What if…my teacher was an app??? February 26, 2012

from Associate Professor Susanne Gannon

Susanne Gannon writes on the increasing trend in schools towards online learning, and argues that teachers are very important in utilisng new technologies in education; indeed that “the teacher is the key”.

Last November the Wall Street Journal reported in ‘My teacher is an app’ on an increasing trend in the United States for high schooling to be delivered entirely online. In particular states, this phenomenon has been more marked than others. The article reports that Florida requires all public school students to take at least one class online, Idaho will soon require two, while Georgia allows public school students to take entire courses on their iphones or Blackberries. Entirely online high schools are proliferating. Partly these moves are justified by the respective authorities in terms of preparing students for the cyber university, but no doubt they are also partly responses to crises in education that see some states as performing particularly poorly in standardised testing, and to ongoing issues around recruitment and retention of quality teachers for disadvantaged students. While the affordances of connected classrooms and other networking technologies have proved very useful for Australian schools with small numbers of students in particular curriculum areas, or remote and rural schools, and for teacher professional learning, we are – thus far – untouched, as far as I know, by large scale relocations of learning from the ‘real’ to the virtual. The other insidious move that is apparent in the WSJ article is the corporate control of online learning, and through a sort of sleight-of-hand – by supplying services that under-resourced schools may be unable to deliver themselves – an incursion of for-profit companies into not-for-profit public schooling markets.

What about teachers in online schools? They are designers, presumably, of the learning materials that students are accessing on their various devices. At least the corporations are employing teachers, the article tells us. Teachers are built into the modules. One student reported that he listened to ‘most of’ an online lecture that ‘his’ English teacher was presenting, explaining the concept of a protagonist, to the 126 ninth graders who were logged for that session. I am unclear about when and where the teacher will be available to check their understanding and application of the concept to texts that they might be reading (except in a pre-prepared quiz or test) for that module. I suspect that next year’s students will hear the same voice and the same lecture that they hear this year. On the audio podcast there will be no signs of aging, no changes in mood, no changes in teacher. If the teacher is seconded to higher duties, takes leave or is hit by a bus, the students won’t suffer a casual or replacement who may not know them as well as their own teacher. But this teacher is unlikely to know them anyway. To give them their due however, some of the schools do offer email or phone support to students, though delays in response of up to three days are common, or ‘the occasional video conference’. Some offer field trips and live classrooms at a school building for students who prefer that – although most learning will still be online and self-directed. No doubt the profit margins are greatly enhanced when teacher salaries are minimised in the educational delivery equation. The article notes that one school district in Idaho sees the wholesale outsourcing of education to online providers as ‘a creative solution’ to the state’s budget crisis. Other inadvertent consequences of students, and the funding that follows them, shifting out of public schools includes the slashing of LOTE curriculum and cancellation of the school play. Results from these experiments in terms of improved student results are erratic.

It is clear that ICTs are transforming education. A recent mapping exercise we completed as part of the Strategic Secondary Education Research Program (SSERP) for Greater Western Sydney, a partnership between the University of Western Sydney and two large regions of the NSW Department of Education and Communities, found that ICTs and Web 2.0 technologies play ‘a fundamental role’ in planning, delivery and access to innovative educational programs. We plan to begin supporting a cluster of schools to research their practice in this area through 2012. These technologies were taken up within constructivist, collaborative, learning centred pedagogies, enabling new relationships between teachers and students, and extending teachers’ skills and knowledges. Teachers are not replaced by technologies but rather, effective and powerful use of technologies is reliant on teachers and how they are able to make best use of the affordances of technologies to enhance learning. My UWS colleague Jane Hunter’s recent blog entry on 21st Century Learning emphasises how innovative use of technologies is reliant on ‘imitable teachers’ – highly skilled, enthusiastic, imaginative, expert at integrating technologies seamlessly and purposively into classrooms – who can open up learning in classrooms. Jane’s research demonstrates that the teacher is the key.

I began writing this blog just as the new school year was beginning around Australia, and a day after watching the Four Corners program Revolution in the classroom. Anticipating the Gonski review of school funding, the program focused on school based management and drew comparisons between the relative autonomy experienced by private and public schools. However what struck me in the footage was, firstly, the uncompromising focus each school placed on teacher effectiveness and on student learning. Secondly, it was obvious that innovative leadership had created cultures of collaboration and critical reflexive practice in each of the schools, supported by coaching, mentoring and peer support programs for teachers at all stages of their careers and enabling teachers to research and evaluate their own practice. These were also characteristics of the innovative DEC secondary schools that we mapped in 2011 in Western and South Western Sydney, where many of these innovations were enabled by National Partnership funding. Finally, the other striking feature for me of the footage from each of the schools in the Four Corners program was the relationships that were evident between teachers and students. A year 9 student says that it is the ‘teacher-student relationship’ that has made all the difference: ‘it’s about the teacher understanding the student and the way they should be taught’. A year 12 student says that teachers ‘really care’, they’ve shown ‘massive support’ and have pushed and supported students to make sure that ‘you do the best that you can’. This is not a vague sort of ‘teacher-student relationship’ – although connection, respect, interest and engagement are all necessarily part of it – but it is a purposeful relationship that includes a focus on learning about each student and understanding their learning needs. Getting the best out of every student is the goal at each of the three schools that are profiled and this is premised on knowing each student not only through carefully analysed assessment strategies, that are then used to adjust pedagogy, but also on knowing the student as a particular and complex person. The focus on performance that was evident in the Four Corners program carries with it a risk, however, that the ‘tight coupling’ of education to teaching and learning outcomes that can be measured in mandated assessment and other data driven performance measures may reposition anything else as superfluous. The final scenes at the schools cut between the teacher calculating HSC bands and rankings relative to other schools to the warmth of her hug and ‘I’m so proud of you’ for the student who has transcended his ‘well below average’ record in English. An app will never do this.

The provocation of  ’My teacher is an app…’ points to an ongoing need to maintain the emphasis on teacher quality as the crucial factor in student learning. Teacher quality is not an inherent characteristic of an individual, not a feature of personality, but an ongoing learning journey throughout a career. It is not solely an individual characteristic. Nor is it solely to do with cognitive domains. School leadership structures and an ethos of inquiry and collaboration that supports teachers to continue investigating and improving their practice alongside each other are crucial for this. Research I conducted in a sample of DEC English faculties in our region that had sustained good results in English Extension 2 indicated that strong and collaborative leadership with shared responsibility for improving student learning and teaching quality characterised these faculties. Interviews with high quality graduate English teachers in their first five years of teaching in a range of schools also suggested that the context of leadership in their school and faculty made the difference between their capacities to develop rapidly into effective and excellent teachers and to build the resilience and commitment to keep them within the profession. The most effective teachers are committed to their students as people and as learners and they are incorporating all sorts of technologies into the teaching and learning activities that they design for their students and they are opening spaces where students can surprise them with what they can do with technology. Despite the simulation of care that the voice of ‘Siri’ from an iphone might give, I don’t see any time soon when ‘My teacher is an app…’ will be any kind of solution to the complexities of contemporary education.

Susanne Gannon is an Associate Professor of Education at UWS. She is Director of Programs for Adult and Postgraduate Education and Academic Course Adviser for the Master of Education (Leadership). She loves her ipad and is a great fan of many apps including i-university, however she is increasingly annoyed by the spamming of her faculty by emails marketing poor quality apps for teacher education, and remains wary about the erratic quality of many educational apps. She is involved in a number of ICT innovations in teacher education, including the national Teaching Teachers for the Future Project and a laptop trial project at UWS. She is a member of the SSERP project team at UWS. She is also the current editor of the journal English in Australia, the next issue of which focuses on English teaching and new technologies (guest edited by Kelli McGraw and Scott Bulfin). The views expressed in this opinion piece are entirely personal and do not represent those of the School of Education at UWS.

The context of leadership in 21st century schools: constructing the narrative for teachers October 2, 2011

 from Professor Steve Wilson

In his second post on school leadership, Steve Wilson argues that school leaders have a key role: to construct a ‘pedagogical narrative’, or ’learning story’, for teachers and students in their school.

My recent post on school leadership examined the importance of formal school leaders in building up other teachers as informal leaders in schools, and the skills leaders use to do this. This is part of the context of 21^st century schools – to create effective learning communities and leadership participation and engagement among teachers and their students. These learning communities experiment with learning strategies, share successes and failures, and progress the work of the school over time to improve teaching approaches and learning outcomes for all.

A key part of school leadership is to enable teachers to work well by creating for them and with them a compelling pedagogical narrative in the school . This narrative is a story about teaching and learning in their school that is optimistic, clearly and compellingly conveyed by the leadership, and which supports teachers to be clear about what they need to do in their day-to-day work. The 21^st century school exists in a complex environment in which most forms of information are now readily available on-line. We are information rich (in terms of quantity and accessibility), but information poor (in terms of quality and reliability). Young people of all ages now have a lot of power in their own time to access and create information, and the role of the teacher and school in this new environment in providing quality ‘learning’ is becoming less clear. The pedagogical narrative or story of the school is important in guiding the work of teachers so they can work with, not against, these new ways of accessing and using information (learning). It is the job of school leaders to create this story for, and with, their teachers. This is the key leadership challenge in the 21^st century school and defines the context of 21^st century school leadership.

In the 21^st century school this narrative needs to firstly explain the nature of 20^th century learning, what was good about it, and what was not so good. The story needs to explain how the fundamentals have not changed – learning still needs to be challenging, enjoyable, and meaningful for young people. However, the story also needs to explain how new forms of e-networking and technologies ‘fit’ into the goal of achieving quality learning, and what this means for the ways teachers can work effectively.  This story, well told and shared amongst teachers, provides a powerful basis for clarity of purpose, and for learning transformation, in schools. Here’s how I would construct the narrative.

How should we think about 20^th century learning?

We know that, understandably, many schools are still fundamentally situated in 20^th century practices. Despite a century of extraordinary innovation in western education in various eras and places, learning in schools is still dominated by: prescriptive, externally driven curricula; pedagogies that are over-dominated by didactic teaching approaches and passive learning; a focusing on lower level knowledge and a lack of ‘deep’ learning; and learning which focuses on whole groups which progress in standard ways, rather than on individual dispositions and needs. These practices generally placed students as passive receivers of the expert knowledge of others. They are captured in my graphic below of the 20^th century classroom as the ‘contained classroom’. This graphic conveys the teacher as the dominating force in the classroom, directing all learning, with students learning quite individualistically and disconnected from each other. They are ‘contained’ within the classroom, also disconnected from the outside world, experiencing second-hand learning through textbooks and teacher exposition, and exercising little learning initiative. While this is not an accurate picture of many contemporary classrooms (it is a worst-case picture in some respects), it is a reasonable representation of the student experience in many 20th century classrooms. We know the results of these practices. We experience high levels of disengagement of young people from school learning – even amongst our brightest young people. We find it difficult to motivate young people to want to learn. Many of us are not satisfied with levels of student learning engagement or achievement, and many teachers do not experience the levels of professional satisfaction in their work that they would like.

However, we also know what works from 20^th century approaches. Carrington (2006) for example, reviewing decades of research into middle-years schooling, has identified what she calls the ‘signature practices’ of schooling – those things that have been found to work (that is, they engage students, promote ‘deep’ learning, and lead to learning achievement). They include: a focus on higher order, critical and holistic thinking, problem-solving and lifelong learning; learner-centred education; negotiated and cooperative learning; authentic and outcomes-based assessment, and heterogeneous and flexible student groupings. A good pedagogical narrative will draw attention to these ‘signature practices’ of 20^th century schooling, suggesting they are a bridge to the new forms of learning that have now begun to evolve and which will eventually characterise the 21^st century school.

How is 21^st century learning different?

The pedagogical narrative that school leaders construct for and with their teachers should enable teachers to see the new forms of knowledge creation, transfer and networking as opportunities for enhanced learning engagement and learning outcomes. In this optimistic narrative, 21^st century learning technologies and networking tools are opportunities for learning, not things to be resisted – the challenge is for teachers to be supported in learning how to work with them. Various thinkers about education (for example Leadbeater, 2008; Miliband, 2006; Williamson & Payton, 2009) argue that these approaches can lead to exciting opportunities for personalised and student-centred learning, in which decisions about learning can be partially driven and influenced by students, thereby enhancing their personal learning motivation and engagement.

My second graphic (above) shows the 21^st century classroom as a ‘networked learning community’ – a more fluid and flexible learning environment than that of the 20^th century. The teacher is still at the centre, directing and influencing student learning through good planning and targeted explicit teaching, and skills and concept-building. However in this more permeable and connected environment, students are also connected to each other, and to others outside of the classroom, as active learning agents. They use their intelligence and motivation, supported wholeheartedly and guided by their teacher, to engage in activities and projects they have helped to define. They use networking technologies to communicate with, and seek knowledge from, others within the class, and within and outside of the school. They use these learning networks to test and share their own learning and the cognitive and creative products they have generated through their learning. The teacher is still an essential and very significant presence, but no longer the ubiquitous and dominating presence of the 20^th century classroom.  The 21st century classroom is an active, participatory learning community, a part of many other learning communities, with students and their teachers as committed and active members of these communities of learners.

Clearly, such a pedagogical narrative is optimistic in its vision and expectations. Yet, it is clearly demonstrated in the both the conceptual and case-study literature on 20^th century learning and pedagogy that disengaged students can become quickly and powerfully re-engaged through the creation of motivating learning communities in which they, the students, have a voice and can contribute to learning decisions. It is the job of school leaders to ensure that teachers are aware that such an unashamedly optimistic narrative of learning does exist, and that this optimistic story of student engagement through 21st century pedagogies should drive their practices and their school’s evolution into a 21^st century school. It is the capacity of school leaders to develop and sustain just such an optimistic pedagogical narrative for the teachers and students in their school that defines leadership in the 21^st century school. It is the necessity for schools to develop such effective pedagogical narratives that provides the key driver and context for school leadership in the 21st century.

References:    Carrington, V. (2006). Rethinking middle years. Early adolescents, schooling and digital culture. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.    Leadbeater, C. (2008). What’s next? 21 ideas for 21^st century learning. London: The Innovation Unit.    Miliband, D. (2006). Choice and voice in personalised learning. In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Ed.). Personalising education. Paris: OECD.    Williamson, B. and Payton, S. (2009). Curriculum and teaching innovation: Transforming classroom practice and personalisation. London: Futurelab. Online at:  http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/handbooks/curriculum_and_teaching_innovation.pdf

Steve Wilson is Head of the School of Education at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.