Over the years I’ve acquired and read a substantial number of books on the many facets of education. My collection, which spans several shelves in our home library, includes names that should be familiar to us all: Howard Gardner,  Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, Alfie Kohn, Carol Dweck, Robert  Marzano, Charlotte Danielson, Eric Jensen, John Bransford, John Bruer, Rick Wormeli, Carol Tomlinson, and scores of others. Collectively, this group has influenced countless educators across the country and around the world; teachers flock to their keynotes, administrators make their work required reading.  And while they represent some of the brightest, most respected minds of our time, not one of them appears to have mastered the subtle art of social networking.

If you search Twitter for Dweck or Danielson, you’ll come up empty.  Same holds true for Gardner, Jensen, Bransford, Bruer, and Wormeli.  Carol Tomlinson aka @cat3y has tweeted only twice, most recently in August of 2009.  Marzano, Wiggins, and Kohn have written dozens of books and hundreds of articles; together they follow a total of eight people.  Perhaps McTighe was speaking for them all with his one and only tweet: “I just signed on [to] TWITTER. Now what?????”  Now what indeed.

Social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have enabled educators to form vibrant, extended learning communities.  Pre-service and veteran teachers alike are able to exchange ideas, shape and expand their thinking, and find and develop their professional voice.  Some voices are more learned, some simply more vocal, but the voices we should all be listening to are largely missing or silent.  And yes, I did say “we should all be listening to.”  Whether you agree with their research and theories or not, the aforementioned literally wrote the book (or at the very least a good number of its chapters) on modern education.

Imagine being able to read Gardner’s latest tweets about multiple intelligences, or Danielson’s thoughts on successful teaching practices.  Wouldn’t it be something to follow a conversation thread about differentiation with Wormeli and Tomlinson, or put a few questions to Wiggins and McTighe regarding essential questions and enduring understandings?  Granted, there are certainly others who tweet about these topics, and many do an exceptional job.  Does it really matter, then, if Gardner et al. are not engaging us online?

Absolutely.

By not effectively participating in social media, the aforementioned are missing opportunities to share and accurately represent their work with a global audience and solicit feedback from those of us who put theory into practice.  Because these luminaries are not part of our learning landscape, they risk becoming irrelevant to a growing populous of networked teachers.  Without lending their voices to the often chaotic stream of online thought that is social media, louder but often less thoughtful voices will lead the way.

To those whose ideologies have shaped this profession, it’s not too late to get started; come join us.

The Multitasking Myth

Most teenagers (and many adults) believe themselves to be competent multitaskers, capable of simultaneously emailing-texting-surfing-listening to music-you name it while attending to other tasks such as driving, studying, or even having a conversation.  Stanford professor Clifford Nass has been studying the effectiveness of self-proclaimed multitaskers, and his research confirms the multitasking myth. As he concludes, “It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we’ve done suggests they’re worse at analytic reasoning.  We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”

These finding are not surprising, but the potential long-term effects are quite disturbing when set against the backdrop of our technology-rich homes and classrooms.  University professors are already seeing the toll that constant, multitasking-driven distraction has taken on writing; students compose paragraphs, not cohesive compositions, because they can’t maintain focus for extended periods of time and see how the parts must relate to the whole.  Write a paragraph; update Facebook status.  Write a second paragraph; check email.  Write the required number of paragraphs; assignment finished.

Unfortunately and despite the research, secondary schools may be encouraging and reinforcing the wrong habits.  One of the teachers interviewed for the program stated that schools need to actively teach multitasking because it is such an important life skill.  Attempting to teach that which cannot be learned is not in anyone’s best interests.  Perhaps a better approach would be to critically examine the role technology plays in learning.

Teaching with Technology

Digital Nation’s producers visited a middle school in the south Bronx that has completely embraced technology in the classroom.  Student laptops have been credited with saving the school by improving discipline and test scores, reducing truancy, and establishing a 21st century learning environment.  They view technology like oxygen; ubiquitous, necessary, and something never to be withheld.  For many educators, their model of teaching with technology could be considered the ideal.

Others, however, are less enthusiastic.  Todd Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind, is concerned that technology can dampen students’ attention span, create boredom, and lead to “instant gratification education”. He contends that the ability to click on a whim can “bifurcate the brain, keeps it from being able to pursue one linear thought, and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs.”

Any school that uses technology has experienced at least some of the successes and problems featured in the program; most schools live somewhere between these extremes.  Technology is neither education’s savior or scourge, and balance is achieved by weighing the risk against the reward.  Is higher academic achievement worth a diminishing of our collective patience? Is the self-guided engagement that a computer provides worth decreased human interaction?  The answers to these subjective questions are beyond the scope of this space (and Digital Nation itself), but one thing is clear; technology facilitates change, and change comes at a price.

With Change Comes Loss

An unpleasant reality mentioned throughout the program was the loss that accompanies change.  The advent of writing shifted us away from being an oral culture, and consequently we lost some of our ability to remember.  The mass production of text enabled a wider variety of writers to be published, and as a result our language has lost some of its beauty and sophistication.  Living and learning in a digital society will lead to loss as well, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The importance of factual knowledge, the development of interpersonal skills, even the role of teachers in the classroom will change (and have changed) as a result of technology.  It may be hard to accept, but as the producers noted, “We grew up in a world anchored in pages you turn.  Maybe there is something these kids are getting that we’re not sure how to value yet.”  Our students are getting the ability to acquire knowledge, process information, and demonstrate understanding in new and amazing ways; I think that’s something we can all value.

Time Well Spent

If you haven’t done so already, I would encourage you to set aside some time to watch Digital Nation and explore the online resources for parents and teachers.  The program raises more questions than it answers, but if it generates conversation regarding how best to serve our students, it should be considered time well spent.

Image Source: http://www.vella-zarb.com

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….