10 Things Every Educator Should Start Doing Today: #2
2. Focus on creating the conditions for powerful learning before uttering the word edtech
It’s Wednesday morning and Mom calls upstairs to me, “Eric honey, it’s time to wake up! You don’t want to be late, you have PLUS class today.”
I jump out of bed, get dressed grabbing the first shirt and pants I see, rush out of my room with a Bo Jackson t-shirt, mismatching socks, and a serious case of bed head. Then I fly down the stairs, inhale a bowl of cereal and an untoasted pop-tart just before I walk to school with my backpack in tow… which by the way is overflowing with wrinkled incomplete worksheets, an unfinished homework packet, and a neatly filled in Pizza Hut reading log.
Awe… Eric liked to read when he was young. Not exactly, I figured out how to game the system so I could get my free personal pan pizza every month for meeting the minimum reading requirement. Yes, I was that kid.
I didn’t do my homework, didn’t like to read, and didn’t like school. Unless it was art, gym, recess or PLUS class, a pull out program in our public school district for students who had been identified as “gifted.”
Once a week I joined the other gifted students and spent the entire day in an environment with the conditions for powerful learning as described by Will Richardson in a recent TEDx
We did things like problem and project based learning, drew pictures and painted, built things with our hands, had fewer rules, could sit wherever we wanted, it was based on our interest, had no homework, and when possible the work we did was for an authentic audience.
PLUS was amazing for a kid like me. It allowed me to be creative and gave me autonomy. We did projects relevant to the real world and it challenged me with interesting questions. Most of all, it was FUN!
Sadly for me, the following day I returned to my regular classroom to spend the remaining time in school bored, disengaged and getting in trouble for talking or drawing.
When I reflect on this experience and consider what I’ve learned about education, I think of two things. First, I get frustrated and wonder why everyday at school wasn’t like PLUS class? Was I only gifted one day a week? Why were the gifted students the only ones privy to this type of learning? More importantly, based on conversations with parents who have gifted students today, it’s puzzling how this is still happening in our school system 30 years later.
Second, my experience in PLUS class did not include technology. There was an occasional quest on the Oregon Trail, but other than that we had NO LMS, NO apps, NO adaptive software, NO virtual reality. Zip, zero, zilch.
Point being, the only reason I jumped out of bed on Wednesdays was because I knew when I got to school I would be “engaged.”
When I say engaged, I don’t mean the type of engagement that some educators loosely throw around today I.e. when presenting at conferences or participating in Twitter chats about how engaged students are because they were using technology and the latest and greatest app or “cool tool.” I loved PLUS class because of the way I got to learn, not the tools I used.
To be truly engaged is when students are being met at the optimal level of challenge and their abilities. I remember being hyper focused, “in the zone,” or a in state of flow as described by Csíkszentmihályi.
The type of engagement we should be striving for in education, the type that leads to deep and powerful learning, does not happen simply because technology is present and it can’t be observed either.
Have you ever walked into a classroom with an administrator while students are working on devices? Start the countdown timer until the word engagement comes out of their mouth. Then walk over and ask a student what they’ve been doing only to find out they’ve spent the last 45 minutes looking for the perfect picture to insert into their slide deck. Engagement, really?
There are far more important factors to consider such as the purpose for, or nature of the work the students are doing. For example, relevancy and authenticity will trump the presence of technology every time. We should ask ourselves, do the students have autonomy and agency of the learning taking place? Are they doing this to get a grade, or because they’re intrinsically motivated by a greater cause? Furthermore, what role does technology play? Is it being used to do old things in new ways, or is it providing opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist?
“Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces, so in education, technologies amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there.”
- Kentaro Toyama
If the goal is to engage students, then focus your time and energy exploring how to create the powerful conditions for learning before you utter the word “edtech.” Once you’ve mastered those skills, technology will serve as rocket fuel and take your instruction to the next level. On the other hand, technology acts like rocket fuel for ineffective teachers too… but in the wrong direction. It leads to more ineffective teaching faster and more efficiently than ever.
Now I know this type of instructional shift takes time, but this is not about how teachers like to learn, or how comfortable teachers are with technology. There isn’t enough time or money in the world to provide teachers with face to face professional development on all of the technology that exists today. It’s not sustainable and we can’t keep up with the pace of change.
I believe there’s a need to shift away from teaching students WHAT to learn, to teaching them HOW to learn, and the same goes for teachers when it comes to professional development.
Students only get 930,000 minutes of instructional time from Kindergarten to 12th grade. They can’t afford to wait for educators to get comfortable with doing things differently than they have in the past. More importantly, to paraphrase Seymour Papert, simply adding technology to the classroom, but changing nothing else is absurd. Focus on instruction and creating the conditions for powerful learning before anything else. So when you do use technology, it will be your rocket fuel and not simply a new way of doing old things.
3. If you haven’t already, create a Twitter account. If you have, identify the next place to grow professionally
4. Remove the front of the classroom
5. Let go of the need to control everything that happens in the classroom
6. Go to your curriculum director and advocate for inviting students to write curriculum this summer
7. Model appropriate uses of social media (see #3)
8. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
9. Advocate for more and better professional development before adding edtech to your district
10. Practice 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation everyday
1. Eliminate “paperless classroom” from your vocabulary forever
