How Technology is Changing the Role of the Teacher
Nancy Sulla
board, how about with the subtleties of professional development.
For about a decade we've been talking teachers needing to become the "guide
on the side", facilitator, coach. But few teachers truly know how to play
that role. I watch teachers as they tend to "give over" the lesson to the
students and the technology. They circulate, waiting for a question to
arise or a problem to occur. Worse yet, I've seen teachers off on their own
designing the next project while their students are working.
We need to help teachers embrace this new role. We need to impress upon
them that teaching occurs in many ways, not just from the front of the room.
We need to impress this on students as well. I was in a learner-active,
technology-infused (the term I use in my work) high school biology
classroom. I sat with a group of students and asked them how the class was
going. They said it was okay but that the teacher doesn't teach. "Really!"
I responded. "What does she do?" They told me how she walks around and
sits with them and asks questions. I asked them what they were learning.
They began to offer a wonderful description of nuclear fission and fusion.
I asked them how they learned that. They claimed they learned it on their
own. Then one student explained how the teacher sat with them and helped
them understand something they were confused about. Then another explained
how she presented a short lesson to the whole class. Then another explained
how she helped them diagram the process. Finally, I said, "So what was your
teacher doing all those times?" They looked at me dumbfounded and said,
"Teaching????" Then they looked at each other, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, I
guess she DOES teach." Tough new trails to blaze.
I tell teachers, "Never hover!" Pull up a chair and sit with the students.
Ask questions. Conventional teaching called for telling up front and then
circulating during independent work to see if there are any questions. But
if students are learning outside of the lecture, teachers must be prepared
with different questions. I'll suggest five levels here and hope you'll all
add dimensions to my thinking:
- comprehension -- ask questions that convince you that the students know
what they are learning
- application -- ask questions that convince you that the students can apply
this knowledge to new situations
- connection -- ask questions that convince you that the students can make
connections between this learning and their lives
- synthesis -- ask questions that convince you that the students can take
this information and create new information
- metacognition -- ask questions that convince you that the students are
thinking about their own thinking and learning processes
It is in the questioning that educators "send off" their students to pursue
further, more depthful learning.
Two cents for the morning ...
Nancy Sulla
www.idecorp.com
Art Wolinsky
>Count me in! But wherever do we start? Since this is an administrative
>board, how about with the subtleties of professional development.
Ditto to all you said, Nancy, but there is nothing subtle about it. In the November issue of the Journal of Staff Development the NSDC director (don't have his name in front of me) talks about standards based reform as being a three legged stool, with one of those legs being staff development.
He points out as you do, that most teachers don't know how to be the facilitator. They weren't taught by professors who modeled the methods that support standards based learning and a major effort must be placed in that area.
Art
==========================================
Art Wolinsky 609 698-8223
awol...@adelphia.net
Online Innovation Institute 21st Century Teacher Network
Technology Director New Jersey Chapter Director
http://oii.org http://www.21ct.org
===========================================
I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes
I will surely learn a great deal today.
===========================================
Ferdi Serim
Nancy's vivid posting lets us see what new ways of learning might entail.
Another of our frequent contributors to K12Admin is featured on the cover
of this month's MultiMedia Schools magazine. Ted Nellen's "Morphing from
Teacher to Cybrarian" provides a view of this change from the inside out.
The full text version is available on the website at:
http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan99/nellen.htm
Enjoy!
Ferdi
______________________________________________________
Ferdi Serim phone,fax: 609 924-4815
Editor, MultiMedia Schools http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools
fe...@silicon-desert.com
co-author: NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/netlearn/
"We are more than the sum of our knowledge,
we are the products of our imagination." - Ferdi
Bonnie Bracey
awol...@ADELPHIA.NET writes:
<<
He points out as you do, that most teachers don't know how to be the
facilitator. They weren't taught by professors who modeled the methods that
support standards based learning and a major effort must be placed in that
area.
Art >>
A comprehensive resource is...
<A HREF="http://www.ncrel.org/tandl/homepg.htm">Learning Through Technology
</A>
and..
The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory and the Midwest Mathematics
and Science Consortium collaborated to design and create a series of
multimedia CD-ROMs to support and guide technology planning committees' work
in educational settings. The CD-ROMs, described below, can be ordered through
the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development at
http://www.ascd.org.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
The Research on Technology for Learning
Overview
This CD-ROM is designed to help individuals or groups build a knowledge base
about best practice and research findings on uses of technology in a variety
of learning contexts. The CD-ROM features an executive summary, a report on
reform implications, and an annotated bibliography covering important issues
to consider when using technology in educational settings. Four scenarios
describe typical learning situations found in today's school. Working through
a set of questions, users will be able to define uses of technology,
appropriate to their own settings, as related to learner characteristics,
teacher characteristics, and building/district characteristics. Individuals
or teams can search the bibliographic database to identify research and best
practice resources on specific topics related to implementing technology in
educational settings similar to their own.
A PROBLEM IS TIME
As Oliver Hazard Perry said in a famous dispatch from the War of 1812: "We
have met the enemy and they are [h]ours."
If experience, research, and common sense teach nothing else, they confirm the
truism that people learn at different rates, and in different ways with
different subjects. But we have put the cart before the horse: our schools and
the people involved with them-students, parents, teachers, administrators, and
staff-are captives of clock and calendar. The boundaries of student growth are
defined by schedules for bells, buses, and vacations instead of standards for
students and learning. Prisoners of Time
<A HREF="http://www.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/Prisoners.html">Prisoners Of
Time</A>
It is impossible to deny the tremendous effect rapid technological growth has
had on our society. This explosion of new technologies has changed the way we
live - from the way we do business to the way we communicate with each other.
Technological advancements are also affecting the way we teach and learn.
The business world demands that our schools prepare educated workers who can
use technology effectively in the global marketplace. The president and vice
president of the United States, governors, state legislatures, and other
policy-making groups are increasingly convinced that technology is a central
element of educational reform and improved student learning.
New skills needed in the workplace are catalysts that spur technology use in
the classroom. Computer to student ratios have declined steadily from 50:1 in
1985 to 20:1 in 1990 to an estimated 9:1 in 1997, affecting traditional
classroom practice and even the culture of the schools.
Student enrollment is growing at the same time that the nation's experienced
teaching staff is declining, due to regular retirement. An estimated 2 million
new teachers will be hired during the next decade. Classroom teachers hold the
key to the effective use of technology to improve learning. But if teachers
don't understand how to employ technology effectively to promote student
learning, the billions of dollars being invested in educational technology
initiatives will be wasted.
The nation's teacher education institutions must close the teaching and
learning technology gap between where we are now and where we need to be.
Although progress has been made and exemplary practices exist, recent research
indicates that most teacher education programs have a long way to go.
Teacher education institutions must prepare their students to teach in
tomorrow's classrooms. Rather than wait to see what tomorrow's classrooms will
be like, they must experiment with the effective application of computer
technology for teaching and learning in their own campus practice. Today's
teacher candidates will teach tomorrow as they are taught today.
<A HREF="http://www.ncate.org/projects/tech/TECH.HTM">NCATE's Technology
Report: HTML version</A>
The introduction of computers and other technologies into schools is occurring
at the same time that three decades of research in the cognitive sciences,
which has deepened our understanding of how people learn, is prompting a
reappraisal of teaching practices. We know from this research that knowledge
is not passively received, but actively constructed by learners from a base of
prior knowledge, attitudes, and values. Dependence on a single source of
information, typically a textbook, must give way to using a variety of
information sources. As new technologies become more readily available and
less expensive, they will likely serve as a catalyst for ensuring that new
approaches to teaching gain a firm foothold in schools.
Despite the technology changes in society, being a teacher in American schools
too often consists of helping children and youth acquire information from
textbooks and acting as an additional source of expertise. Teachers are
provided role models of this approach to teaching from kindergarten through
graduate school; their teacher education courses provide hints for making
textbook-oriented instruction interesting and productive, and as teaching
interns, they both observe and practice instruction based upon mastering
information found in books.
Teachers may be forgiven if they cling to old models of teaching that have
served them well in the past. All of their formal instruction and role models
were driven by traditional teaching practices. Breaking away from traditional
approaches to instruction means taking risks and venturing into the unknown.
But this is precisely what is needed at the present time.
<A HREF="http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/events/love-too.html">Powerful
Ideas Need Love Too!</A> Alan Kay
One of the arguments advanced for why it is so difficult to get most children
to learn to think in these new ways is that "this kind of thinking is hard to
learn". But it is quite hard to learn to ride a bike, harder still to shoot
baskets, and one of the hardest things to learn how to do is to hit a baseball
consistently. If one watches children trying to learn these skills, what one
sees is that they fail most of the time, but keep on trying until they learn,
usually over years. This is more like their attitude when learning to walk and
talk than the defeatism so often found in schoolwork. In fact, what really
seems to be the case is that children are willing to go to any lengths to
learn very difficult things and endure almost an endless succession of
"failures" in the process if they have a sense that the activity is an
integral part of their culture.
Montesorri used this very successfully in her schools. Suzuki has had similar
success in music learning via setting up a musical culture in which the child
is embedded. Television and cultural continuity is very good at providing an
environment that includes athletics and certain kinds of music and dance, and
shows what it means to be highly skilled at them. An impressively large number
of scientists either had a scientist parent or one who was extremely
interested in science -- sometimes just extremely interested in "learning as a
high calling". Difficulty is not the real issue here. Belonging to a culture
and building a personal identity are. We could call this "rite of passage"
motivation.
If we hark back to the less than 5% estimates for the percentage of the
American population that has learned to think in these new ways and recall
that television is not a good medium to show these new ways of thinking, this
means that most children will have no embedded cultural experience in these
ideas before coming to school. I don't know what percentage of elementary
school teachers have learned to think in these new ways, but I would guess
from personal experience that it is very similar to that of the population as
a whole. This means that it will be very unlikely for most children to
experience these new ways of thinking at home or at school or through
television -- especially as embedded into the general ways of doing and
thinking which are so important to how children assign value to what they are
going to try really hard to learn.
Other interesting sites.
<A HREF="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/idt/">Building the 21st Century School</A>
<A HREF="http://www.nfie.org/takechar.htm">Teachers Take Charge of Their
Learning</A>
<A HREF="http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/techgap/navigate.cgi">A New
Model for Education</A>
Bonnie Bracey
Nancy Sulla
>Ditto to all you said, Nancy, but there is nothing subtle about it. In the
November issue of the Journal of Staff Development the NSDC director (don't
have his name in front of me) talks about standards based reform as being a
three legged stool, with one of those legs being staff development.
Sorry Art, poor choice of words ... by subtle, I meant it's something that
too often is taken for granted. We tend to think of staff development as
alternative assessment, multiple intelligences, technology infusion ... and
we cover the "big picture" but we rarely offer a teacher suggestions for
what to say and do when sitting next to a youngster -- facilitating.
You must be referring to Dennis Sparks. More info on www.nsdc.org or the NJ
Staff Development Council (I happen to be on the advisory board) at
www.njsdc.org.