I have been in education now for 40 years, most of those as a student and the last 26 as an educator as well as a learner. I have watched little change in how things are done in a classroom over those 40 years with the exception of some of the tools changing. The evolution from a chalkboard, to an overhead, to a white board to a projector is just one example of how new technology has been introduced but little change in pedagogy has resulted. We have gone from using pencil, to pen, to typewriter, to computer and again, little has changed in the products we are expecting from our students. It really pains me to see that investments in technology have had little impact in they way in which we ask students to learn and demonstrate that learning.
I have often pondered why new technology is not being used to enhance pedagogy. I think the way in which we have introduced these technologies, the limited initial implementation of new technology and the fact that many of our teachers have more interest in interpersonal interactions all contribute to our current reality.
I have been in a number of schools that have recently made significant investments in technology. Included in those schools were those in which I served as the principal. We discouraged our staff from using the overhead for the purpose of having students far point copy aka take notes, we covered each black board with a whiteboard surface and installed projection units which could be used by teachers to display PowerPoint slides. In fact, we provided numerous workshops on the use of PowerPoint and as administrators began using PowerPoint ourselves. We also replaced "old" computers with "new" computers to keep up with the "improvements" in Microsoft Office applications. Note cards were to be created by students, but research papers were now to be word processed and submitted through Turnitin.com to ensure that plagiarism had not taken place.
I am pretty sure that I could have added and maintained at least two staff positions for what we spent annually on new technology over the course of the last 8 years. The only practice that I have seen drastically change in the majority of these classrooms is that unruly students are no longer being asked to stay after school to clean the board and bang the dust from the erasers. Instead we have a column of construction paper each representing a "level" for student behavior and move clothes pins with the students' names on them up and down the column to shame them into compliance or provide them a tangible reward for doing what is merely expected. Somehow I think the conversations I had with my teacher while banging the erasers probably had a much greater impact on my behavior than the clothes pins would have. Having now shared some of my frustrations, I will get to the heart of this post. How do we find a balance between support of new pedagogical advancements and accountability for them? In other words, at what point is exploring new instructional strategies, new technologies and recent developments in content transition from what educators learn to what we expect to see in the classroom? We ask that our students provide us evidence of their learning but do not hold each other to that same expectation. With the time and money that has been spent on professional development you would think we would see more of what is presented in our classrooms. Myself and my fellow administrators should acknowledge our role in this travesty and work to provide adequate support which would include accountability measures for staff for any new learning.