It’s not that schools and educators aren’t trying; schools are spending a fortune on educational technology from devices to consultants to professional development, and teachers are quickly updating their lessons and practices to accommodate a technologically saturated student body. Venture capitalists, silicon valley companies, and tech billionaires are using money and influence to embed educational technology in schools.
The reason all of these constituencies are dedicating resources to technology is because it allows access to the world’s information; as such, teachers can provide autonomy to students so they can pursue interests and expand and deepen their knowledge beyond the classroom walls. And, technology provides inexpensive, user-friendly applications so teachers can inject engagement and creativity into their classrooms.
Imagine a student researching a topic of interest. Today, that includes access to the world’s information, and access to the world’s professionals. Google is the ultimate learning tool. Once curious and informed, students can go straight to the source by digesting the words of a professional by watching TED Talks, listening to podcasts, or reading their work online. With social media, students can do this indefinitely with the follow button. Even better, they can directly converse with a professional via email, tweet, or message. After a deep, sustained research process, students can think critically and communicate creatively with a number of free tools and professional examples. From Google, Apple, and Adobe to tablet applications and online editing tools, students have an endless suite of products available to them to create and share a masterpiece (not to mention a thousand online tutorials to help them learn how to create or edit something their heart desires). The technology described above has powered excitement in education around project-based learning, personalized learning, experiential education, gamification and many more.
Schools and administrators quickly seize upon the successes of the individual teachers that are savvy in academic technology, and they try to push others to do the same. From schools to students to teachers, as more constituencies embrace technology and seek ambitious, positive goals, it has resulted in short-sighted, pedagogical failures. Technology’s ubiquity, has birthed bad pedagogy, which has poisoned the well for the technologically and pedagogically savvy.
SCHOOLS - From progress to convenience
As schools and administrators have seen the success of technology in learning, they have pushed teachers to adopt technology for the sake of “progress” and 21st century learning. Those ambitious goals fade within a year or two, and what schools have actually come to depend on with respect to technology is convenience. When all teachers post assignments online, grade online, and communicate online, it allows a perfect paper-trail for administrators to explain problems with students and teachers alike. Administrators reference technology to talk about 21st century skills and a 21st century job market; many have adopted words like innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurial--only to force students into the same centuries-old factory model of subject-bell, subject-bell, repeat and for homework with task-submission, task-submission, repeat. When students seek autonomy and creativity elsewhere, like social media, schools are quick to play whack-a-mole hoping to limit agency and enforce conformity. Schools are decidedly not teaching digital citizenship and media literacy, thereby ensuring students are not using their devices as an extension of their intellectual and character education and are not leaving school with 21st century skills ready for a changing workforce.
STUDENTS - From learning & creativity to distraction
As schools and administrators have seen the success of technology in learning, they have pushed teachers to adopt technology for the sake of “progress” and 21st century learning. Those ambitious goals fade within a year or two, and what schools have actually come to depend on with respect to technology is convenience. When all teachers post assignments online, grade online, and communicate online, it allows a perfect paper-trail for administrators to explain problems with students and teachers alike. Administrators reference technology to talk about 21st century skills and a 21st century job market; many have adopted words like innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurial--only to force students into the same centuries-old factory model of subject-bell, subject-bell, repeat and for homework with task-submission, task-submission, repeat. When students seek autonomy and creativity elsewhere, like social media, schools are quick to play whack-a-mole hoping to limit agency and enforce conformity. Schools are decidedly not teaching digital citizenship and media literacy, thereby ensuring students are not using their devices as an extension of their intellectual and character education and are not leaving school with 21st century skills ready for a changing workforce.
STUDENTS - From learning & creativity to distraction
If you sit in the back of a high school classroom with devices out, you will see videos, messages, and games running concurrently with classroom instruction. Our students use technology all the time; and, capitalism has driven the biggest tech companies--from social media platforms to video games to streaming services--to compete for their attention in order to sell advertising. Companies do this by traveling down the brain stem to keep our students hooked. For some teachers that celebrate the creative pursuits of their students via devices, these apps and connections can foster learning, collaboration and creativity. But to most teachers, these pursuits are a distraction from the course content. Most teachers now see open devices in class as a headache. Many aren’t allowing students to take notes on devices anymore.
TEACHERS - From transformative learning to “package and submit”
TEACHERS - From transformative learning to “package and submit”
Because teachers see many of their students as distracted, they struggle to leverage technology for depth of research, collaboration, and creativity (let alone sustained engagement). Instead, teachers are leveraging technology the way schools are, more for convenience than for progress. As such, teachers are implementing poor pedagogical techniques to meet the parameters created by schools and students around classroom technology.
To control for the parameters placed on them, teachers have perverted technology use from autonomy, deeper learning, and communication/collaboration/creativity to a much more small classroom culture of what I call “package and submit.” In order to ensure their students are on task and using the resources that they’re supposed to, teachers ask students to use their devices for simple knowledge-based tasks and then demand to see each task (and sometimes grade it). Whether an English teacher asking students to answer questions about an author or submit reading journals or a Science teacher asking students to turn in a worksheet, a pre-lab, and a lab, tasks are small, and checkpoints are frequent. Often, students will go to Google; they use the copy and paste features on their devices in order to package information and submit it. This style of instruction is not at all innovative or creative (read: not progress), it’s just easy (read: convenient), made even easier by modern learning management systems like Google Classroom.
Schools and administrators are totally okay with package and submit culture; in fact, they welcome it. It’s good for administrators and parents because assignments are transparent and available online. Many schools are even going to open online gradebooks. And these grades depend on whether or not a student can package and submit, which is largely objective. This has led to grade inflation, specifically for organized students (rather than inspired or intelligent students). Clearly these changes are convenient for administrators and parents, but teachers too have learned to embrace them, understanding that grading transparently and objectively is an easy way to keep administrators and parents off one’s back.
That said, administrators are trying to have it both ways by also pointing to a successful technological project to justify the widespread use of technology in school (and purchase of devices, applications, and professional development). But those successes are declining, fast.
The methods described above that we currently use to administer technologically-driven pedagogy are simultaneously undermining it. If a teacher gives significant class or homework time for an assignment that allows autonomy and creativity, he will find that his students will spend some of that time off task, cut corners (copy/paste), and submit and forget it. That’s because that’s what all of their other teachers are requiring, and our students are being conditioned to package and submit (and they’re getting good grades!). And that’s ruining academic technology for the rest of us. Even if a couple of students did embrace autonomy, enjoy learning outside of class, and submit something truly creative and unique, the math is simple for most teachers: for what percentage of my students did this project go as planned? And how much of my course content did I forgo to create this technologically driven opportunity? These fears and the uncertain results of a unique and creative project or activity lead to a regression in digital pedagogy, a regression to convenience, to package and submit, and to transparency and objectivity. The well is poisoned.
If we truly want our students to succeed in our schools and beyond, we have to plan for autonomy and creativity and give our students time to acquire a depth of knowledge in an area of interest. Only then will students better understand themselves in digital spaces and uncover professional opportunities in digital spaces. If we don’t, more and more administrators and teachers will embrace “package and submit” (and grade) as the only way to ensure students complete an activity or project requiring technology. As this gets worse, the medium becomes the message; if computers in school becomes synonymous with Google, copy/paste, and package and submit, that will become the norm for our students not just in school, but also in the professional world.
If we don’t fix our pedagogy, our students will still explore interests in digital spaces where they have autonomy, and creativity. They’ll just do it without our guidance and mentorship. Today’s information landscape is complex, deceptive, and even dangerous. Let’s not outsource our job as teachers to YouTube, Reddit, Netflix, or Fortnite. Unfortunately, up to this point, instead of leaning into those spaces, we’ve shut them down.
The good news is we can solve this. After all, we made this mistake; we ruined the incentive structure for students and teachers using technology. We need to start by listening to our students, mentoring our students in digital spaces, and trusting our students when we embark on technological exercises. We must endeavor to get our entire faculty on the same pedagogical page with respect to technology. Finally, but most importantly, we have to investigate the structures that drive our schools and modify things like our schedule or our gradebooks to maximize for a new style of 21st century digital learning, one that embraces autonomy and engagement, promotes depth of research, and rewards creativity.
