Technology and Education Reform

I’ve recently been in a number of conversations about the education system in the United States and the role of technology in improving things.  So I thought I’d take a minute to write down some of my thoughts on the subject. While I don’t think technology is a silver bullet by any means (as evidenced by the fact that I’m still having this conversations 20 years after I entered the field!), I do think technology has a role to play in improving learning outcomes. “Improving learning outcomes” is a loaded phrase but, for the present purpose, I’ll define it to mean substantially increasing the number of students completing high quality post-secondary education. This is a big problem in the US and has been documented in a number of places, so I won’t belabor it here. If you don’t agree it’s a problem that’s a separate thread.

I’ll begin with a few observations that strongly influence my thinking:

• Student interest is critical. If students aren’t interested in what they are being asked to do, they won’t learn effectively. Or they won’t learn at all, as illustrated in The Silent Epidemic, a report sponsored by the Gates Foundation. The report found that at least half nearly 500 dropouts surveyed left school because their classes were boring, they did not see its relevance to their lives outside of school, and they were not motivated to learn. Whatever solutions you put in place must ensure that students will be interested in what you’re offering. Better access to more boring and irrelevant content isn’t going to do the trick.
• The current default model for classroom instruction is obsolete. This has been stated over and over again by people smarter than me. Actually, it probably works just fine for the people privileged and accomplished enough to go to places like Stanford and Harvard and Michigan and Berkeley, but it doesn’t work for the vast majority. There are several major problems with the current system, one that evolved a long time ago for a society that doesn’t resemble the one we live in today. I’ll mention four here:
  • Most jobs today entail working with others, yet most of our efforts to teach have students working alone. 
  • Today’s workers need to combine communication skills with analytical and mathematical skills, yet the strict curricular boundaries represented by our subject divisions don’t encourage or even allow these skills to utilized simultaneously.
  • There are different paths to learning and an improved and productive life beyond school, but we still see many instances of “everyone on the same page at the same time.”
  • The internet has made access to factual information extremely easy, yet our learning activities too often emphasize rote memorization of facts instead of conceptual understanding and practical application.
• Assessments are narrow and unhelpful to students.  Assessment is clearly important. I worry, though, that the focus on a small number of standardized exams is not only reinforcing the obsolete instructional model but also embedding it even more deeply in the system. Moreover, as a “capstone” of your educational experience, a score on a multiple-choice exam is not something that is going to help you get a job (except, of course, to the extent you need a minimal score to get a degree). It isn’t an artifact a student can take to a prospective employer and say “Here’s what I can do.” And yet schools are under increasing pressure to spend more time preparing students to do well on these exams. It can’t be surprising therefore, that students find school boring and irrelevant.
• Good teachers matter. Too often in the past technologists have focused substantial energy in trying to create learning systems that bypassed instructors. While there are some applications where this may make sense, I generally believe we should use technology (a) to allow of good teachers to reach more students effectively and (b) increase the number of good teachers.

Some thoughts on improving the situation

I’m not going to claim to have all the answers to address these issue. The system is incredibly complex (although the health care system is probably even more difficult to make sense of).  Moreover, there isn’t going to be one answer that serves all communities or individuals—a multitude of approaches will be needed to address the issues in different places and for different people. Still, working from the observations above, I'll mention two directions I think are fruitful.

• I would work to explore how to introduce substantially more project-based learning into the curriculum. The primary reason is student interest—practical and relevant project work is much more likely to engage students. This is especially true if students have some degree of choice in the project they undertake (by choosing from an instructor-provided list or constructing their own) and if the project results in some real-world impact. Project work, especially group project work, also addresses other aspects of the “obsolete” school: It has students working in groups and it is much more likely to require interdisciplinary work.

There is ample literature on how well these approaches work. There is also ample literature on the difficulties of implementing and scaling approaches like this. Projects may require additional resources, they may take a teacher outside the comfort-zone of their own knowledge, and they can more difficult to objectively evaluate. Technology has a role in helping, in a variety of ways from easing the administrative burden for teachers to bringing structure, tools and content to students so that they can complete project work more independently.

• The role of assessments is key to any attempt to reform the educational system. With the (fundamentally sound) calls for increased accountability, the role of assessments becomes increasingly important.  Unfortunately, the “teaching to the test” phenomenon coupled with inadequate assessments will result in a system that is arguably worse than the one we have now. Assessment must be strengthened but it must, simultaneously, also be made more varied and complex. Increased use of rich assessments (e.g. essays, performance assessment, oral presentations, demonstrations, exhibitions, and portfolios) is a must.

There are at least two reasons these vehicles have not seen extensive use. First, they are more time-consuming. Second, they are perceived to lack objectivity. We can overcome both of these obstacles and, again, technology can play a significant role.  Technology has proven its ability to improve the efficiency of complex workflows like those entailed in evaluating richer assessments. While the effort may still be greater than feeding a stack of bubble-sheets into an automated scanner, the rewards will be well worth the investment. Technology can also help with increasing the objectivity of rich assessments. A state-wide (or national) platform that provides standard rubrics and examples for teachers and that allows randomized inspection of local practices can go along way to giving us the tools we need to enact these reforms in a meaningful way. And the results of these richer assessments can give students an artifact they can leverage in their next stage of life whether that will be further education or employment.

The difficulty of change

I often mention a picture from Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines shows a group of students and a teacher taking advantage of a new technology, the airplane, in their study of geography. The educational implications of aviation are obvious; instead of relying solely on maps and photographs, the students will be able to actually visit the particular locales and see geographical features from the air. Remembering the capital city, rivers, mountains, political systems and economic strengths of a region become much easier when you have spent some time there. What a wonderful way to make history and geography and politics come alive.

Instead we see the teacher standing at the front of the room directing everyone’s attention to one of the oldest tools for teaching geography: a globe. The class may very well be taking a trip on the plane to visit some interesting and educational location that will enable the students to truly understand and remember its significance. But, with the exception of the shape of the windows (windows that no one is looking through), the scene is indistinguishable from an ordinary classroom. This photo encapsulates one lesson from Cuban’s book quite well—classroom practices are extraordinarily resistant to change and the seemingly most interesting and innovative technologies will generally be absorbed into existing pedagogical practice without changing much.

From primary school through college, the classic image of a teacher dispensing wisdom from the front of a room full of silent students remains all too easy to find. And the classic definition of a lecture comes all to quickly to mind: Lecture is the art of transmitting information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of students without passing through the minds of either.

That’s not to say, of course, that no wonderful exceptions to this standard picture exist, as evidenced by the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award entrants and winners. Nor is it to say that these exceptions don’t take advantage of modern technologies in interesting and important ways. It is simply to acknowledge that technology isn’t automatically going to change anything about the quality of a course. I take two lessons from this.

First, the fundamental determinants of course quality have always been, and remain, the course content, the instructor(s), the learning activities in which the students are engaged and the students themselves. If you want to reform pedagogy, reform pedagogy first and bring technology in where it makes sense to support the change. Don’t hope that technology will do it for you—it is not a Trojan horse that you can use to smuggle in improved teaching and learning practices.

The second lesson is, simply, that the system is complex and that changing one piece of it without changing the others is impossible. The web of forces in the system is very resilient and can (unwittingly!) undermine innovation. We need to be sure to address changes systemically and modify multiple components in the system simultaneously.

Thanks for listening....I'd love to hear your comments.

Something to watch

Finally, a couple of videos that relate to the topics above. I’m sure you’ve seen them but, if not….

Sir Ken Robinson video: Schools Kill Creativity (doesn’t really get going until half-way through)

Tom Chapin’s Not on the Test

Liz Koelman on Reforming Liberal Education

Guido Sarduci’s Five Minute University