When my children were younger, their bedtime routine invariably included a nightly story or two, and one of their favorites was the well-worn tale of the blind men and the elephant. As the Hindu fable goes, a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like.  Each touches a different part, such as the tail or trunk, but only one part.  As they compare notes on what they felt, they find themselves in complete disagreement regarding the nature of the beast.   Although the story has taken many forms through the years, the myriad versions all point to the underlying principle that reality is based on one’s perspective.

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Sadly, family bedtime stories have long since faded into childhood, but yesterday I was reminded of the blind men and their elephant after reading The End of Techno-Critique: The Naked Truth about 1:1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment. This brief yet important piece, by Mark E. Weston and Alan Bain, directly addresses  technology’s failed promise to transform and improve modern education.  While the article focuses on 1:1 programs because of their prominence, the shortcomings of laptops are not unlike those of any and all other initiatives.  In summarizing the scope of the issue, the authors conclude:

The body of evidence shows that the existence of scalable and sustainable effects from educational changes, innovations, and reforms – technological or otherwise – although frequently assumed remain an unrealized goal within education. In the field’s prevailing paradigm, efforts at improvement, as promising as they may appear, too often are co-opted, diluted, or diminished to generate any widespread effect on teaching or learning.

Anyone connected with education could cite numerous and varied reasons why schools suffer the effects of “co-opted, diluted, or diminished” efforts.  Weston and Bain suggest the causes are rooted within the  “autonomous, idiosyncratic, non-collaborative, and non-differentiated teaching practices that largely remain uninformed by research about what it takes to significantly improve student learning and achievement.”   Expressed another way, teachers, administrators, students, and parents typically only perceive part of the teaching-learning “elephant”.

Not unlike the blind men, we tend to focus on what is nearest (and by extension, most important) to us, effectively limiting our perspective to the reality at hand.  If the metaphor seems strained, consider your daily professional interactions and obligations.  Do they truly reflect an understanding of and involvement in the whole of teaching and learning, or are they merely a part of the “big picture” that only someone else sees?

From Technological Tools to Cognitive Tools

In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Bransford et al consider technology in terms of cognitive tools that shape and extend human learning.  In this environment, laptop computers are holistically integrated into a school’s  teaching and learning process.   According to Weston and Bain, such a setting requires establishing six distinct components:

• One, the community comprising the school – students, teachers, school leaders, and parents – must have an explicit set of simple rules that defines what the community believes about teaching and learning.
• Two, the school community deliberately and systematically uses its rules to embed its big ideas, values, aspirations, and commitments in the day-to-day actions and processes of the school.
• Three, all members at all levels of the school community are fully engaged with creating, adapting, and sustaining the embedded design of the school.
• Four, the embedded design generates feedback from all members of the school community: teachers, school leaders, students, and parents.
• Five, the interplay of rules, design, collaboration, and feedback make it possible for the school community to develop an explicit schema—a shared conceptual framework for practice—that defines interactions for the community members in their pursuit of learning.
• Six, guided by their use of their schema, community members demand systemic and ubiquitous use of technology, as opposed to idiosyncratic and sporadic use of technology described in the research on many 1:1 computing programs.

While I may not subscribe to every aspect of the self-organizing school concept, I do believe that developing a community-wide understanding of teaching and learning is an important first step in improving education.  At first blush this may seem obvious if not unnecessary; what school would profess to lacking such a shared vision?  Such an endeavor goes far beyond a simple mission statement or strategic plan, however.  Defining what a school believes about teaching and learning is to define the school itself, to see and comprehend all the parts of the elephant.

Just think what a bedtime story that would be….

Posted: 12|31|09 at 5:14 pm. Filed under: 1:1, Educational Change, Leadership.
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