Embedding the Pedagogy of Things — Teacher Training and Software in ICT
In the first part of my history of computers in Australian education, I looked at the way school institutions have spent money on the hardware tools in an attempt to help schools use technology in order to teach students. The problem has been how to have effective and sustained methods of improving the education of students with the software and tools. This is especially an issue when the people who go to conferences are generally the same faces, repeating the same messages to each other. The chain of creating ideas and then delivering them has been a fairly tortuous one. It often starts with conferences and then trickles down from there.
The Conferences of Presentations and Post-Its
Every year in our professional teaching lives in Australia, there are Information Communication Technology conferences that a fortunate few can attend. The major ones are EduTech, held in Brisbane each year in June, or the Australian Computers in Education Conference (ACEC) held every second year in a variety of cities. Last year, it was held in Adelaide. It is at these conferences that we get an idea of how teachers are using technology in classrooms, either from consultants, major “thinkers” and “influencers” or from teachers in the field. This is the story of the relationship between technology and the way teachers have developed a pedagogy around technology — hopefully with the aim of “embedding” such pedagogy into the way schools do their educating.
The Ideas
Those of us who go to ICT conferences are used to Ideas. Lots of them. Often involving words and phrases like “embedding”, “fluences”, “changing paradigms”, “personalising learning”, “human literacy”, “knowledge construction”, “digital citizenship”, “design thinking” and the like. The ones I have attended are EduTech and ACEC. The chief difference between them are that EduTech has three streams — an Education Leader stream, an Education Technology stream and a Corporate Stream. ACEC doesn’t have the numbers or purpose of EduTech — so there is only one stream. This is why you are more likely to see Principals and officials from education offices at EduTech than at ACEC. You are also more likely to see the shiny products and hard sell from software and hardware suppliers happening at EduTech than at ACEC.
The presentations at these conferences, though, still fall into these categories (these are my terms for them) — the superstar keynote, the star lectures, the consultant workshop and enthusiast presentation.
The Superstar Keynote is given by a generally imported university researcher / teacher turned superstar like Sir Ken Robinson. Robinson has made a lucrative living out of appearing at conferences and telling teachers that they need to think outside the square and break away from existing, stultifying structures. Essentially, recreating and riffing from his famous 2007 TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” The problem with having keynotes like those from Robinson is that they raise questions without providing much of an answer. Yes, the teachers present — the converted — understand that school systems, high stakes testing and straitjacketed curriculums have a negative impact on creativity. There possibly isn’t a need to fly in someone from overseas to tell us this. The difficult is, however, is that conferences are expensive things to mount and there is a perception that it’s the superstar keynote that get the numbers through the door. This is particularly important with conferences like EduTech, with its multiple streams and higher cost. You don’t see anywhere near as many superstars doing ACEC.
The Star Lectures are provided by a range of people who are either education researchers or consultants who work outside Australian school education (Alan November, Stephen Heppell, Gary Stager and Andrew Churches being such people) who provide evidence and challenge the ways education is undertaken and are fond of the kinds of phrases I mentioned earlier. Their outsider status gives them the freedom to challenge Australian ideas about education. The idea of these lectures is for teachers to take the ideas and facts back to their schools and school systems and hope to communicate them to the wider teacher populace. They are sometimes clear in terms of how to apply the ideas, at other times not so clear. In addition, these are often the same ideas that have been floating around such conferences for 5 or more years. Another interesting element to a number of these stars is that they are often associated and linked to one of the big edutech companies because that is who helps them stay employed in the industry.
The Consultant Workshop is where ideas from up the chain can be shaped into a more pragmatic set of solutions, usable ideas and resources for schools from people with direct experience in Australian schools. Their work, when at its best, takes the ideas from up the chain and help teachers be able to see how to apply the ideas. These are the workshops one rarely sees at something like EduTech and is more an ACEC concept. The consultants who run them are an interesting group, in that a number of them also have some kind of brand loyalty, because the various big edutech companies have provided them with support, materials and jobs. As a result, it’s difficult at times to find consultants who don’t have an allegiance with Google, Microsoft, Adobe or Apple. This doesn’t make their resources unusable or irrelevant — but it does mean that teachers have had to establish a solid set of filters when approaching such workshops.
It would also be unfair to criticise these consultants for being supporters of a particular brand that has supported them — there is a dearth of people within education departments who are able to provide sustained support for ICT initiatives in schools and there isn’t the culture of systems retaining full time external consultants, able to provide support when needed. It has therefore been said by many within education circles that there is no problem with corporate support for education — that anything that helps teachers is fine. Not everyone agrees.
Teacher Enthusiast Presentations are where current teachers from schools present what they are doing in classrooms that involve some kind of technological innovation. These can be quite useful, as they involve direct and recent experiences from a variety of classrooms. These are also missing from EduTech and are a major strength of conferences like ACEC. The most recent presentations at the ACEC Conference in Adelaide featured a number of recent technological trends, such as: the latest in ipad apps, which were geared more towards primary education than high school education in terms of idea formulation and skill development; numbers of Catholic systemic teachers presenting on the usage of Google Apps and other Google tools in the classroom; the ways that schools were changing classroom shapes and practices to incorporate flexible technology usage; teachers who have become evangelists for one particular piece of tech (I remember one such presenter who was an unpaid “Ambassador” for a particular tech tool — I still wonder whether that granted her diplomatic immunity in other technology based lands); principals or executive members from particular independent schools that have been able to undertake radical innovations in terms of classroom shapes, technological support and teaching methods — which can be difficult to replicate in less flexible school structures; various inspiring stories from teachers who have managed to make tech work in order to enhance learning, rather than necessarily be focused on the technology.
This last concept is ultimately the point of these conferences — that we could be inspired and take back such ideas to schools. They can also have the effect of revealing to teachers present of what is going on in other schools which can either have the impact of driving them onto implement those practices in their schools or make them despair of the challenges of doing that.
Another outcome of conferences are the networking that goes on — which generally spills into the following of Twitter accounts and blogs. It’s always interesting, in terms of networking, to talk to those employed by various education offices about their experiences at conferences. They are generally open to new ideas and will engage with them on a meaningful level at such conferences. They will also seek to hire various consultants and star lecturers to do programs within their systems. They are also there to see which companies are providing ways to help their systems. There’s a lot of coin being spent to lure these officials.
The EdTech Companies Shifting Units
I remember being at the EduTech conference in 2013 and seeing exactly what was going on around the fringes of the conference. Selling. And lots of it. The type of products had changed, though, from my first ACEC conference of 2010. Then, it was all about hardware like SmartBoards and laptop trolleys and elaborate software packages from textbook companies. By 2013 there were still SmartBoards and software packages, hardware from every computer company but Apple (why be there if most schools with the choice of tech have Apple?) but now there was a Google booth featuring Star Lecturers from the conference doing miniworkshops, as well as a whole host of companies providing tech support services. These support services included Learning Management Systems (LMS) that had outside companies manage a portal into which teachers could mount their material and manage their school resources and classwork in an attractive, easily accessible form. The field of LMS is one area where some bigger independents have seen a benefit for both education and marketing purposes — it can look better to parents to have a visible organisation system. There were also companies providing a way for schools to better manage Google docs and other files, where a fee is charged per student in order to have the company provide folders for each student — plus, for an extra fee, provide teachers with a chance to see what students are browsing while at school (which makes many teachers and education consultants uneasy).
Another presence were companies providing protection and firewalls for schools, either through an onsite server presence or via the cloud. These companies could make a great deal of money from providing such services to the bigger independent schools, so there were a lot of free dinners and drinks being provided, especially at EduTech. Not so many at ACEC 2014, however. At that conference, I had to pay my own way to sing karaoke with local teachers. But that’s a completely different story…
The Embedding of Pedagogy in Schools
The difficulty for schools is how to take ideas from conferences and from outside systems and put them in schools. Within schools, it’s very difficult to find time in the usual meeting and inservice schedule for meaningful work on technology integration. It’s usually scheduled for a 15 minute presentation at the end of a staff meeting or maybe, if you’re lucky, a one hour chance for some work during one day a year. That’s because inservice schedules are crammed with annual plans, compulsory annual inservices, administrivia and various other requirements. As a result, most teachers stumble through their year either doing trial and error with technology (if they are interested in the first place) or depending on their ICT Co-ordinator (if they have one). In order to address this, school systems have had to come up with ways of channelling the ideas from conferences to schools.
Solution One — The Office Consultant Model
School systems have ICT departments — usually pretty small — and they have two sides. There’s the IT network people, who run the systems that channels every school’s web traffic through a single desk in order to block a huge number of “dangerous” websites. This black list still includes Facebook and used to, back a few years ago in the NSW state system, Youtube. Then there’s the ICT officers, who will run programs themselves, which include options such providing money as to release teachers to undertake some kind of project in negotiation with the central office, or have teachers be released as to work with experts employed by the office in things like Google Apps or other software or cloud based technology. These are overseen by ICT consultants who are expected to oversee many schools in their weekly work. The reason that signing up to network solution companies and companies like Google has been attractive to these central offices is because it helps with uniformity and ease of organising inservice opportunities. The flipside is that it is difficult for schools in a system to break with the office and explore its own model and way of approaching tech, especially if that school wants to enlist people from central office to help with inservicing staff on such a model. The difficulty with this for schools is that this inservicing is usually still one off and piecemeal, which often doesn’t have meaningful follow-up due to time constraints.
Solution Two — TeachMeets
The other solution that is liked by offices and staff are TeachMeets. This involves teachers going offsite after school and meeting in various school locations, listening to a variety of teachers talking about tech journeys. The talks are either 2 or 7 minutes in length — the 7 minute presentations are sometimes done in the “Pecha Kucha” style, with 20 images accompanied by 20 seconds of explanation each. These are followed by a TeachEat afterwards, which adds to the informality of the event. These are hit and miss affairs, especially if the presentations aren’t entirely relevant to teachers in the room. In addition, TeachMeets tend to become events attended by the same people each time — teachers preaching to the converted. Another pattern I have observed is that the host schools will have some of their staff attend and be curious about what goes on, but then may or may not use the ideas later.
That is the issue with any of these models — it’s best described as scattergun technology training. People throw ideas in the air and hope that the teachers will find something relevant and useful. Things like TeachMeets require staff to give up their own time and travel to far flung places. Inservice projects need expensive days off and staff to be enthusiastic in order to embed ideas into what they are doing each day. It is for that reason that there isn’t a very stable or solid bridge between ideas coming from conferences to the classroom practice of teachers. It comes to one phrase.
“We haven’t got time”.
The Future
It’s easy to look at this history of ICT and point a finger at people at the top of education — those who run central offices — and accuse them of lacking vision in terms of how technology can help enhance education. It’s not as simple as that, however. They are constrained by a number of factors. One is the constantly changing nature of what is actually working in education — not only have we seen hardware fads come and go, we’ve also seen software and cloud based ideas come and go. I remember, for example, people getting very excited about Nings, until Ning decided to monetise their product, which knocked out most schools from experimenting with them. Edmodo is also very popular with teachers because of its resemblance to Facebook — but has its limitations. Another is that these offices are often restricted in terms of budget and usually employ former teachers to work in consultant positions because of the perception that teachers better understand the concerns and working conditions of other teachers. It’s rare that one sees a non teacher working for a central office — we’re more likely to see them only at conferences. Another problem facing these offices is the increasing speed of the teaching world and the wariness of teachers who have seen many pedagogical fads come and go.
What has made things easier for these offices, however, is the realisation that education and tech aren’t different animals and that the focus of any use of technology is only in terms of improving pedagogy, rather than driving people to adopt technology and force pedagogy to be shaped by the technology tool, which did happen from time to time. It’s also good that the realisation has occurred that shiny things and expensive software isn’t what will drive this pedagogical change, meaning that the arms race of shiny things has largely stopped.
So what will happen in the future?
Teachers are getting better and better with technology through sheer persistence and the goodwill of tech savvy staff in their staffrooms. Teachers who want to better engage students will go to workshops, get onto Twitter, talk to other staff or get to TeachMeets. Other staff will be slower and more cautious and may ask a sly question to the tech savvy. It is, however, a slow process. There’s also the much simpler idea of teachers learning from tech savvy students as to how to better work with students. This is why “Digital Leader” groups are being formed in schools in order to have students help teachers as well as their peers. Somehow, teachers and schools find a way. It just isn’t all that easy to see how that way will be found at times.
