I have often heard this question asked, especially in the Edu-Twito-Blogosphere, "Is it okay for a teacher to choose not to integrate technology in their classroom?" Sometimes it is worded differently but the affect is the same. Questions like these miss the point.
In my post yesterday I wrote about how new technologies allow us to have more choices and chief among those is the choice not to use the new technologies. Kevin Kelly says that it is precisely because of the existence of new technologies that minimalist cultures such as the Amish can exist. In essence, the Amish benefit from the existence of the same technologies they reject and as long as the government does not oppress them with forced adoption they are free to self-repress. This self-repression is a big part of their identity. However, even though the Amish choose not to use certain technologies it doesn't mean that their lives are somehow not effected by them. The Amish may choose not to use cars but they still have to deal with other people driving automobiles on the roads, they still have to deal with the environmental damage done by other people's exhaust fumes, they still have to live with the noise pollution the internal combustion engine creates, but they also benefit from the trade goods that come from far away and the use of smooth paved roads. The Amish may choose not to use electricity but they still have to deal with it's effects and affordances in the world around them and they often benefit from other people's use. Choosing not to use a technology does not prevent it from impacting your life.
The same is true in schools with new and emerging forms of information technology. One school will give laptops to all students, another will give all students iPads, another might allow BYOD, and others might reject these tools and prohibit their use. The same is true with Internet filtering. Some schools might have an incredibly open filter and others might have an incredibly closed filter. Either way, both schools have to deal with the existence of Facebook. If your school chooses to limit technology use, greatly restrict the Internet, and ban students from using devices in the classroom, or if a teacher in a school chooses not to integrate technology in the classroom this doesn't mean that they are not effected by it. It only means that they have slowed the adoption process. You may ban Facebook in your school but you will still have to deal with the social dynamic it creates among students who use it at home. You can ban personal devices in the classroom but you still have to deal with the access students have to these devices outside your walls.
The Internet, as well as many other technologies, profoundly change what it is we need to teach students. Just as the calculator made it less necessary for students to need to be able to do complex calculations by hand allowing them to focus more on math concepts rather than math calculations, so too the existence of the Internet change the nature of what students need to know. You don't have to use the Internet in your classroom to be effected by this. And, you don't have to use technology to respond to this shift in the technium. Its existence in the world outside your classroom is enough to force you to do things differently.
Technology is not a gadget or gadgets, it is the embodiment of ideas. One doesn't have to have the physical manifestation in their classroom to integrate the ideas. Technology integration includes at the most fundamental level a shift in the structure of the environment. That environment consists of far more than the things we use. It consists of how we interact with one another, it consists of the content of our discussions, and it consists of the the curriculum we employ. The greater shift is among these more fundamental elements of the technology of school. In this way it is entirely possible for me to be integrating technology in my school without ever having one device or allowing students access to online resources. I can repress those things while still doing a very good job of reacting and responding to their existence. Its not about the gadgets, it is about the technology.
That act of reacting and responding to changes in the technium is technology integration and it doesn't matter how many devices, gizmos, and gadgets I have at my disposal. This is what many schools who try 1:1 programs don't immediately understand. You can't just take the same old school, with the same old curriculum, with the same old bell schedule, with the same old assessment tools, and just add on technology. Technology integration is not an add-on. Technology integration is an ecological change and it will happen whether or not you choose to bury your head in the sand. You can choose to ban devices, ban websites, not use computers, repress the technology, but you can't escape it. If you choose not to use then you still have to make changes to remain relevant in light of the existence of these other technologies in the world. In this way all schools are 1:1.
All schools and all teachers integrate technology. What matters is which technologies we choose to use and which ones we choose not to use. Technology can be used to liberate or it can be used to oppress. We need to be aware of when we are using technology and when it is using us. We need to be aware of when we are integrating a technology that improves learning and when we are integrating a technology that simply makes schooling more efficient. If you have used technology to increase testing, maximize surveillance, and streamline the delivery of a scripted curriculum you are integrating technology but you have done so at the expense of student learning. Not all technology integration is equal. And when the use of any of these technologies is mandated, when the option to opt-out is prohibited, their forced adoption is oppressive and destructive. Conversely, if you use technology to foster creativity, to expand student access to information beyond someone else's curriculum, when you use technology to empower students to take control of their own personal learning, when you use technology to make visible the abstract and the complicated so students can focus on the core ideas, when you use technology to empower students to think critically about what they are learning and think critically about the world around them you have integrated technology in a way that is profoundly liberating. The question is not whether or it is okay for a teacher not to integrate technology, the question is what technologies are appropriate for a teacher to use.
As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently reading Kevin Kelly's new book What Technology Wants. In this book he goes through a fascinating deep look at the relative value and/or virtue of limiting technology use. This is particularly true in two chapters, one about the Unibomber and the other about the Amish. Kelly notes a curious fact that it is only in western civilization where intentionally minimalist cultures exist. Sure, there are plenty of people in places like Laos or sub-Saharan Africa who live lives with very little technology but for the most part these are not intentional lifestyle choices. Given the choice to have more technology most would welcome it with open arms. Only in the developed western world are there entire groups of people like the Amish or Mennonites who live within a technologically advanced country but live without much technology by choice. Kelly argues that technology gives us choices and among these choices is always the choice not to use. And, it is our choices that help to define us.
"the number of technologies to choose from so far exceeds our capacity to use them all that these days we define ourselves more by the technologies we don't use than by those we do." Kelly
The Amish and Mennonites can only exist as a minimalist group because they are part of a larger civilization that embraces the technologies they reject.
"If the Amish had to generate all their own energy, grow all their clothing fibers, mine all metal, harvest and mill all lumber, they would not be Amish at all because they would be running large machines, dangerous factories, and other types of industry that would not sit well in their backyards." Kelly
Technological advances generate more and more choices and always present among them is the choice not to adopt. Perhaps this is the most important among the choices that technology enables. Kelly also notes that in the history of technology we have at times imposed prohibitions against certain types of technology but those prohibitions rarely last very long. Eventually technology wins out and is permitted to exist as a choice. While we may argue about the value or ethics of prohibition and passing restrictive laws and regulations can cause people to get upset, no prohibition is ever as disruptive as prohibiting the choice not to adopt. Prohibition of a new technology is a repressive measure, forced adoption is an oppressive measure.
If we take the broad definition of technology then school itself is a technology, so are grades, standardized tests, and curriculum. Deny a student the choice not to adopt any of these and our act is an act of oppression. In Instead of Education, about the nature of schooling John Holt (1976) states:
"Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seem to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all social inventions of mankind." Holt
Holt clearly saw formal education as a technology and saw compulsory schooling as oppressive. Holt eventually gave up trying to "fix schools" and instead worked to free people from them.
"My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves." Holt
Like Holt, John Taylor Gatto views schooling and all its trappings as a technology. Here are just a few quotes from his most recent book, Weapons of Mass Instruction:
"H. H. Goddard, chairman of psychology at Princeton...believed that standardized test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face to face with their biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dunce cap. Exactly the function 'special education' delivers today." Gatto
"Sick of Amish rejection of it's schools, Wisconsin sought to compel Amish compliance with its secular schooling laws through its police power. The Amish resisted on these grounds: they said government schooling was built on the principle of the mechanical milk separator. It whirled the young mind about until both the social structure of the Amish community, and the structure of private family life, were fragmented beyond repair." Gatto
It doesn't matter how many different types of school choices we have. We can have traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools, online schools, project-based schools, Montessori schools, etc. and they may all be fine technologies but if we take away the choice not to adopt, the choice not to go, then we do all of these options a huge disservice. As long as schooling is compulsory it is oppression. As long as standardized tests are compulsory their use is oppression. As long as schools require teachers to issue grades it is oppression.
"I need you to question your own schooling and the price you paid for it; I need you to dig behind the illusions of education schooling produces; I need you to recognize how its imperial energy drives your understanding long after the classroom door seems to have closed forever." Gatto
And, about the value of the choice not to adopt Kevin Kelly says:
"Voluntary simplicity is a possibility, an option, a choice that one should experience for at least part of one's life." Kelly
I worry that this blog post is starting to sound like a rallying call to convince people to drop out of school. It is not. I do believe in a school's ability to help someone improve their life. I do believe that schools can be places of real and important learning. And, for most, schools are a necessary choice to prepare for life in a democratic society and to make one employable. However, the only way that works is if it is a choice. Mandating attendance, as Obama suggested states do in last week's State of the Union address, takes the power of choice away from students and their families. As long as I have a choice, and as long as those choices include a choice not to attend, I am in control of my own education. If I am forced to choose only among choices that do not include "none of the above" any choice becomes schooling, not education. It is our choice that empowers us as learners. That choice is a necessary component for learning. Now, what is the purpose of school? The only way the answer to that question is "student learning" is if school is something we choose.
Yesterday the #dayofdata hashtag caught my eye as it floated down my Twitter stream so I decided to follow it and got sucked in by the current. At first I didn't know what it was but soon realized that this was the hashtag for an event featuring panelists that included "education reformers" such as Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee. Needless to say, I found a lot of what I was reading in the stream of live tweets from the event objectionable to say the least. But one tweet in particular has caused a rash that I just can't get out from under my skin:
A quick search on YouTube finds this video from EdWeek where Aimee Guidera explains this statement:
I was actually hoping for something more eye opening and enlightening than that (or at least illuminating since after all, it is flashlights she is talking about).
So, anyway, here was my initial response when I read that tweet:
I have written about this a few times before but I think Plato's allegory is perfect for understanding the problem with student data. If we must use a flashlight in our analogy for understanding student data the flashlight is the instrument which we use to extract the data by shining it on students. What the flashlight produces as a result are not students but rather the students' shadows. By saying we need to use student data to improve instruction is like saying that I should use my shadow to help me improve my appearance.
The big problem, and the one that makes arguing with these dataphiles so difficult, is in Plato's allegory the prisoners who were released and shown what makes the objects, shown the truth, were seen by the prisoners who weren't released as having come back unable to see.
[Socrates] And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
Who was at this event? Who was on the panel? Were there any teachers there? Did any of the panelists have any history in teaching (besides taping children's mouths shut and taking pleasure in firing people)? And who do these "reformers" listen to? A quick look at who the people at this event live tweeting follow on Twitter tells me they probably don't listen to the voices of educators who actually work with the students whose data they are concerned with. They probably see us as having lost our sight. We see students, they see shadows. The student doesn't matter so long as the shadow they cast looks good. The result is we end up bending and contorting students in ways that are unnatural and don't make much sense just so the shadows they produce with their data flashlight look good.
Let me preface this post with two statements/disclaimers:
First, I love the TIES conference. I've been attending this conference and presenting at it every year for the past five years. I like the people at TIES and consider them some of my closest colleagues. I have a lot of respect for that organization and a lot of respect for the impact their annual conference has for education in Minnesota and beyond. That said, what criticism/observations in this post are more a general criticism aimed at the state of affairs in education today through which I believe this week in Minnesota TIES was a conduit.
Second, this post will contain a greater percentage of my own editorial than simply just reporting/recording what Mr. Rose said at the conference. I have some deep concerns and I feel obligated to express them. Readers of this blog who have been with me a while will find no surprises.
What follows is a record of my live-Tweets from Joel Rose's keynote along with my own reflection and commentary:
Two years ago Promethean sponsored Dr. Marzano as the keynote speaker at the TIES conference. That year Promethean had paid Dr. Marzano a handsome fee to conduct and publish research showing that their products promoted student achievement gains. Marzano never let that research be peer-reviewed and what the research actually tells us says less about the technology products and more about teaching practices. But, I'm not going to rehash that whole debate here.
This was how Joel Rose was introduced to the audience here at TIES. I am not quite sure those credentials instill a lot of confidence in an audience where the majority of those in attendance are educators who entered the profession with more than a five week training course on how to be a teacher. Also, Edison Schools (now EdisonLearning, Inc.) was a for-profit brand of charter school that failed. Widely touted as the school model of the future they failed to show the academic gains they promised and their stock fell from $40 a share to 14 cents. There are no Edison Schools in the United States today because they all closed or morphed into other entities. Edison got out of the business of running schools and entered into the business of offering services such as testing and after-school programs.
Anyway, Mr. Rose was also introduced as having 15 years experience in education which means that if he was a TFA recruit and then an administrator at Edison Schools that he couldn't possibly have more than 4 or 5 years experience in the classroom. Most likely what experience he brings to education is most strongly rooted in a form of assessment derived from the Edison Schools model.
Rose begins his talk by asking why schools today don't look radically different from how they looked in 1843. By now this is starting to become a cliche comparison but it is a pertinent question.
Now, this was a great little side note in his presentation and it generated much adoration. What he did was show in a bar graph how much money has been donated by the Waltons, the Broads, and the Gates to public schools and then a bar that dwarfed these bars in comparison showing how much teachers give to public schools. Now, the way he figures this is if you take all the extra time teachers work grading papers and writing lesson plans and multiply that by what would be their hourly rate and add up all that money for all teachers the amount donated by teachers is ginormous. However, this kind of comparison is a bit dishonest as we are comparing the giving of time to the giving of monetary resources and to arrive at this statistic requires some massaging of the data. But, that was also how Edison schools showed for years that they were making gains in student achievement. This kind of data analysis should call into question the methodology Mr. Rose uses to show the academic gains of School of One. This also works as a rhetorical device to draw attention away from the effect private donors like Gates, Walton, Broad, and Zuckerberg have on public education.
No disagreement there. On this point I agree with Rose. School needs a redesign and technology ought to be part of the fabric, not just an add-on. I'm just not sure that what School of One offers as an alternative vision really is radical enough of a shift. It still carries with it a lot of the bad stuff inherent in the current old model.
I wish this were framed different. This still implies that a linear progression with "prerequisites" is a necessary component of knowledge and skill acquisition. What if we decided not to assume that there is or should be such a thing as 6th grade or 4th grade content? Or chapters? Or levels?
Here is the crux of my rub. (oh that sounded dirty). The theme of this conference was "Its Personal: Transforming Pedagogy With Technology" but what the premise of this statement, which is arguably the single most distinguishing feature of School of One, is a form of personalization. The key difference between personal and personalize is where the agency lies and who is empowered to make educational decisions. If I create a personal learning environment I as a learner have the agency to make decisions about what is allowed to be part of that environment, what content I choose to study, what tools I choose that fit my needs, and what people and resources I find valuable. If learning is personal then personal learning transformed by technology must involve the learner making choices about the content, modalities, and direction. If my learning is personalized for me someone else is telling me what to do. The agency still lies with someone who is telling me where to sit, who to listen to, how to learn, and when to move on to the next thing. Learning that is personalized is not personal learning.
Now, if I choose to outsource the personalization of my learning to someone else that is my choice and can arguably fall within the realm of a personal learning choice. There are definitely times when this kind of arrangement is desired and needed by the learner. But in that choice the agency still lies with the learner and if that method doesn't work out there ought to be a choice to abandon the endevour.
And, what of the lessons? This is something I would like very much to know more about. From Mr. Rose's description of where they get the lessons in their lesson bank it doesn't sound like the lessons are created with a new learning system in mind. They sound very much like old school lesson plans be they taught by a teacher in a small group, online asynchronously, or online remotely. I would like to learn more about this aspect of School of One before I pound the gavel on this but if my impression from this talk is correct, what the algorithm does is simply shuffle the old school lessons and presents them to each student in an individualized schedule. Essentially, it sounds like the learning experience for a student at School of One on the pedagogy level isn't any different than any other school.
This was my question. Nowhere in Mr. Rose's talk did he address how School of One does community building or what the role of personal relationships between students and teacher are. Nowhere is this addressed but we know from volumes of literature and research on this topic that this social element of the learning environment is extremely important. This is especially true when we are talking about the at-risk students Rose called our attention to at the outset. If you work in a school that serves that 1/3 of students who are likely to drop out you know how important relationship building and community is. Where is that in the algorithm?
Yes, but are you comparing a group of students who have the family support and/or personal motivation and initiative to attend an after-school math program to students who don't have those things? How were students chosen for the after-school program? Did you compare students in this after-school program to students in another after-school program that used different methods? There are just too many variables to make this an actionable statistic.
Rose ended his talk trying to address a fear he anticipates teachers might have about School of One that it will mean teachers will loose their jobs. He cites economic data showing fields where technology has caused a transformational change showing that fields where some level of human judgement is involved those careers have seen increases while those that didn't saw decreases. He speculates that in education this will mean more jobs for teachers, not less.
I would like to push back on this notion for just a moment. It isn't like education has not yet seen a transformation, in fact we are in the midst of one right now. But, I think most are too close to the trees to see the forest on this issue, or rather, too close to the circuits to see the machine. The whole standards-driven education environment with high-stakes testing and standardized mechanisms for measuring student achievement, school improvement, and teacher "effectiveness" is a technology itself. It is the core processor driving School of One. The algorithm in School of One is only part of the equation. It is a subroutine in a much larger program called standards-based education.
The standards-based machine is a biased one. It has its own set of values and very little room for what falls outside it. The standards-based machine only understands inputs and outputs that can be easily measured by its sensors. It ignores all else. In its scans it misses important details because it does not possess the sensors to detect certain domains of learning, certain domains of understanding, certain domains of knowing. Those things, the things that are not easily standardized, are lost to the machine because the machine cannot process it. Because the machine cannot process them and the fate of schools depends on the machine showing good results schools will focus more energy and time only into those domains the machine can read. Therefore, we see reductions in the arts, reductions in family and consumer sciences, reductions in creative writing, reductions in physical education, and reductions in anything else that the machine has not been programmed to read.
Mr. Rose argues that domains that require human judgement will not be negatively impacted by the integration of his technology, a technology that not only supports the standards machine but makes it more efficient. Because the algorithm can only see what it has been taught how to read it will just as likely expedite the extinction of the domains already in decline. And to add a bit of irony to this, it appears computer science is among those domains.
TIES is the upper-midwest's largest technology education conference and very very little of what was offered this year addressed how to teach computer science in school. Not one session on programming, not one session on how to teach students to write their own algorithms. I don't blame TIES for this, this is a much larger trend. In the past two years at ISTE I observed the same phenomenon. Somehow we have come to a point where technology in education is something we use to put kids through their paces, to help to personalize their learning, to program students. I want students to learn how to program a computer, not to be programmed by one.
@anderscj anderscjWhat does School of 1 teach students about learning? Does it use tech 2 program stdnts or help stdnts learn 2 use tech 4 themselves? #ties111 day ago via Mobile Web · powered by @socialditto
This conference is huge. This year they reported over 3,100 participants and about 1/3 of the school superintendents in MN were present. That is a lot of students they are responsible for and for one morning they all were presented an infomercial for Edison Schools 2.0. I like to think that most of our school leaders have a good enough BS detector to sort through a lot of this and ask tough questions but I know in a group of people from any sector of life you will have some who buy in hook line and sinker. This is especially true if you are in a state of crisis. This year the number of schools not making AYP was staggering. That pressure can lead anyone to make decisions without asking the right questions. In conditions like those someone coming along selling an idea with a promise to solve all your problems receives a welcome reception. I suspect more superintendents were receptive to what Joel Rose had to say than would be if the standards machine were not causing a crisis in their districts.
Normally at the TIES conference the keynote address is followed by a small group presentation/discussion between the presenter and the superintendents. This is then usually followed by a Q & A session with the presenter. Rose had no such session. There was no opportunity given for other conference-goers to ask questions. There was no platform for push-back. I hope some of the questions I raise here were asked in the superintendents session but not being part of that club I will never know.
To TIES credit, the rest of the conference was filled with feature speakers that did justice to the other side of the personal learning coin. Christian Long, Chris Dede, Bernajean Porter, and Ananth Pai all were excellent and highlighted the value of personal agency in learning. Also, the one place I did see some computer programming was in the Classroom of the Future installation where the kids were fully immersed in a LEGO Mindstorms project.
