Lessons in Responsibility from Spider-Man, Part 2

Yes­ter­day, I began a series of blog posts about the respon­si­bil­ity that comes along with the use of pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy tools in school. We can­not hand stu­dents the keys to the Inter­net with­out some dis­cus­sion of the ethics and respon­si­bil­i­ties of dri­ving on the Superhighway.

But stu­dents aren’t the only ones in this dis­cus­sion that have respon­si­bil­i­ties. Teach­ers also must under­stand their role in the process—and I’m not just talk­ing about their respon­si­bil­ity to teach respon­si­bil­ity to their stu­dents. Teach­ers have three main areas of respon­si­bil­ity of their own when using instruc­tional tools in the classroom.

Learn the Tools

Long before a teacher can pos­si­bly use a tool to teach, she must first be a stu­dent. This has been true as long as there have been tech­no­log­i­cal advances in edu­ca­tion. When chalk­boards were first intro­duced to schools, teach­ers responded much like they do now to mod­ern tech tools.

That sec­ond quote comes from a book of instruc­tion for teach­ers about how to use a chalk­board, includ­ing step-​​by-​​step tuto­ri­als. Today, of course, the chalk­board (or white board) is such an inte­gral part of what we do we don’t even give it a sec­ond thought. Instruc­tion in its use is no longer necessary.

This is not true with more recent tech­nol­ogy. Unlike the chalk­board, today’s teach­ers did not grow up in a cul­ture where com­put­ers and the Inter­net were an inte­gral part of daily life and school. Thus, we need to first become learn­ers and under­stand the tech­nol­ogy our­selves. This may mean tak­ing work­shops and sem­i­nars (more on this in my next post), read­ing books and arti­cles, or just jump­ing in and fid­dling, but it will not hap­pen on its own, and it will not hap­pen by osmosis.

I read a blog post yes­ter­day which gives a great expla­na­tion of the impor­tance of this mind­set, and which also leads right into the next responsibility:

Use the Tools

Many times teach­ers attempt to leap directly from a basic famil­iar­ity with a new tool into using it in instruc­tion. I’m cer­tainly guilty of this myself, par­tic­u­larly if the tool is one that intrigues me and is full of pos­si­bil­i­ties. In my expe­ri­ence, though, this usu­ally leads quickly to either mis­er­able fail­ure or at best a super­fi­cial layer awk­wardly tacked on to exist­ing instruction.

There is a cru­cial step miss­ing: teach­ers must first use the tool them­selves for their own learn­ing, pro­fes­sional or oth­er­wise. Until you inte­grate some­thing this deep and pow­er­ful into your own learn­ing process on some level, you can’t com­pre­hend how a stu­dent will inter­act with it. This is not a new idea, but it is one that does not yet per­vade the pro­fes­sion, and until it does, new tech­nol­ogy will be thought of as a fad or an add-on—or worse, a sub­sti­tute for “real” instruction.

We have to con­tinue to remind our­selves that these are not new sub­jects to be taught, they are sim­ply new tools. Would you trust a fly­ing instruc­tor who could pass a writ­ten test about pilot­ing but had never flown an air­plane? Why, then, do we think we can teach stu­dents about blog­ging if we aren’t blog­gers ourselves?

Design Quality Learning Experiences

This is (and should be) the hard­est part of teach­ing, and one which con­sumes the largest amount of energy and time. If done well, it will be like the Parthenon: the struc­ture you and your stu­dents build together will hold up for a very long time. If done poorly, it will be more like a movie set: it looks great from one side, but has lit­tle sub­stance and less endurance.

Yes­ter­day I dis­cussed the stu­dents’ respon­si­bil­i­ties in using tech­nol­ogy and the impor­tance of teach­ing them. Many objec­tions to tech­nol­ogy use revolve around keep­ing the stu­dents from “fool­ing around” dur­ing class. Let them blog, and they might write about some­thing inap­pro­pri­ate. Let them have cell phones and they might text the test answers to each other. Let them use a wiki and they might get out­side help on their assign­ment. (All of this hap­pened before there was tech­nol­ogy, of course, but let’s just give the argu­ment the ben­e­fit of the doubt for the moment.)

I sus­pect that beneath these objec­tions is fear: fear of los­ing con­trol of the class­room and fear that the lost con­trol will reveal inad­e­quate and inef­fec­tive teach­ing meth­ods that are more eas­ily hid­den in a teacher-​​centered, tra­di­tional structure.

Thus, the prob­lem isn’t the tech­nol­ogy, it’s the teacher. Know the lim­i­ta­tions and pit­falls inher­ent in the tools and plan for them. If they might get out­side help because they can access the wiki any time, then build that into the assign­ment. Encour­age it, even. Make it essen­tial to the task. That’s more real­is­tic any­way. Of course cre­at­ing assign­ments like that is more com­pli­cated. It takes thought, energy, and time. But truth­fully, it is thought energy and time that we should be putting into our instruc­tion even if it does not involve new tools.

To para­phrase Haim Ginott, we must col­lec­tively rec­og­nize the fright­en­ing con­clu­sion that we are the deci­sive ele­ment in our class­rooms, and the respon­si­bil­ity is ours to see that the cli­mate and the learn­ing envi­ron­ment allow our stu­dents to thrive.

Ref­er­ences

Barnard, H. (1839).First annual report of the Sec­re­tary of the Board. &printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0" target="_blank">Con­necti­cut Com­mon School Jour­nal, 1, 155–176.

Alcott, W. A. (1843). &printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0" target="_blank">Slate and black board exer­cises. New York: Mark H. Newman.