Why do so many “Digital Age” Ed-Tech initiatives run aground in the classroom? That was the critical question that I tackled on September 10, 2016, at the researchED 2016 National Conference in London, UK. My short presentation set out to confront the significant challenges posed for classroom teachers by initiatives attempting to usher in what is now termed the “Brave New World” of 21st century learning. It also attempted to pick-up and further develop insights gleaned from Tom Bennett’s thought-provoking 2013 book, Teacher Proof, an indispensable little handbook for every teacher who’s been introduced to an ‘innovative’ teaching strategy or ‘new’ curriculum and been told that it is “based upon the research.”
The current 21st Century Learning mantra likely found its origins in a very influential November 2000 OECD Schooling for Tomorrow address by Sir Michael Barber, British PM Tony Blair’s chief education advisor. In his sppech, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Re-conceptualizing Public Education,” he provided the essential narrative, replicated in most of the derivative education initiatives:
“The explosion of knowledge about the brain and the nature of learning, combined with the growing power of technology, creates the potential to transform even the most fundamental unit of education: the interaction of the teacher and the learner. Moreover, huge social changes, such as growing diversity and population mobility, present educators with new and constantly changing circumstances. As a result, the characteristics which defined the successful education systems of, say, 1975, are unlikely to be those which will define success in the future.”
Barber and his disciples unleashed what I term “Big Idea mimmickry” that popped up in a whole series of top-down education policy spin-offs ranging from the infamous June 2009 UK “Your Child, Your Schools,Our Future” declaration to New Brunswick’s short-lived 2010 “21st Century Learning” initiative (NB3-21C) with its bizarre CRT2 formula, with C standing for “Creativity,” R representing “Relevance,” the first T signifying “Time” and the second one “Technology.” In the case of New Brunswick, it provided a convenient new pedagogy to accompany the mass distribution of laptops to all of the province’s teachers. While the NB plan fizzled and died, its initiator, Deputy Minister John D. Kershaw, resurrected it and took it nation-wide rebranded as C21 Canada: Canadians for 21st Century Learning and Innovation, championed by the Council of Ministers of Education and bankrolled by Canadian branches of the world’s leading learning corporations.
Most “Digital Age Revolution” plans, like the September 2015 North Carolina version, promote “binary thinking” pitting the “old” against the “new,” analogue vs. digital, and traditional vs digital age/progressive. It all rests upon the purely theoretical assumption that constructivist learning is better than explicit instruction, and proceeds to perpetuate such false dichotomies. The latest iteration, Michael Fullan’s “New Pedagogies of Deeper Learning,” hatched with Barber and Pearson Education, is the most recent example of Digital Age pedagogical theory rooted in such fallacious thinking.
Twenty first century learning advocates set out to “Shift Minds” utilizing You Tube videos mimicking Colorado IT teacher Karl Fisch’s 2006 smash hit, Shift Happens. Riding that 21st century bicycle has proven difficult, facing an uphill climb against stiff headwinds emanating from resistant classroom teachers and legions of concerned elementary school parents.
Three dominant ideologies have recently arisen to propel the latest phase of high-tech education: personalization, robotization, and Goolization. Mass introduction of ICT is now packaged as a way of “personalizing” education for today’s students, allowing them to work more independently and to proceed at their own pace. Preparing pupils for a life “dancing with robots” is now accepted uncritically as a necessity in the 21st century workplace. School districts once cautious about technology integration are turning to Google for single-source agreements to get free or heavily discounted access to Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Few education bureaucrats seem to question these priorities or the implications of such technological initiatives.
Education policy analysts like Stanford Education professor Larry Cuban and Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters have issued periodic warnings about the impact of “machines” on teachers in the classroom. In Teachers and Machines, Cuban examined previous cycles of classroom technology from film strip projectors to calculators. Every new innovation, he shows, has followed the same pattern in the classroom: adoption by teachers, inflated claims by enthusiasts, deflated expectations, then followed by a new technological panacea.
So far, ed-tech has not transformed how teachers teach in the classroom. That’s the firm assessment of Larry Cuban in a June 2015 piece posted on the Education Week Digital Learning Blog. It also prompted me to dig a little deeper to find our why there is such teacher resistance to initiatives seeking to introduce widespread e-learning in K-12 schools.
Based upon my own recent research, conducted for an upcoming chapter in the Springer Guide to Digital Learning in K-12 Schools (September 2016), the explanation is deceptively simple. Top-down initiatives branded with “21st Century Learning” labels tend to falter and rarely succeed in winning over regular teachers or in penetrating the so-called ‘black box’ of the school classroom. The potential of e-learning will only be realized when initiatives enjoy the support of regular classroom teachers and engage those teachers from the school-level up.
Top-down initiatives simply do not work in education, and a succession of struggling high-tech education initiatives are proving this every school day in classrooms world-wide. Four critical factors come into play in undoing such initiatives: great teaching still matters most, “sheep dip” tech-ed training does not last, new pedagogies are merely ‘warmed-over’ constructivist ventures, and teachers integrate IT only when it demonstrably improves their teaching effectiveness.
All is not lost when it comes to introducing technology and e-learning in the classroom, if the hard lessons are absorbed by wise education policy makers and head teachers, capable of tuning out 21c learning missionaries and IT zealots. It will take what I describe as a “flexible, agile, responsive approach” starting with teachers themselves.
To that end, at researchEd 2016 in London, I proposed four strategies with a better chance of succeeding in winning over today’s teachers.
1: Support Early Adopters committed to Technology Integration and initiating Blended Learning Programs
2: Strengthen and expand Existing and ‘Seed’ New Self-Directed Online Learning Programs
3: Focus on building the A La Carte Model of Blended Learning Programs in Junior and Senior High Schools
4: Build School Leadership capacity in E-Learning, Change Management, and Disruptive Innovation
5: Develop and test (before proceeding large-scale) more reliable measures of the effectiveness of E-Learning Program innovations.
What is really needed is a much more strategic, longer-term Technology Integration plan in our school systems. Teachers must be in full control of the technology— to produce true deeper knowledge of much greater benefit to students. Students and teachers are yearning for more stimulating and engaging classroom instruction, tapping into the potential of e-learning. We deserve much more from our schools. My presentation was intended, in a small way, to demystify e-learning in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
Why do high-sounding 21st century learning initiatives fail to gain traction among classroom teachers? When will high-tech education advocates begin to demonstrate that their have absorbed the hard lessons? Is my modest set of proposals worth pursuing? Would it work – where it counts – with teachers and students in the classroom?
Why do high-sounding 21st century learning initiatives fail to gain traction among classroom teachers?
Because they insult our intelligence. Many of us know successful elderly people who were creative, hard working, optimistic,respectful ,teachable and flexible, who went through most of the education system offered to them at that time, only to become heads of companies or departments. Seems like they were fairly good problem solvers. Would they be able to adapt to the changes in our present world with only those attributes?
Technology is an excellent tool, but in itself will not produce a culture who positively impacts our society. We need to be teachable and adaptable and collaborative. There is a lot of room for improvement, but there are always those same mundane things called character traits that are the bedrocks for any century to build their cutting edge educational programs upon.
Practically speaking, I endorse the “Supporting Early Adopters” because it carries with it the sense of networking or collaboration. The early adopters would be effective influencing those that they have relationships with including the educators that have mentored them.
As usual, Paul has provided a great deal to ponder, chew on and digest here. So much, in fact, that it’s difficult to know where to enter the conversation.
There’s one “plot point” here that caught my attention. The idea of polarized thinking is something that I’m thinking about quite a bit these days. For me, it’s the whole debate around mathematics teaching that has my neurons firing, but it is relevant in so many areas of educational discourse.
I would venture to say that the polarization so evident in the blogosphere is very rare “on the ground”—in Canadian schools and classrooms.
I’ve never worked with many colleagues, for example, who stood at the front of the classroom all day and attempted to stuff information into the heads of students. Yet, if you listened to “new learning” advocates today, you would get the impression that this is the status quo from which we’re challenged to stop away.
In 30 years of teaching, I’ve never encountered any classes of students who are abandoned every day to “discover” the world on their own—including what it is that they should be discovering! Admittedly, in most schools in which I’ve worked, I would have been considered the one who came closest to that imaginary teacher, but I was very far from dancing on or around that particular pole. (Excuse the imagery!)
The caricatures are helpful if you want to sell another way of doing things or create a crisis that really isn’t there, but in terms of describing what is actually happening in my child’s classroom? Not so much.
Not saying that the ideas are not out there. They are, and they have been for the last century and a half of public education.
I’m simply (or not so simply) suggesting that it would be helpful begin with a more grounded understanding of life in schools. That takes a lot more work.
Actually, Paul is one of the few people that come close to raising some of the “new questions” that need to be asked—the types of questions that have the ability to get us to see and think about Canadian education in a different way.
Agree with almost all of Stephen’s points about the false dichotomies about archetypes in teaching in educational debates.
As for tech in classrooms, I have had more than 200 student teachers reflect on its use in more than 200 schools in the Greater Toronto Area in classrooms gr 7-12 over the past 5 years.
Their consensus? It varies in use, access, and effectiveness
John, at the risk of sounding like someone who has all of this figured out, I’m interested in knowing the points off mine that you want to push on a little more!
Paul has proposed 4 strategies that I see as having the potential to support teachers in their efforts to use technology as a useful teaching/learning aid. I have had positive experiences using forms of blended learning with both teacher candidates and grade seven and eight students. Currently, as a supply teacher, I see teachers in my former school working to integrate those types of experiences into their teaching, and they would certainly benefits from Paul’s proposals. Like any new learning, it takes time for teachers to develop expertise, and if they have control over the pace and the content of what they are doing, that makes it far more likely they will make the most of whatever support is offered.
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The polarizations in the blogosphere, Stephen, always make me reluctant to participate.
Black and Wilian in a classic article in 1997 spoke of the “black box” of a classroom in which pundits and policy makers make all sorts of suggestions/demands on schools then are disappointed when they don’t happen as expected. The article posits that implementation seldom takes into account what actually happens in classrooms.
My multi-year “study” collecting impressions from my students certainly supports some aspects of blended learning in my subject area as Lynn Lemieux notes. Under what circumstances beyond information retrieval is still to be determined.
Long term technological integration is not only a goal, it’s also the problem. The challenge with long term and technology is that no one knows the next technological innovation. While schools are implementing desktop computers, society is moving onto laptop computers. Schools promote laptops and more people have tablets. Always one step behind.
Tech companies themselves struggle with how to work and profit from technology in schools. I spoke with an IT guy recently who said that Apple probably never envisioned its ipads being used in schools the way they are and in the huge numbers they are being used.
As well, technology cannot help a system where there are more questions than answers. Technology isn’t going to help Math scores when people cannot decide if discovery or rote learning is the key to Math.
And we haven’t even discussed the costs related to technology.
There is a great deal of suspicion amongst teacher union thinkers that runs along these lines.
What is the agenda of those who want to force feed technology to the education system?
Bill Gates and similar tech leaders work overtime and practically demand the system turn itself inside out to accommodate IT solutions. Ummm. ..could it be that he and his pals stand to make big bucks if IT is forced down the throats of reluctant teachers? Maybe he is just a carpenter who sees every problem as a nail.
What about Professor Terry Moe, a corporate reform Poli Sci prof who tells everyone who will listen that ” we can use IT to break the unions”?
The big question is WHY THE RUSH? WHY THE POLITICAL PRESSURE?
personalized learning allowing students to “work at their own pace” has always been a disaster that reformers usually decry. Working at your own pace usually results in what George Martell calls ‘going nowhere at your own pace’.
IT people see something beautiful in children logging huge numbers of hours of screen time but regular teachers see a dystopian Brave New Word of job slotting for the proles.
Why not simply take a long slow foot dragging approach and avoid all the white elephants and wasted money and time that accompanies a hot house IT environment.
Why should any parent, teacher or Administrator actually care if the intro of IT is very slow? Most see nothing in particular to gain.
I can’t speak for parents, teachers, or administrators in general, Doug, but I can say that I have worked with teachers who do value and think there are quite a few things to gain from the “intro of IT”, as you put it.
In my last few years of teaching, the availability of laptops and access to the Internet positively transformed the way I teach In several ways. For example, as a Science teacher to Grades 7 and 8, I wanted my students to read about new developments in the different fields of Science so they could be excited, amazed, and motivated to learn more about what they found, but I needed to find texts that were current and at their level of reading and comprehending. Once I had access to laptops and the Internet, my problem was solved. I could ask students to go to sites such as Science News for Students, and select hot off the press, short articles which interested them, and which were tailored to the Intermediate / junior high school range. We could do this in class, or they could do that at home. In addition to Science articles, there were interactive sites and videos we could use explaining all kinds of Science phenomena better than I could using only the overhead projector or blackboard. When teaching visual art, we visited virtual sites for art museums and photographic work, and students examined and discussed the work of artists of their choice.
I agree with the concern that students are sometimes released to surf the Internet without teacher guidance, and struggle to find and understand things that could enhance their learning in any area. Mindless copying and pasting is a huge issue that has to be explicitly addressed – students have to be helped to find, process, and write about what they learned, crediting the authors, and without plagiarizing. That requires essential teacher work that must accompany the use of IT.
When the TDSB provided me and other teachers with the opportunity to set up and use an e learning platform, that gave me a way to address the issue I had around assessment, which was how to follow what students were reading and thinking without having to collect and write on paper copies of their work. With the e learning platform, we could correspond within the discussion board feature, and I could read and respond to what they said to one another, their questions, and their responses to my questions, enabling me to see and plan for problems with understanding of concepts, for example, before the next lesson.
Important point here is that I was ready to make use of this technology when it arose; it was not forced on me. The TDSB, and earlier on OISE, provided workshops and support for me as I was learning how to use the new technology platforms. I worked at my own pace, adding only as much as I could manage at a time. Others chose not to try it out, and I understand why.
Currently, several teachers use Google classroom, and I would have liked to have been able to use that before I retired, seeing how teachers can electronically read and make comments on rough drafts of writing, and see how students collaborate when sharing project writing, among other features.
Last point: I watch my 7 and 9 year old grandchildren confidently using i pads and the Internet to find things they want when they want them, such as how to draw dragons. If we as teachers drag our heels in stubborn refusal to make the best use possible of the ever changing IT field, we do our profession a disservice. Good teaching is needed more than ever the more technology evolves; it will just look different as it too evolves alongside the technology.
Last sentence rings so true!
Of course technology has a role. All teachers use laptops for their marks, for lesson prep, for power point and on and on. The question is this – why do some people agonize about the fact that teachers or the system are not adopting enough IT fast enough.
Just let a loooong sloooow process unfold in its own time. This is the only way to prevent white elephants and corrupt profiteering.
We all need to just chill out about the rate of adoption of IT.
The Ontario Teachers Federation runs workshops (usually in the form of webinars) throughput the year. In addition to “21st century learning” and “critical thinking” that promote various APPS to see student learning as it occurs.
How valid are the claims made?
Just asking