Matt Brady has been creating digital ecosystems that organize, inform and inspire for two decades. He writes as a curatorial journalist- connecting related stories across disciplines often beyond “Education”- to examine and understand educational leadership in a more adaptive and predictive way.
You stand at the water’s edge, looking out at the vast ocean of possibilities that technology holds for your school community in 2023/2024.
You look toward the horizon and see wispy clouds, seagulls…and wait, is that a giant digital clockface flashing 12:00? It is. It’s the infamous “blinking 12:00″ from VCRs of yore, encapsulating the frustration that arises when technology requires more cognitive load than users are willing to bear. When the perceived cost in time and effort exceeds the perceived benefit, resistance to technology ensues.
You wonder: Could it be that technological transformation is far more a social process than it is a technological one?
Might the path to meaningful progress be high-touch as much or more than it is high-tech? You consider your school’s overall past performance in challenging established norms, dismantling paradigm paralysis, and encouraging innovation…and…what’s clear is a fresh approach certainly couldn’t hurt.
Dynamic school leaders see their role as serving their communities, as co- constructors of systems and workflows that prioritize the needs of students, staff and the community–the users—first. This is how dynamic school cultures do difficult things.
You know that organizations fall to the level of their systems far more easily and more often than they rise to the level of their goals so you realize you need to know which strategies to achieve “techno-social system transformation” have the best shot at moving the needle for gains in student achievement.
You smile as three question pathways appear before you:
What if you, ask not—“How do we get there?” but instead, “Where can we get from here?”
What if instead of setting top-down goals, you collectively envision a broad direction and cultivate an evolutionary mindset among staff by asking “Where can we get from here?”
Leadership, in its truest sense, is not about extracting from people; it’s about enabling people and teams to move forward by fostering a sense of collective empowerment and community. Hierarchical authority as it is in schools, however, tends to evoke compliance, not foster commitment. Commitment and collaboration will take your community farther than compliance so we must rethink our policies to motivate rather than constrain, drive change from within rather than enforcing it from above.
What if you elevated staff and students into active agents of change and ruthlessly went after systems and processes that are diverting energies to administrative Yak Shaving over student learning and support?
A pivotal first step towards meaningful progress is to engage everyone in collective inquiry @ system and process redesigns. Students and staff should be designing technology innovations, not just implementing them. Encourage teams to question deeply held assumptions, challenge the “we’ve always done it that way” mentality, and examine systems and processes that are too often frittering away our most precious resource — human brain cycles.
Daisy chained, pieced together systems lacking stakeholder input from day 1 get put into place in ways that may seem locally efficient (for the IT Dept, Office staff, Admin) but make yak shavers of the users these systems are ostensibly supporting.
What if you deliberately re-balanced your digital ecosystem toward high touch support?
More than anything, we need to ensure that inquiry and experiments in digital transformation do not create an onerous burden for our community but instead provide meaningful, user-friendly, and beneficial change. Computational kindness, a concept that refers to the way we design and use technology in ways that are considerate of human factors, should be at the heart of our endeavors. This shift toward a “user focus” prioritizes high- touch integration support and proactive problem finding alongside the “reactive problem solving only” style of support that is the relatively prevalent norm.
By turning this inquiry into action we are in much better shape to write the next chapter.
Has any elementary school student in the history of the world tried to sell their Google Slides project to anyone? No you say? So why do elementary schools spend time each year forcing students as young as 2nd grade to attempt to follow arbitrary citation formats for images they re-use after grim, confusing lectures about “Copyright” from the head of the class?
We’ve all seen it: the three slide presentation with a title, a few sentences, an image or two and then the attempt at a citation, usually below the image which then mars the aesthetics of the student’s work. Instead of focusing on how to use the tool, to format things for readability or follow design principles, we get nine year old novice keyboarders taking eleven minutes to mis-type a URL. I walked in on this “copyright/citation lesson” so many times as a tech integrationist; you could literally see the enthusiasm for both the subject and the technology draining from the student.
The idea of dropping citation instruction from elementary digital learning programs will cause some serious pearl clutching among some of our media center and teacher colleagues, and let’s be clear—nobody is saying you can claim another’s work as your own, that is common sense.
What is not sensible is the way “copyright” is almost universally mis-taught in schools.
As “taught”, it not only discourages kids from following their natural inclination to be innovative and inquisitive using digital tools, more importantly, the endless focus on copyright denies the stronger argument that almost everything a student does as schoolwork falls under “Fair Use” and would be/is therefore exempt from any/all copyright claims in the first place.
In US law, fair use has four broad categories. They are:
Effect: Whether the purpose and character of the use are of a commercial nature or are for nonprofit educational purposes.
Nature: Whether the nature of the copyrighted work itself is primarily factual or creative.
Amount: How much of the work is used, or how substantial is the part used, in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
Purpose: How the use affects the author’s ability to market and realize a profit from the work.
Fair use is almost always granted if it is noncommercial, for schoolwork or education and not being used to try and make money, obtain views, etc.. As well, re-purposing an image is not using the entire article, webpage, etc., as your own. Student reports are not meant to be public repositories to inform others about penguins or cats or tigers, and when students use images and information in their assignments, it’s nearly always for non fiction work, which is almost always granted fair use.
At a minimum, schools should be balancing the boogeyman of copyright with the freedoms of fair use.
What is nearly as frustrating as the focus on copyright over fair use is the tone deafness to the fact that Western culture largely rests on and is entirely enthralled by sampling, reusing and repurposing material. Popular entertainment is so often based on sequels and spinoffs, rehashes and remixes! We should be encouraging creative transformation and re-use in schools, not haranguing primary school kids about copyright.
The good news is that some things can be improved by actually doing less, not more! Please pass this link of resources from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to your teachers, your integrationists and your media center colleagues. Because, to cite the Foundation’s main point behind creating the resource, “Students need fair use information, not copyright intimidation.”
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912)
NOTE: I’ve heard it said that great writing is ‘clear thinking about mixed feelings,’ and I have a lot of them after working through Sonny Magana’s book and the research and marketing behind it. As an experiment, I published this post and then published a follow up post after I saw Magana speak about his book in person at the ELMLE conference in Budapest. I wanted to be open to changing my mind if I was misunderstanding him or his work etc., The follow-up post is here.
NOTE2: By the way, the title of this post is a “riff” off of Magana’s “rock and roll!” related storytelling/style; that at some level the genesis for the book started around a campfire hearing Eddie Van Halen for the first time as a young man learning guitar.
By the end, I hope readers will not only better understand the issues Magana addresses in his book, but also hope you will be more confident in making an informed judgement when hearing your own heads of school and principals offer solutions to the challenges of technology integration.
First, my conclusions:
Magana’s framework is itself sound— (I know, I created one largely identical to it a decade ago as an MYP IT teacher.), so one can argue it could be an improvement over SAMR, Triple E. TPACK, etc., but the problem is that for generalist teachers, it’s akin to putting a new stereo in your car to fix a faulty transmission. As “Julie’s” review of the book on Amazon.com explains perfectly: (click the review to open it in a new window to read)
Magana’s research partner, John Hattie, blurbs the book and seems to be saying the opposite, claiming that understanding why performance is so low is “critical”. I don’t get the sense that either Hattie or Magana understand very well what happens when you approach people and tell them “you’re doing it wrong,” especially without acknowledging/affirming first what they are up against that is completely outside their control.
Magana points to Hattie’s Visible Learning data which claims “computer technology” as having effects underneath the zone of desired effects for the past 50 years. If this type of research and technology integration has been his “life’s work”, the lack of explanation, pushback or questioning of Hattie’s data, methodology or vague categorization of what exactly Hattie supposedly measured with regard to “computer technology”, seems incongruent.
In a promotional piece on Magana’s website written about a school that implemented his T3 framework, the actual changes made to implement it could only have been done by Administrators, not teachers. The piece claims success came from the provision of tech training for teachers through a “Curriculum Camp” and allowing demand from teachers to drive tech choices/integration instead of top down decision making. This does not square with the claim that the problem with tech failure stems from “tell and practice” teaching methods. What this piece actually demonstrates is that technology sprayed into classrooms without adequate teacher training is going to result in low teacher efficacy with technology. You have to change the admin approaches first, not the other way around. Nowhere in Magana’s book are administrators asked to be responsible for these types of changes, yet they are front and center in the “success stories?”
Corwin’s stable of authors all blurb the book effusively on the Corwin site, on Amazon,LinkedIn, Sonny’s website, etc., without disclosing that they are all fellow Corwin authors. How is this different than Amazon product reviews where the financial incentives/conflicts of interest are not disclosed? If this kind of intra publisher back scratching is common practice, so be it, but it seems contrived.
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“Where are the nuts and bolts?”
For two former teachers and tech integrationists who’ve no doubt shared many of same experiences in schools, I draw different conclusions than Magana does about the root cause of low impact technology integration. I began writing about these realities in TIE back in June of 2019. I called some of the phenomena Trickledown Edtechonomics, the Edtechochamber and Kabuki Integration.
During the decade and a half plus years I taught, coached and lead Edtech programs in several schools and countries, I worked with administrative leadership who more often than not had a limited grasp of technology but could both micromanage and starve IT programs of attention simultaneously; no small feat. My hope in publishing this review is to offer my experience so you can make up your own minds what you think makes sense as the best next step to invest scarce time and resources in your own school. On to the review.
The studies the book is based on some consider “Pseudoscience”
One cannot review Magana’s book without first reviewing the material on which Magana bases it on, which is the work of Australian researcher, John Hattie.
Hattie’s partnership with the educational publisher Corwin (both Hattie’s and Magana’s publisher) is to develop professional publications and learning workshops. Hattie has co-authored about twelve different books since publishing the original Visible Learning book in 2009, all variations on the same theme and all containing the same highly controversial analysis as a starting point. One can find Visible Learning books for math, literacy, K-5, science, teaching, and a host of other spinoffs, the most recent being Magana’s book.
There are many critics of Hattie’s work and it’s conclusions, but the core complaint is that the work is unscientific and his meta-methodology draws conclusions that simply cannot be drawn. Another is that Hattie’s work facilitates the rise of the guru, one who outlines how things could be and provides aspirational descriptions of a utopian future if we just do the work…often without any consideration of how the labor involved in the new work will be “paid for” and by whom.
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The Role of Leadership, Teachers and Solutions in Technology Integration
Role of Leadership
Any school that believes the use of technology can improve instruction must find a way to provide training for teachers and opportunities for them to practice and prepare technology enhanced lessons.
If they can’t or don’t, then school administration should be held responsible for the failures and no one else. Otherwise, what does their “leadership” even mean? Who is hiring all these “tell and practice” teachers Magana and Hattie say are mucking everything up? Who is setting and directing the schedules that enable or disable the collaborative planning necessary to coordinate such “transformative education frameworks?” Who is controlling the PD budgets? The management of the IT department? The overall school culture?
It’s not teachers.
At best it is disheartening when you see leadership responsibilities foisted on teachers who have zero power to make the programmatic decisions that would enable and increase the possibility of success for technology integration.
Nearly everyone would agree that Edtech has been successful in getting kid’s parents connected to the school, making student assessments viewable online, enabling endless variations on digital teaching, made many forms of collaboration a breeze, survey data collection is now easily done, the list goes on. Edtech’s successes are in command and control, communication and collaboration among teachers, but this is largely digital teaching, not digital learning, and thus it’s not really aimed at student achievement. Magana does not address this or make any distinctions about what exactly he’s talking about when he talks about “computer technology.”
Schools have been successful with this kind of digital teaching, and I think that’s why more and more you’re seeing schools trying to commingle the success of command and control tech and sell it as part of “digital learning” that is benefiting students. It’s a very convenient conflagration for schools to make, sort of like digital “Kleenex”, but everything being lumped together makes real problem solving much more difficult.
Most schools have some kind of marketing for Information Technology, descriptions of their aim to provide 21st century, student centered learning and some even have a scope and sequence/curriculum for digital learning, a makerspace, etc.. On close inspection, a much smaller number of schools actually have an operational vision, processes, expertise and leadership to make it all function for powerful discovery and learning for students.
Underneath the high visibility, low impact provisioning for students is in large part I think the pernicious myth of the digital native. This nearly 20 year old, evidence free myth was started by Marc Prensky (another Corwin author) and I would argue one of the myth’s most significant effects was that it gave school administrators a rationale and cover for minimizing time and resources deployed to train staff and students on the devices they were pushing into classrooms.
Which has lead us to the reality of much of Edtech in the classroom, Kabuki Integration. This is when culture hasn’t changed because no skill-sets nor mindsets were changed: New boxes, old ideas. Magana calls it “technology rich and innovation poor”, I call it FOMO and virtue signaling over virtuosity. Whatever you call it, it is high concept performance art; the expensive hardware and software is all there, but the critical bits behind it all, the “mindware”, is largely missing. Without having done the work to create a functional digital culture, absent a user focus and the requisite socio-technical feedback and iteration processes, many of today’s Edtech implementations are the equivalent of giving teachers chainsaws:
It all depends on how teachers use it. We don’t buy a chain saw for every teacher. If we did, a few teachers would do brilliant work with the chain saws, a few others would cut off their thumbs, and the vast majority would just make a mess.” Dr. Gary Stager
So in a sense, Magana is right in that teachers would be better teachers if they were also better technologists, but what is interesting about Stager’s quote is that we in fact have given chainsaws to almost every teacher, many times with only the barest minimal of instruction/support in how to use it. The result? A mess. What else should we expect?
Teachers
We’ve been steadily increasing the amount of operating systems, apps and hardware every teacher and student must know each year. Our orientations and PD include a tiny fraction of the training teachers eventually piece together on their own just to stay afloat, let alone innovate. In my last school we had over a half-dozen major software platforms staff needed to navigate and that didn’t even include any “learning” apps for lessons, etc., that was just for infrastructure, grades, curriculum, communications, storage, etc..
Why aren’t teachers efficacious at imparting digital learning skills even when they have integration support? Because the tech integration process into units/lessons, the functional integration system and mechanisms that connect a schools digital learning “aspirations” to actual classroom activity are often completely absent or inconsistent at best in all but the smallest percentage of schools, even the “better” schools. And this floundering is as at least as much or more the result of programming choices by administrators, as it is the way teachers teach, and Magana has nothing at all to say about this in his book.
There is no shame in being an “Average user” as without continual access to training and knowledge, without being told that it’s not worth pursuing a certain course of action because there’s a non-obvious roadblock that leads to negative results, without someone to tell them they should try procedure X in this specific step because “it just works better when you do it this way,” everyone struggles. Getting access to this kind of hard earned tech knowledge and skill is an enormous performance advantage and that’s why it’s such a shame that so much tech is rolled out with so little time devoted to coaching and integration support.
Also mentionable, in teachers defense, regarding the common refrain from the school community peanut gallery that “The kids are just sitting there on their devices watching/doing X instead of doing the work in class…” To suggest that a teachers inability to defeat the work of professional psychologists, behaviorists, gamification experts, and all the other people paid to make devices, games and social media addicting is somehow the fault of the teacher is at best irksome.
Solutions
Magana is correct that we’re putting computers and other technology in a school system that was designed for a totally different epoch. In part, we’re still living under the legacy of the blackboard, the overhead projector and pencil and paper, technologies that required presentation bit by bit…which is why it had to be divided into curriculums, subjects, assignments…where children then had to be organized into age groups and rows because what could be taught was restricted by the conditions under which the knowledge was disseminated.
Today, knowledge dissemination is largely the reason “computer technology” is assigned to students to use in schools—most often it’s used as an efficient content delivery and assessment system; and it’s prescriptive, not imaginative. It does things to children; rather than empower them to do things that are important to them. Tech use in schools is largely about following rules and copyright, finding the right answers, consuming in the basic ways what you’ve been told to consume; it’s the way you process and turn in assignments. Magana is correct that schools generally remain at this type of “translational”, surface learning.
Magana’s recommendations are in sync with the feedback I’ve gotten from students over the years is that information technology has been the most beneficial to students as an autodidactic launching pad; enabling self determined, independent learning. Unfortunately, schools, leaders and teachers today are ill prepared, and often hostile towards this type of learning as it requires an entirely different approach to “School.” And no, you cannot single teachers out as the resistance, most I have worked with would love to loosen up how and what they teach, but parents, school leadership and even students often reject these “new teaching methods”.
As far as new ways of doing “School”, teachers largely do not seem to have the support systems necessary to re-conceptualize their educational roles and the requirements placed upon them. Whether it’s Magana’s framework or another, absent change at an administrative level that not only acknowledges the need for teacher training/support, but actually devotes adequate (ongoing) resources toward it; creating the culture, calendaring and communication systems to support the collaboration it requires, godspeed to you in “disrupting Education.”
Assuming the Status Quo in Schools Stays Pretty Much The Same (it’s a safe bet), What Might a Truly New Framework for Digital Learning Look Like?
So, if the computing “grammar” and ecosystem kids experience in school, its structure and constraints, stand in the way of the real possibilities computers and the internet represent for learning, what then?
Outside of the school environment, digital tools can offer an incredible breadth of experience in a tiny footprint, — IF and it’s a big IF, you know how to use IT yourself and have the ability and patience to guide others in how to use IT.
Assuming a person had the skills and patience, what might be possible?
What if you set schools aside completely, forgot about them as part of digital learning until the Magana’s and the Admins and the teachers of the world get their priorities and responsibilities worked out, and instead you focused on cultivating one of the most accurate (and uncontested) predictors of student achievement: parental involvement in their child’s education?
In other words, what if you were to design a system that was about learning with technology, not teaching with it; acting as the curator and coach of students’ and parents learning experiences together? e.g., A framework that includes dedicated “mindware development” for digital learning, rather than focusing on the process and devices and apps for digital teaching which is a different animal altogether?
This way you could imprint the better angels of what technology is useful for and ingrain the right types of “screentime” from the start. Young children would then have a useful tool that follows them through the rest of the their schooling, not a debilitating distraction as many children today seem to relate primarily with devices.
Perhaps technology is best learned as an autodidactic launchpad, not taught as the way to turn in assignments?
NOTE: This post is a follow on of my review of Sonny Magana’s book. The previous post entitled Not So Hot for Teacher?
A Fata Morgana is a mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon. Early associations of the effect were said to resemble “fairy castles built in the air.”
A Fata Magana is a mirage suggested that by making tweaks to how they teach, teachers can disrupt all of the highly interdependent status quo fixtures of “Education” itself and double student achievement. Like the Fata Morgana, it is suggestive of fairy castles built in the air.
TLDR: Polymath believes his interpretation of Hattie’s meta study of technology’s effect size on student achievement afforded him insight into creating a framework that doubles student achievement while requiring far less teacher effort. This is purportedly achieved by combining “high probability teaching strategies” and tracking student emotions about their work solving “wicked problems” using whatever technology they deem appropriate. While there is no shortage of dramatic descriptive detail, Magana leaves out how the framework integrates within Education’s core subjects.
Magana’s Entry in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Education
I learned a great deal from this experiment of doing research, writing a critical review and then seeing the author speak about the work in person.
The first jolt of the process was the instant feeling of camaraderie and collegiality walking into an education conference with a hundred and fifty other people. Seeing all the smiles ostensibly all there to “educate better” it was hard to imagine being critical of anything or anyone in that initial moment. As humane and comforting as this feeling was, I noted this is also related to why it is so hard to maintain an independent voice in a school.
Sonny’s Session for Teachers
I went to Sonny’s presentation for teachers first. There were about ten of us. I was familiar with his sessions as I’d seen and read so much online already, nonetheless I was surprised just how exactly the session went like a copy of what I’d seen online. His message discipline was remarkable.
He has obviously read Dale Carnegie and made sure to have everyone introduce themselves upfront so he could immediately begin using our names. As in his writing, he comes off as a clearly intelligent practitioner, of…? His background is somewhat hard to parse; he told us he was a “researcher”, but didn’t let on that before that he spent seven and a half years in various sales roles for Promethean, a whiteboard company, and before that an unexplained three year gap on his profile, and before that a principal of a “Cyberschool”, and so on.
A “difficult” child in his own youth, he related that his career took the path it did after taking on kids who were failing in “the system” and helping them to succeed. Once you understand his “alt-school” background, it makes his approach towards traditional teachers and schools much more understandable. You can see why he formulated a framework that fit much better outside “the system,” given his previous roles had effectively allowed him free reign to design his courses and assessments as he pleased.
After hearing about his bona fides, he moved to the story of how he came to the seeds for the book. It all started when he was around a campfire in his teen years, strumming open chords on a guitar until for the very first time he heard…BLANG!!!!! Magana queues Eddie Van Halen’s song “Eruption” to play as if he did not know it would be coming on.
Magana uses Van Halen’s frenetic guitar to demonstrate his framework and how its three stages culminate in transcendant learning, as in the type exemplified by Mr. Van Halen. It was an effective demonstration of the core pillars of his framework and Magana would (effectively) come back to music concepts and clips again and again to explain and his work.
Beyond music analogies around the genesis of his thinking, Magana is less clear….How to lead the transcendent pursuit? How does each kid learn how to learn? Can it be generalized? All great questions and where those answers fit into a school’s curricular program is a mystery that Sonny does not speak to.
Sonny’s first session activity for teachers was to set the four tables off reading a couple pages of his book summary. Fair enough, but when he asked us to not only come back with three “things that made us think Aha!” from two pages of his writing but also at least one thing we’re going to implement in our own classes, the presumptuous/pretentious request immediately made eyeballs both dart and then roll slightly between teacher attendees.
While he waited for us to read, he noodled in the background on an acoustic guitar while his favorite classic rock jam band tunes played in the background. It was a bit much given only once briefly in about 15 minutes did he walk around among the tables, but even then he did not engage. Next, when we had finished, instead of just discussing the work as a group, he had us type our work into our digital tool of choice and send it to him on email, which seemed bizarrely overcomplicated until later you realize this was to goose the next step in his book promotion/sales process.
When we pulled back together, the responses were not what he was intending. I think with so much of his work being with public schools in the US, he was not at all used to the depth and experience that Tier 1 international school teachers who self select into a technology session possess.
In other words, things got awkward.
A 10th grade social studies teacher politely but firmly told him she was already aware of the strategies he referenced and used most them at different times with her classes; there was nothing new under the sun here. Sonny quickly moved on, and the rest of the responses were tepid at best.
Sonny then went in to describe the stages and reached the final goal of the T3 Framework, Social Entrepreneurship.
Sonny holds “Social entrepreneurship” as some kind of deep, universal human desire that all students will want to participate in at every opportunity if we would only just let them. Sonny’s framework also assumes that changing the world and making money doing it is viable in 6-8 different classes each day. Even if this was the only worthy goal for students (and it is not) I would argue there are not as many kids with the kind of endless creativity and drive Magana assumes. Not every student is Elon Musk, nor should they feel they need to be.
Magana came up to me during a break after the first session for teachers ended and asked about me. I was the most engaged in his sessions in some ways. I said I was a former teacher, involved in digital integration most recently who would really like to see a framework like his work, but that I was concerned that it had a lot of earth to move in terms of the status quo. Sonny interpreted that to mean I was talking about teachers and he did what I was wondering if he would do– he gently threw teachers as a whole under the bus.
Sonny said “You know, so many teachers, like we had today, say that they are doing the things in the framework, but they are not.” He then indicated he had to go, and later in the day he sent me an email with a copy of his Oxford Research paper as a gift to share with my colleagues. Not really a good look at a teaching conference. I felt relief that my initial judgements had born out.
Sonny’s Session for Administrators
I attended Magana’s session intended for Administrators on the final day of the conference. I was not surprised that his presentation to teachers and admin was nearly identical, but what was different was telling. Instead of Van Halen, he used the Beatles and US President Kennedy’s “Moonshot” speech along with a stirring video montage to relate his framework as Education’s “moonshot”.
Again, as in the first, he glazed over the details on the studies; let’s just all assume Hattie’s massive meta-study is a stone tablet from on high. The rest of the presentation steps were generally the same, only without any reading activity and collection of emails for his marketing machine. It was less on explaining the framework and more on selling the whole package…the association with Hattie, the book, the classroom walkthrough Google form tool, the T3 Leadership Academy. Interestingly, none of the non-theoretical practical tools were beyond early iterative stages of a basic Google sheet and form.
I asked what he felt the top three or four things administrators would need to do to implement or encourage the implementation of the T3 framework. Here’s what he said:
Belief in collective efficacy.
Have to talk about it. You need a common language for transcendent learning
Common set of strategies to establish examples
Need to evaluate it
I thanked Sonny when it was over. I then took a seat, went into the initial blog post/book review, added a question mark in the title and let the rest stand.
As I work my way through the first months of changes in my life from “not working in a school” for the first time in a decade and a half, I am the first to feel ruffled feathers by this question as I most recently left a position of “Director of Digital Learning.”
Shouldn’t I know? I always just assumed Edtech offered a net benefit because it did and does for me…but absent the need to feed the status quo, I’m free to follow my questions wherever the answers lead me.
I think it’s important to say from the outset that I am a supporter of digital learning- at least as I understand it. I have endless anecdotes from my own (tech) classes and coaching about students who (I think/they claimed) benefited greatly from exposure to technology in one form or another whether assistive, academic, etc.. What I am not so sure of is the correlations between Edtech and digital learning being made today as much of the Edtech that gets talked about and implemented in the majority of schools I would term “digital teaching”, not digital learning.
What I hope to come to a better understanding of in this space, is whether or not we’ve all allowed ourselves to slide into believing something about technology as it’s used in schools as to be something it’s really not. So since we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflection on experience, that’s what this column and perhaps 2-3 posts after it are about- reflecting on over a decade and a half in the classroom and a handful of years at the end as a leadership team member at an international school.
Interestingly to note, some of the struggles I had as a teacher, a coach and integrationist became clearer once privy to the inner sanctum banter of a school leadership team. No question there are schools with cutting edge technology initiatives and fantastically capable and enthusiastic staff leading them, but unfortunately I think it’s safe to say there is more often than not a dearth of accountable leadership for digital anything in less ambitiously “21st century” schools. This lack of focus results in friction losses at the interfaces, poor infrastructure provisioning, lack of management and mentoring of IT staff, etc., the list goes on…
You may even have to resort to leading a technology integration program from a position of influence only, as instead of every aspect of the digital ecosystem being considered, there is a lot of “default setting” implementation happening and don’t even get me started on the gube roldbergian dumpster fires created and sanctioned as “technology integration” programs and policies. It’s an unthinking approach, proceeding mechanically, disregarding information and clues (“Okay, so now we’ve had about 3 minutes for constrained “discussion” about tech in the staff meetings this quarter, so moving on…So, regarding who peed on the boys bathroom floor…if anyone has any…)
At one point I was fortunate to be at a school that employed digital learning integration support and even put a “tech” person on the leadership team, but even still, there was much less team support for digital learning initiatives as there were for traditional “teaching and learning” shibboleths. And it makes sense, as even the best generalist administrators are not well versed in any kind of depth of insight regarding technology integration. That’s okay– it’s just important to point out because there is a lot of decision making going on and diagnosing of issues happening with very little training or experience behind it.
Why this matters is because digital learning, digital teaching, edtech and IT, etc., are all thrown around interchangeably and they are not the same. A digital “Kleenex” if you will. There is an “Edtechochamber” of tech industry types, evangelists and a small percentage of heavily tech invested coaches, admin and teachers who support the use of “Edtech” and everything gets megaphoned together.
It’s repeated in a lot of school marketing as all having to do with improving student learning. Combined like this, marketed with fervor, one presumes that there is true “game changing” technology being implemented and integrated, but a curious thing is- you don’t often see any data supporting these claims about Edtech’s ROI, or certainly not ROI in terms of student achievement/learning for which it’s being claimed to be in the service of.
So my question is simple:
Where is the evidence that Edtech, (regardless of what it’s called) provides a net benefit for student learning?
I would so love to see a deluge of studies come forward that I have simply missed. I want to see the data that shows that the kind of integration that’s being done in classrooms today around the world is a net benefit for “student learning”. Anecdotes on a small number of classrooms in a school/district or stats on improved teacher efficiency, (Gaining time doesn’t mean the teachers repurpose the time on students of course!) aren’t what I’m looking for.
If we can’t measure the positive effects of “Edtech” on student learning, (or maybe we shouldn’t if it’s digital teaching, not digital learning?) then what exactly are we doing to students in schools with technology? How do we know? I’m not convinced we’re getting what we think we’re getting, and I am open to hearing about what I have not yet seen.
In order to ask and wonder “What is needed next as we grapple with which types of digital learning positively impact students and how and when they should be integrated?”, my next posts will summarize my review of Sonny Magana’s 2017 book (that leans heavily on Hattie’s Visible Learning research) laying out what he calls the “T3 Framework for Innovation in Education”.
On his research, Magana says “I’ve been researching the “Wicked Problem” of low-impact technology use in schools for four decades and have recently discovered a sequence of learning strategies that unlock students’ limitless learning capacity. I call it the T3 Framework for Innovation. The T3 strategy sequence was shown to reliably double student learning and achievement.” As well, Magana invites readers “…to learn how to work less and teach better…” and finally, to “Rock and Roll!”
See you next time for more on that.
Sharing stories, expertise, and experiences from international educators around the world
