The Classroom Will Look Exactly the Same

Newsela CEO says the disruption in education technology will be a quiet one.

Steve Jobs’s seminal 1980 speech described computers as “a bicycle for the mind,” a machine that can superpower the way we think, work, and learn. He described walking around classrooms with Apple computers, wondering how children will use these amazing machines to learn in years to come. In other words, Jobs was wondering how computers might disrupt how we teach and learn and define the School of 2050.

Schools began buying PCs almost as soon as PCs were a thing in the 1970s. By 2012, there was one computer for every two students in U.S. classrooms. Last year, K-12 schools in the United States purchased 13.2 million computers, a 30 percent increase over the previous year. Today, thousands of schools are “1:1”—in other words, each student has his or her own school-issued computer or tablet, available at all times, just like pencils or math textbooks or notebooks. In a few years, most of the country’s classrooms will be 1:1. In a decade, they all will.

So the battle has begun over how teachers and kids will make the most of these bicycles for the mind in a 1:1 world.

Two lines of thinking dominate. The first comes largely from education reformers and big philanthropic foundations that view public education in the United States as broken and see 1:1 as an opportunity to blow up the system, to make American education competitive again. This approach favors a total overhaul of how classes are taught, which materials students use, and even how schools and classrooms look.

There are promising approaches to technology-driven instructional and school overhauls. The most talked-about approach is the flipped classroom, in which students learn content and concepts via software and videos in class or at home, and teacher-directed class time focuses on individualized help, projects, and discussions. Flipped classrooms are red hot: ISTE, last year’s leading K-12 digital learning conference, hosted 87 sessions that focused in part or entirely on flipped classrooms. They have been implemented in combination with total classroom overhaul in models such as Summit Public Schools in California, as well as a handful of schools around the country that have adopted New Classrooms’ “Teach to One” approach.

The second line of thinking, advocated largely by Silicon Valley and education technology superusers, see technology as a means of teaching students completely new skills, such as coding and robots, and using technology as a way of sparking engagement in a bored and overtested student populace.

It’s important that the education world continue to experiment with future-forward approaches. But the feverish conversation about total instructional overhaul is having unintended effects that are actually stunting innovation, because it causes teachers to ignore part of the basic value of computers.

How could this be?

In a game of one-upmanship around future-forward approaches to classroom tech adoption, the market has generated a glut of technologies that, at best, can be viewed as off-target nice-to-haves.

ISTE 2015 featured dozens of sessions with names like this:

QR Codes for the Elementary and Secondary Classroom

Build a Crafty Robot with the Hummingbird Robotics Kit

Making a STEAM-powered Interactive Musical Performance

Mesoamerica: Virtual Trip to an Ancient Magic World

Using Kiva Microloans to Develop Global Compassionate Leaders

Lots of people are talking about these nice-to-have uses of technology. They’re unwittingly reinforcing a destructive, anti-innovative view that many teachers still have: that computers are a “reward” to give to students when they need a break from “real” teaching and learning.

These teachers haven’t evolved from the days when a few Apple IIe computers sat in the back of the classroom so students could play games from time to time (as I did as a 6th-grader in 1983). They fail to think of computers as a tool that can seamlessly integrate with every aspect of teaching and learning, and no amount of robotics kits or virtual tours of Guatemala will help them do so.

But there’s another reason future forward conversations can potentially stunt innovation: Adopting flipped classrooms is hard. Really hard.

Just think about what’s involved with creating a flipped classroom. The school must find videos and activities that completely replace all of the instructional work that was formerly led by the teacher. Every lesson plan must be overhauled. Teachers must find a way of ensuring that students have actually completed the online lessons. Students must be trained in using the new tools. Classroom organization — the centering force that keeps behavior and plans from spinning out of control — must be reworked for this new way of operating. In other words, instructional practice that has been honed for more than a hundred years must be scrapped and replaced, and teachers and students must be trained in this new medium.

That’s why the growth of flipped classrooms has been modest. (And perhaps appropriately so: We need to learn much more about flipped classrooms before we can decide on models that are right for all 50 million K-12 school children in the United States.)

But the most important negative impact of future-forward approaches on ed tech is that they distract schools from focusing on the most fundamental value propositions that classroom computers deliver — ones that are dull by comparison yet have the power to supercharge a classroom. I’ll call these value propositions the “Big Six.”

Organization: Nothing beats a good task list or folder structure. Sexy, right? Yet students and teachers generally don’t use simple electronic tools to keep their lives in order.

Productivity: Man, do I love Google Docs and Microsoft Office. Any tool that makes creating and editing documents faster, and makes it easy for students to revise revise revise! will help them create better content because of one simple fact: They can make more of it.

Collaboration: Workers are spending more time collaborating electronically because it’s easy to track and collect ideas in one place. Hello, 21st-century skills?

Content personalization: We’ve taken for granted that every website or app we consume gives us suggestions that fit our needs or interests. No textbook can do that.

Real-time information: Research shows that frequent assessment and feedback is the fast-track to learning gains in any setting — the workplace, the golf course, wherever. So we have amazing software that tells us what’s going wrong and right and how we can improve in the moment, not months from now. Why on earth don’t all teachers and students have that?