarize the important points of the conversation. Sometimes the instructor is delivering content, but more often the teacher is helping students learn how to learn.

If you ask anybody involved with education in the last 50 years, the only thing remotely new in that description is the use of technology. The irony is that he uses the term “Socratic exchange,” as if that might somehow signify something radical? The short of it is, some teachers have been engaging in student-centered, project/problem-based learning for a long time. Introducing new tools like laptops and telecommunications simply serve to supplant the old tools, like books and encyclopedias. And please, can we dismiss such clichés as “sage on the stage” and “guide on the side” ? While they serve to quickly frame a discussion, the notion of student-centered learning is far from radical.

It’s time to fess up, edtech-ers. The majority of us aren’t doing anything particularly revolutionary in education; we’re simply using new tools to implement old yet seldom-used models of teaching.

I’m not a particularly visionary thinker, but here are some things I might do to change education in the US. I don’t pretend that any of these are original ideas.

1. Treat the disease, not the symptoms. Are underperforming students and schools the problem, or just the symptom of some larger problem? Corporatism reworked in ecological theory has much to teach us about this. Maslow, anyone? The decay of communities, local economies, and families? Education doesn’t take place in a vacuum.
2. Change what and how we assess. Assuming that we assess what we value and that assessment drives instruction, what are we telling young people? Some folks tell them about the 21st century skills they’ll need, while they’re cramming to take yet another high-stakes test.
3. Get the federal government out of educational outcomes assessment. Let local communities decide what sort of education they value and what kind of schools they want. Just because Des Moines and Los Angeles have different values and priorities doesn’t mean there can’t be accountability, it just means they are accountable to different people, i.e. the local community and not Washington.
4. Empower administrators to get rid of bad teachers. Or teachers who aren’t willing to change to meet the goals of the school. Steve Jobs took a lot of heat when he blamed teacher unions for many of the problems with education today. Bad teachers exist. If they are unable or unwilling to change, let’s get rid of them.
5. Make administrators accountable to the community, not just a supervisor. From a recent personal experience, I was amazed at how dismissive an elementary school principal was of my concerns. I later learned that several other parents had approached him with the same concerns, and he was equally dismissive with them. Why is he still a principal?
6. Keep kids in school for less time. Oh wait, I forgot, schools make for great, tax-payer funded daycare.

What would you do to improve public education?