Motivation, Discrimination, and Social Learning #TechEquity Breakout-Session

Today I will be facilitating a break-out discussion session at our Technology & Equity in Education Symposium at Hamline University. Our discussion will focus on this video:



Compare differences and similarities we face today with education and technology.

• Have things changed?
  
• What do the issues raised by these three men mean for educators?
  
• What do they mean for schools?

Any response to these questions in the comments below will be shared with the group and greatly appreciated.

Open Letter to Diane Ravitch @DianeRav #edchat #lrnchat

Dear Diane Ravitch:

This week I watched your interview with Book.TV where you explain why you think we need to focus on good strong curriculum. This focus concerns me.

When I first began teaching I was committed to the idea that k-12 schools should, above all else, provide students with a rigorous curriculum. As an art teacher I saw what many teachers did in their classrooms as simply putting paints and crayons in front of kids and saying, "have at it, now don't make too big a mess." I spent countless hours writing curriculum and developing lesson plans that would expose students to the splendors of art history, the thought provoking ideas in art philosophy, and a strong foundation in aesthetic theory. I loaded those lessons full of such rich content that I thought there would be no way my students would be bored in my class or that they would walk away from eighteen weeks in my classroom not knowing more than I did when I took high school art. Why then was I always surprised when most of my students did not find the content as riveting and inspirational as I did? Sure, occasionally I would expose them to an idea or introduce them to an artist that would capture their attentions and their imaginations but not always, not by a long shot.

Six years of working with "at risk" or "non-traditional" students later in environments both traditional and online and three years spent with the majority of my time in the back of the classroom observing, I have a far different perspective. I think I understand why my original beliefs about teaching and learning were false. The more time I spend in the back of the classroom the more strongly I feel that there is nothing, no matter how hard they try or how good they are, that a teacher can do to impart knowledge or information to a learner. Learning comes from the learner, not the teacher, and the only thing a teacher can do is set conditions for the learner to discover the understanding for themselves.

What I failed to realize when I was a new teacher was that in so carefully crafting a rigorous curriculum for my students I was robbing them of the element that made the curriculum exciting for me. I was robbing them of the opportunity to discover many of these things for themselves. Discovery is fun, discovery is the ingredient in the learning equation that provides the fuel to keep going. It is why we like adventures and exploring. It is this thrill of discovery that can motivate lab researchers to spend years on painstakingly boring and repetitive tasks in the pursuit of knowledge. And, it is what was largely lacking in my classroom my first four years as a teacher.

What makes this story even more perplexing is every time an administrator or mentor observed my teaching in those years, while they all recognized that something was missing, no one identified this problem. I have a theory for why that was. The model of teaching and learning that has become so synonymous with school that it is etched into the vision nearly every teacher, student, and community member has is based largely on two resounding principle beliefs: 1. students learn through instruction; and 2. The depth & breadth of the curriculum define the level of learning in a course. These are false assumptions and there is very little data that I have seen that prove otherwise.

Last week I posted a clip where as part of it Alan Kay very eloquently describes the Montessori model of school and how the Macintosh OS was based on Montessori principles. Users of the computer discover how to use it by encountering cues in the digital environment. This discovery propels the user to dig deeper and explore more until soon they understand how to navigate and use the computer. Our classrooms need to be more like the Macintosh OS. I started to come to this realization about teaching and learning about four years ago, just before I started this blog and titled it Techno Constructivist.

In that same clip Seymour Papert goes on to explain, with precision, exactly why it is so hard to change the education establishment. There is a lot of money invested and people's jobs that depend on the proliferation of the curriculum and instruction myth. However, just as with my early experience teaching a rigorous art curriculum, the pressure schools have had to be more rigorous under NCLB have diminished a vitally important variable in the learning equation. I fear Race To The Top (RTTT) will only work to further extinguish the flame.

A rigorous curriculum poses another problem. Even if it doesn't extinguish the thrill of discovery in students it still represents a fundamental and troubling truth about the purpose of school. Curriculum always discriminates by what it includes and especially what it excludes. Howard Zinn knew this and made it his life's work to explore this equity issue within the context of US History curriculum. At it's best, curriculum reinforces mainstream values. At its worst, it oppressess and excludes people and ideas. But, maybe that is what the goal of NCLB and RTTT is. If you deprive someone of the thrill of discovery they loose the love of learning and diminish their ability to engage in critical thought. If you focus on rigor in the curriculum you reinforce the values and biases in that curriculum.

Kay on Motivation, Papert on how schools discriminate against learners, and Dede on social learning #edchat

This is another fantastic clip from the 1995 Congressional Hearing on Technology in Education that is loaded with important points about motivation in learning.

In this clip Alan Kay eloquently describes the Montessori model of education and how the Macintosh OS is a kind of Montessori learning environment. He also highlights how kids want to learn how to do things they find value in and that our schools do not look like places they resemble from any other part of their lives. Part of this problem, he adds, is they don't see their teachers learning and if they did they might be more motivated as well.

Seymour Papert jumps in to add that our traditional school model is well suited for only a minority kind of learner and that this model discriminates against students who learn differently. He goes on to speculate that with time congress might see this as a human rights issue and declare that schools violate a basic human right by discriminating on the basis of learning style.

At the end of this clip Chris Dede jumps in to add that learning is also social and highlights the ability for computers to foster activities of collaboration and communication. His statements sound like he was describing today's social networks.



Well, that's all I have time for tonight. Stay tuned, when I have a little more time I will try to get through the remaining 170 minutes of this hearing.

Kay & Papert throw Rep. Lynn Woolsey under the bus #edchat

If ever there was an example of what the phrase, "square peg in a round hole," illustrates it is this clip from the 1995 Congressional Hearing on technology in education:



Interesting how Kay an Papert play off each other here to on one hand advocate not providing 1:1 in our traditional schools citing how information access in school libraries has not increased literacy rates while at the same time advocating for 1:1 environments.

Also, the teacher training comments by Woolsey display real cognitive dissonance on her part. "Are you expecting teachers to leave their classrooms, go home, and learn on their own?" What! Teachers can learn on their own? Incredible.

Alan Kay & Seymour Papert on teachers as learners vs curriculum implementation #edchat #lrnchat

This, I think is a key point that Alan Kay brings up and Seymour Papert builds upon, in their testimony before the 1995 House Committee Hearing on Technology in Education, that teachers and schools need to be more humble about what they teach and focus more on how to model learning. I will come back to this clip in a later reflective post (I promise). They both agree here that what is important in a teacher is that they are good learners, not so much that they have extensive knowledge of their subjects. This concept flies in the face of what I believed when I started teaching eleven years ago but have come now to embrace as absolute truth about teaching, learning, and education. Curriculum, after all, is nothing more than a political weapon designed to elevate and highlight some while repressing others (see Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States) but metacognition and knowledge acquisition skills empower all who are taught them.

What is Technology?

A couple years ago, in one of my graduate school classes, I was assigned a paper where we were supposed to find and explain a metaphor for technology. In that paper I said that, "Technology is a Stick." I had in mind the opening scene to 2001 A Space Odyssey where the primitive man touches the monolith then begins using tools. My thinking at the time was that technology was a tool. However, I have been rethinking this lately and have come to a different conclusion.

Alan Kay says that technology is anything that was invented after you were born. This definition plays right into the same concept I held two years ago when I wrote that technology is a stick. Both of these definitions narrow the definition to objects (i.e. Computer, Cell Phone, Particle Collider, etc.). This definition is very practical and is easy to identify with. Shifting the onus of the term to the object removes individuals of necessary ownership of what truly lies within the term. It is empowering to say that you, your school, your town, your interest group, your professional organization, your country, etc. "has the technology." But does possessing tools constitute the possession of technology?

My dogs spend most of their time in my garage. In my garage I have numerous power tools, hand tools, an old computer, and a few machines (lawn mower, snow blower, etc.). According to the stick metaphor my dogs possess the technology to build pretty much anything. Do my dogs really possess this technology? I think not.

I have to admit that my summer indulgence were the TED Talks and taking my dogs on long evenings. Every week I would upload a new batch of talks to my iPod Nano and watch them on the go while exercising my dogs. Thus the way I have framed this idea. From these talks my mind has contracted quite a variety of memes and I think I finally have a definitive understanding of what technology really is.

When a foreign country says they possess the technology to build a nuclear weapon I don't think they mean that they have the materials. What they have is the knowledge and understanding needed to build one. And with this example I think I have solved the definition/metaphor problem. Technology is a meme, an idea, an understanding.

If technology is a meme then it can never really die or be destroyed. The only way we can loose our technology is if we forget how it works or how to use it. I think this notion helps explain a lot of behavior we see in schools. Try as we will, if a our students find a technology real useful they will find a way to use it even if it is banned or there are rules excluding its use. It also gets at the heart of a lot of tensions that can be observed between teachers and their students or one generation vs. another. It explains what is really missing from the digital native/digital immigrant depictions.

Technophobia is not the fear of new tools but rather the fear of not understanding. There is a nervousness that exists when those in a learning environment who are supposed to be subordinates are empowered with knowledge and understanding that those in authority positions lack. What it boils down to is technophobia is fear of loosing authority. It is not the tools that make the digital immigrant different from the digital native, it is the understanding of how they work and how they can be applied or the eagerness to learn new ways of understanding that makes this distinction. When we define technology as a tool we can say we have it but not know how it works or how to use it and we can easily just put it aside. If we see not the tool but the knowledge and understanding as the technology then for us to say we possess it means we must understand it. This is especially troubling in the field of education because educators are supposed to be inquisitive and celebrate knowledge, ideas, and understanding.

My job title at my full-time job is, "Technology Integration Curriculum Specialist." I am starting to see this as a bit of a misnomer given my new concept of what technology is. What I sense is expected of me by the educators I work with is that I am here to help them to bring new tools into their classroom and that is currently an accurate portrayal of what I do. However, am I integrating technology or am I integrating tools? If I were really to help teachers integrate technology my role should go beyond the tools and address understanding both of ideas and how they can be applied. This kind of integration transcends the tools and is much more about pedagogy than technical knowledge. That said, I still like playing around with new tools.




The following are some of the TED Talks that have influenced my thoughts recently on this matter: