Blogger and technology-in-education consultant Will Richardson has done it again in his March 21, 2011 blog post titled “Valuing Change.” What is “it”? It is offering up a thought-provoking snippet that recounts a recent experience he had with a teacher regarding the use of web 2.0 tools in the classroom. In this case, the teacher was less than keen to quickly integrate web 2.0 tools into his lessons because he felt like such insertions of “bells and whistles” act perhaps more as distracters than enhancers.
At the heart of Richardson’s reflection is the tension between, on the one hand, teachers teaching curriculum in order to see students meet predetermined curricular outcomes that they will be tested on (and keeping a fairly narrow, sharp focus on achieving that goal), and on the other hand, teachers integrating more “now-appropriate” pieces of technology into the heart of their lesson delivery and student outcomes. Such tension is present when any change is imminent (the person being asked to change might be thinking something like, We used to do it that way, now they're asking us to do it this way, and the leap from one to the other is laborious, painful, and perhaps even unnecessary at the end of the day). In response to this tension, Richardson advocates for teachers to find ways to do both in their teaching—to both cover curriculum outcome requirements and to make their classrooms infused with the stuff of 21st Century Learning. Richardson calls this kind of teaching “‘doing both mode,’ as in finding a way to engage students in understanding the concepts for the test but doing so in a way that teaches them to think more expansively by using online tools to go beyond the paper and pencil and learn about connecting and creating and collaborating along the way.” The less-than-keen teacher that Richardson was having the conversation with responded to his basic endorsement of “doing both mode” like this: “Well, you know, sometimes I think technology just adds a lot of bells and whistles, makes stuff look good without really adding to the learning. I mean, they don’t need to do any of that to get the concept.”
What is interesting about the real-life-experience-turned-case-study put forth here is this: both parties are correct. Richardson and the “doing bothers” are 100% correct in their assertions that classrooms must become more now-centric not only for the purposes of keeping students engaged, but also for the purposes of doing our best to prepare students for a future that we can only guess about the shape of. One gets the feeling that—despite the human tendency to historically speak of how “things are changing so fast” and “I remember the way it was when I used to do it”—with regards at least specifically to the technology-, computer-, and internet-related world, the rate at which advancement occurs (and therefore the rate at which obsolescence occurs as well) today truly is exponentially astounding. 2011 is very different from 2001. (I am reminded of this video that made its way around the web a couple years ago.) At the same time, the less-than-keen teacher and his ilk are also 100% correct: what is wrong with eliminating distractions and getting down to the heart of the matter with regards to learning concepts and—particularly within the context of a course that features a government-required exam at year’s end—preparing students for the evaluative tasks that we know are coming? Certainly, a teacher who does not invest a good faith effort in preparing his or her students for succeeding on an assessment that is deemed as “important” by the jurisdiction’s education policy makers is perhaps a teacher who is courting negligence.
As teachers, students, and citizens of this 21st century, this is a tough situation we have found ourselves in.
While I don’t necessarily firmly endorse either Richardson or the teacher to the exclusion of the other, one detail stands out as entirely true from Richardson’s post: The way in which learning takes place is changing, and is deserving of more and more conscious reflection at each step of the teaching process. It is true that there is and should be more emphasis on the way—or how—we achieve learning tasks today, and here is why: the content we are working with has not changed much or perhaps not at all—Macbeth still begins and ends in the exact same way it did 300 years ago, and the themes, symbols, puns, and enduring understandings inherent in the text are also unchanged. So we still—as teachers—must know our content, but we must interact with it in different ways. We must involve the tools and processes that are relevant to now. It is as if we are transitioning from slow-pitch to fast-pitch softball: we are still playing the same game, but the way in which we are playing the game has changed dramatically—it is much faster and requires much more savvy on the parts of all the players involved. For those pitchers still lobbing up big, slow, juicy, home run-begging slow pitches…well, they are still participating in the game itself, but a couple of things might be happening: the batters are either knocking each slow pitch out of the park because the task is such an incredibly easy one, or the batters are losing interest because slow pitch is so relatively boring—and they are putting down their bats, walking away, and looking for another game in town that holds their interest. Somewhere nearby, the batter is sure, there is a raucous game of fast-pitch softball being played, where the pitchers, batters, fielders, and fans revel in the speed and intensity of the play on the field, and—sometimes, when there is a quiet lull in the action—they can hear the faint sounds of slow-pitch softball and dial-up internet modems emanating from the other side of town.
While the above analogy serves the purpose of illustrating the situation—and leaves most readers wanting to buy a ticket to the fast-pitch game, where certainly fans would be simultaneously poking around on their iPads throughout all nine innings of action—it is also part of the problem: there is a certain sleek allure connected with all things technology-, web 2.0-, and 21st Century Learning-based that is both unmistakable and often irresistible. Which youthful player wouldn't want to participate in the fast-pitch game? Which students don’t want to see their own likeness reflected in the multi-colored iPod silhouettes? The human tendency to be attracted to most things new and fast—the tendency to put a sort of unthinking faith in all things that look like “progress” and hitch our wagons to an image of the future that is attractive—is one of the central impulses that is shaping our society today. The tension that we see between the “do-bothers” and the “not-so-keeners” that results from this tendency is simply the effect that this impulse has within the context of education; other realms—government, business, even parenting—are experiencing their own unique tensions in their own unique ways.
This allure of the new and our infatuations with progress complicate things. Parents would likely love it if the one ball game in town fit the needs of their children—whether fast-pitch, slow-pitch, or something in between—but that’s not the case. There are, in fact, many games in town and it is complicated to decide which game is best for your child. It is complicated to decide which school is best for your child, which type of teaching and teacher best fits your child, how your child should prepare for the future.
The task is made even more difficult when, more than likely, the fast-pitch game is the game that your child wants to play in, but you are not yet certain if there is lasting value in the fast-pitch game. Time has not shown you yet. What you do know is that you grew up playing slow-pitch, and it seemed to work out OK: you turned out just fine. Time has shown you that. So how to proceed? Combine elements of both? Create a new game: “slow-fast-pitch”? The title itself makes my head spin. Such is the scenario teachers find themselves in right now. Within this complicated context, it is no wonder that the not-so-keeners are attracted to simplicity and an elimination of distractions that shuns the integration of web 2.0 tools in the midst of their curriculum delivery.
Richardson, near the end of his post, hints at another complicating factor within education: it is often the case that government-mandated exams that account for sizable percentages of student marks—a single exam counts for 40% of students’ year-end English 12 mark here in British Columbia, for example—do not assess student mastery of concepts or skills that are specifically or exclusively learned via the use of web 2.0 tools in the classroom. This fact alone does not mean that such tools should not be used. But it does illustrate how teachers everyday operate in a system that is pulling them in two opposite directions: on the one hand, a large portion of students’ final marks might come from assessments that don’t have much to do with 21st Century Learning. On the other hand, teachers are expected to use such now-centric things as web 2.0 tools to deliver instruction and to require students to show mastery of the curriculum using these tools as well. For some teachers, this is fine—easy and enjoyable, even. These teachers naturally gravitate toward technology integration because they enjoy it and understand it. But for other teachers, this is a constant struggle that makes their daily teaching lives less enjoyable. Richardson gives his take on the situation: “My sense of it is that teacher (the “not-so-keener”) is still in the majority, and as teachers get incentivized to do even more test prep and one-size-fits all instruction, he’ll remain in the majority for quite a while longer.”
I don’t know definitively how to conclude this post. And I think that—for many teachers—that is exactly what makes now so complicated.
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