Time for a change - For me and for education
As some of you may have noticed, this month will be my last as technology director for my local school district. Of course, a few folks in the district found out via my updated disclosures on this blog before I could tell them in person. Woops. Complications and missteps aside, though, this represents a real opportunity for my district to reexamine the way it handles IT and for me to take everything I've learned in a wide range of IT and educational experiences and use my voice here on ZDNet and as a consultant to work towards real change in education, with technology as an important catalyst.
I was lucky enough to participate over the last couple of years in the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL). The series of seminars and extensive readings and case studies tackle the serious competitive deficits that our students face in the United States and the detrimental effects of outdated educational models in a very different world from that for which they were originally developed.
A reader asked me the other day, in reference to an article I wrote on "The end of my Mac journey,"
Why is it necessary to transform education? As a student of literature and cultures, in my opinion, the 'old skool' ways of educating students produced far superior achievements in literature, philosophy, and the other humanities. Today, in an education environment that encourages finding new and innovative ways to teach, it is hard to open a newspaper (if you can still find one) that doesn't mention somewhere the continuing failure of U.S. primary and secondary schools to impart basic educational principles to an acceptable percentage of their students.
...is transforming education the solution or, perhaps, part of the problem? If the solution, why, and what is the problem with the older model that produced such intellects as Freud, Einstein, Alexander Pope, and James Joyce? And, of course, what role does technology play in transforming education?
As I told him, I don't have all of the answers, nor are the answers that I do have perfect. However, if there is one thing that I've learned as a teacher, an administrator in public education, a participant in NISL, a parent of 4 school-aged children, and a writer with opportunities to talk with and learn from some real visionaries in the field, it's that education absolutely must change. It must change both quickly and sustainably and we just happen to have the technological tools to drive major components of the change. At the same time, technology itself is necessitating the change.
His point is well-taken, of course. Our students need to be pushed in rigorous curricula that extend far beyond STEM and what most people see as "21st Century Skills." The arts, foreign languages, literacy, and logic all have key roles to play in modern education. However, information management has just as important role. Data retrieval, collaboration, and communication are important in ways that traditional approaches to education (that haven't, to be completely honest, changed all that much since the ancient Greeks did it, except that we let girls learn now, too) simply aren't prepared to address.
The incredible advances to which he alludes were made by lone scholars and artists. Even the great scientists and mathematicians of the previous centuries, who often corresponded with one another either via letters or professional societies, still largely worked alone. What could Newton and Leibniz have accomplished working together and how much more quickly could our applications of the calculus they derived independently have been developed and disseminated with modern tools? What if they had been able to "open source" calculus, building a community of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers to extend, apply, troubleshoot, and document this branch of mathematics upon which so much is based today?
The great advances of this century will be made by high-performing, tightly integrated teams and strong organizations. The members of these teams and organizations, whether at universities, in think tanks, at corporations, or elsewhere may be spread around the globe, but will be connected in real time and asynchronously as needed to achieve their goals. Working in information-driven environments like this requires a fundamentally different set of skills than sitting in cubicles or working in a factory the way our parents and grandparents did.
We have, as well, unprecedented opportunities to identify students' strengths and weaknesses, building upon the former and remediating the latter on an ongoing basis. While good teachers have always been able to spot gifted or struggling students, a little software that helps them understand that little Johnny is having difficulty reading because of poor phonemic awareness rather than a learning disability goes a long ways. Similarly, being able to mine data to predict dropouts or identify subgroups who are being poorly served by existing programs is incredibly powerful.
Transforming education doesn't need to mean giving everyone a laptop. It means giving teachers the tools they need to rapidly assess and manage student needs and address a far more heterogeneous group of kids than their predecessors ever needed to. It means making education relevant to students who live in an always on, always connected world, dominated by data, information, and mis-information. It means emphasizing interpersonal communication and collaboration as much as rigorous math and science curricula.
Various social and communications media enable exactly this sort of communication and collaboration while providing a leveling effect for students who would otherwise be under-served due to geography or socioeconomics. The most rural of students can now learn Mandarin Chinese or Hindi. The poorest of inner city youth can connect to counterparts in Shanghai and understand the world in a deeper way than would be possible in an isolated classroom. In the same way, the teacher struggling to reach all 33 kids in that inner city classroom could leverage inexpensive software and tools to differentiate instruction in ways that James Joyce's teachers never had to.
Technology allows our students and the teachers and administrators who support them to collaborate more closely, forming communities of their own and ensuring that learning doesn’t have to end when the final bell rings. This doesn’t have to mean Japanese-style tutoring and study for hours a day outside of school. Informal, community-driven learning enabled by social networks and modern communication tools has extraordinary value for students and builds skills for interpersonal relationships, collaboration, teamwork, and lifelong learning. All of these are the true 21st Century Skills we hear so much about, not simply being able to create a PowerPoint presentation or put together a gnarly spreadsheet.
For years, I advocated for a technology director position to be created in our school district. Someone had to oversee purchasing, manage projects, handle major technology problems, and implement new tools for education, right? Two years of being that person, though, has shown me (and, I hope, my district) that a technology director should really be promoting and modeling data-driven instruction and coaching teachers on best practices in technology integration. Implementation of real business intelligence surrounding student data and creating opportunities for administrators, teachers, and parents to leverage these systems should be shepherded by a technology director. The creation of high-performance teams and professional learning communities who can share decision-making on technology integration and resource allocation? Another fine job for a tech director.
There will come times, however, when a tech director focused on instruction, building student achievement, and increasing teacher capacity through technology will need some specific expertise. That's why God created consultants. A tech director should be able to identify needs for a new collaborative communications platform, but a consultant could evaluate and implement an appropriate option, leaving the director free to do his/her core job. Need a new SIS? Need to implement an LMS like Moodle? Call a consultant. Need an external resource to train and motivate teachers to use a new set of technologies? Consultant. Need to implement RTI district-wide? Consultant. Time to roll out wireless campus-wide? Consultant.
And that's where I'll be fitting in as I transition out of my position as tech director. Not only will I be writing a lot more here and over on the Google blog, but I'll be working with schools in two ways as a consultant:
- Helping them change the way they do business to ensure that technology adds value and not just cost, focusing on student achievement and instruction rather than expensive tools, and
- Providing specific expertise, project management, and implementation services that are beyond the scope or reasonable job descriptions of already taxed IT staff and tech directors.
I'll also be working with the businesses who sell to schools, helping them provide products and services that do the same thing: add educational value through technology, rather than just throw technology at an educational problem.
As I noted above, I've been writing this blog for a while. I've built a network of people who know a lot of things about a lot of technologies and have developed a decent-sized bag of tricks all my own. What this means for ZDNet Education and for you as readers is that as I can devote more time to this blog and to my consulting efforts, we can increasingly build a community that learns from and through each other. As I develop and evaluate solutions for specific educational issues, this blog will be my sounding board, journal, and historical record. It will also continue to feature plenty of me spouting off about my opinions and thoughts on Ed Tech and reporting interesting and relevant news in the education technology market.
Yes, education in this country is ripe for a change and, as technologists, we're going to be right in the middle of it. Things won't change too much here at ZDNet Education until July since my list of to-dos before I pass the technological torch to a new tech director in our district is extraordinarily long. July, however, will be here before we know it, as will a new school year and, hopefully, a renewed commitment to adding real value in the classroom with technology.