Today, as I was driving to work, something in my caffeine-fueled brain stumbled back to my first day driving to my, then, brand new job as a student teacher some twenty-one years ago. For those of you who don’t know, up until that moment I had been living in Miami and working as a professional musician. I had never imagined myself teaching, but as I had recently turned 30, I wanted a career with sick days and that I might one day be able to retire from. My sister was a teacher and at some point she said “hey, you should try doing this.” So I did. To say my new career would require an adjustment in attitude (not to mention a haircut) would be a little like saying I am slightly fond of coffee. Anyway, as I drifted along this morning reminiscing about the old days I began making some mental notes of all the changes in education I have witnessed over the last two decades. Quite frankly, the changes are neither as numerous nor as dramatic as you youngsters might imagine. Students really haven’t changed that much since I started school as a student let alone as a teacher. Teachers are also about the same although the job has changed radically. I am sad to report that, if anything, I have noticed a drop in creativity and personality among teachers in general which is undoubtedly due to increases in testing, micromanagement and oversight. The most shocking aspect of my new workplace way, way back in 1994 was that no one in the building seemed to know anything about computers let alone the internet. From my first day I would routinely be pulled out of a class to help someone get logged onto the district mainframe or format a floppy disk. Today my building is full of people who actually know something about computers and the web. So there’s that.
However, the innocence of those days is what I really miss. That morning in 1994 I walked into my classroom and closed the door and turned to face thirty, 7th graders. It was entirely up to me to figure out how to get a chapter’s worth of information into the brains of those kids. No one was insisting I use a vetted curriculum, approved lesson plans or asked for my pedagogical philosophy. No one had even asked how I was planning on utilizing that Macintosh Quadra that I had dragged in and hooked up to the classroom television. It was all a little scary, but it was my classroom! When students complained that they couldn’t read my notes, I began typing them on the Mac instead of writing so that they could read them off the TV. An unexpected benefit of typing all my notes was that I could then collect all the lecture notes (yes, I lectured) for a unit and print copies for any student that was struggling. I could and often would try anything and sometimes more than once. When one idea didn’t work, I would shrug off the failure and move on to something else. Today’s teachers don’t get that luxury. They are expected to swing for the fences every day while using someone else's batting stance. This is, of course, absurd and I wouldn’t have lasted more than a year in the current environment. I’m, obviously, not real popular with district, department heads. I talk about teacher branding, social media and marketing anytime I am asked to speak to a group of teachers. (For some reason they still ask me back.) The reason I make all the noise is simple. The only way we will ever change the status quo and move the locus of control back to the classroom teacher (where it absolutely belongs) is by changing public perception. Once the taxpayer is in your corner, you can better control the conversation.
So what does any of this have to do with technology? Well, if we all agree that technology has the potential to do the same for education as it has done in every other industry. That is to say that if we place the right tools in the right hands, we can allow a skilled worker to work more quickly, efficiently and with greater precision. Going back to the first paragraph, you will note that I believe that teachers as a group are bringing more than adequate computer skills with them today. (I hope that I can take a smidgen of that credit.) So what’s missing? “It’s the tools stupid!” I tell myself that everyday. We keep giving teachers the wrong tools and wonder why they are not working quicker or more efficiently. Seriously, when is the last time a technology rollout involved the teachers during the very first phase of planning? When is the last time hardware and software companies did a detailed task analysis of teaching before they rolled out their latest product? When was the last time the department responsible for the performance of the laptops (can you even identify anyone attached to such a department within your system?) that torpedoed a teacher's lesson plans for two days was raked over the coals? And when is the last time the district purchasing department ran an itemized list for teachers to sign off on before the checks were cut? Yeah. Never!
This is what has been wrong with education in general for some time. The people charged with supporting teachers have zero accountability to the teachers themselves. Zero! They are even isolated in a different building as if to emphasize the disconnect. This has been business as usual for large school systems for decades. Computers were able to amplify these problems because they cost way more than chalk boards and expectations were so much higher. So this is my parting challenge to each and every one of you. Take whatever you learn here and elsewhere and disrupt the process. Demand tools worthy of your skills. When a lousy piece of software, anemic website, or malfunctioning device costs you instructional time, raise hell. Don’t let district IT departments get away with poor planning and implementation. You better believe that in the private sector when a company’s website goes down or a salesman's device can't connect to the company VPN and commerce is lost, heads roll. Isn’t the education of our students worth more than the contents of someone’s shopping cart on Amazon? So let’s demand our labor be treated with the same sense of urgency. Let’s demand that our IT departments be held to a higher standard rather than constantly revising our expectations downward. Perhaps we should all act as though our jobs depended upon the success of our core mission (they do) and insist that our support staff’s jobs depend upon our success.
However, the innocence of those days is what I really miss. That morning in 1994 I walked into my classroom and closed the door and turned to face thirty, 7th graders. It was entirely up to me to figure out how to get a chapter’s worth of information into the brains of those kids. No one was insisting I use a vetted curriculum, approved lesson plans or asked for my pedagogical philosophy. No one had even asked how I was planning on utilizing that Macintosh Quadra that I had dragged in and hooked up to the classroom television. It was all a little scary, but it was my classroom! When students complained that they couldn’t read my notes, I began typing them on the Mac instead of writing so that they could read them off the TV. An unexpected benefit of typing all my notes was that I could then collect all the lecture notes (yes, I lectured) for a unit and print copies for any student that was struggling. I could and often would try anything and sometimes more than once. When one idea didn’t work, I would shrug off the failure and move on to something else. Today’s teachers don’t get that luxury. They are expected to swing for the fences every day while using someone else's batting stance. This is, of course, absurd and I wouldn’t have lasted more than a year in the current environment. I’m, obviously, not real popular with district, department heads. I talk about teacher branding, social media and marketing anytime I am asked to speak to a group of teachers. (For some reason they still ask me back.) The reason I make all the noise is simple. The only way we will ever change the status quo and move the locus of control back to the classroom teacher (where it absolutely belongs) is by changing public perception. Once the taxpayer is in your corner, you can better control the conversation.
So what does any of this have to do with technology? Well, if we all agree that technology has the potential to do the same for education as it has done in every other industry. That is to say that if we place the right tools in the right hands, we can allow a skilled worker to work more quickly, efficiently and with greater precision. Going back to the first paragraph, you will note that I believe that teachers as a group are bringing more than adequate computer skills with them today. (I hope that I can take a smidgen of that credit.) So what’s missing? “It’s the tools stupid!” I tell myself that everyday. We keep giving teachers the wrong tools and wonder why they are not working quicker or more efficiently. Seriously, when is the last time a technology rollout involved the teachers during the very first phase of planning? When is the last time hardware and software companies did a detailed task analysis of teaching before they rolled out their latest product? When was the last time the department responsible for the performance of the laptops (can you even identify anyone attached to such a department within your system?) that torpedoed a teacher's lesson plans for two days was raked over the coals? And when is the last time the district purchasing department ran an itemized list for teachers to sign off on before the checks were cut? Yeah. Never!
This is what has been wrong with education in general for some time. The people charged with supporting teachers have zero accountability to the teachers themselves. Zero! They are even isolated in a different building as if to emphasize the disconnect. This has been business as usual for large school systems for decades. Computers were able to amplify these problems because they cost way more than chalk boards and expectations were so much higher. So this is my parting challenge to each and every one of you. Take whatever you learn here and elsewhere and disrupt the process. Demand tools worthy of your skills. When a lousy piece of software, anemic website, or malfunctioning device costs you instructional time, raise hell. Don’t let district IT departments get away with poor planning and implementation. You better believe that in the private sector when a company’s website goes down or a salesman's device can't connect to the company VPN and commerce is lost, heads roll. Isn’t the education of our students worth more than the contents of someone’s shopping cart on Amazon? So let’s demand our labor be treated with the same sense of urgency. Let’s demand that our IT departments be held to a higher standard rather than constantly revising our expectations downward. Perhaps we should all act as though our jobs depended upon the success of our core mission (they do) and insist that our support staff’s jobs depend upon our success.