Education Reform: Hold On To What Works

I keep thinking about Socrates, there on the streets of Athens, asking questions.  No PowerPoints, no laptops, no iPads, just a man in a toga who hated one-word answers.  He didn’t even have a chalkboard.

Why is educational reform tied to technology?  Technology is a tool, and certainly can enhance teaching, but increasingly, it has become the means and the end to everything.  Jobs depend on how often technology is used.  I know of a principal who insists her teachers use blogs, and demands they force their students to comment on those blogs.  The teachers must turn in a list of blogs they follow.  They must contribute videos and pictures to the school website.  They must maintain class pages, updated at least once a day, if not more often.  Textbooks are passé.  Everything that can be known is available on the internet, so who needs a book, right?  Of course, when the technology goes down, as it does so often, the teacher must be quick enough on her feet to pull a lesson out of the air.  And with all this commenting and following and updating, who has time to correct papers or plan interesting and involving lessons?

When did textbooks become the enemy?  When did we give up depth for superficiality?  Forcing someone to blog or comment does not mean he or she has something meaningful to say.  Students fulfill an assignment by typing words, but is this really insightful and enlightening, or is it the 21^stcentury version of busy work?

At the college where I work, every classroom is fully equipped with technology.  The computer is embedded in the lectern, ready to project the lesson on the screen and guide the class through the difficult ideas.  I like this, and I come to class prepared with my flash drive, yet I have had numerous occasions where the technology failed to work properly.  It is not a good feeling to be left standing in front of an eager class without the bells and whistles.  Those are the nightmares of a teacher.

When the technology has worked, I find that students tune out and simply copy what is on the slides, failing to listen to elaborations or discussions.  When I asked why this is, they were happy to tell me.  Too many teachers simply put up a slide and read it to them.  Many wondered why the teacher could not just post the PowerPoint slides online and skip the class meeting altogether.

Education reform does not mean throwing away the past.  I am tired of the charges of “stale teaching” and “dinosaur behavior” hurled at teachers simply because they prefer to keep it “old school.”  There is something to be said for “old school.”  Kids were better educated under the “old school.”  Feel free to disagree, but I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve seen the results.  And I am a walking testimonial to the success of “old school” methodologies.  Just because a method has been used for decades does not make it faulty.  Just because we ask kids a question does not make us fossils.  A question forces them to verbalize ideas in a coherent, concise, ordered manner.  I am shocked and appalled at how inarticulate students are today.

I often conduct a little experiment in my classroom:  I ask for directions to a nearby landmark.  The first response I get is “MapQuest it.”  When I point out the obvious fact that the students know how to get there, I get an incoherent, jumbled, mumbled “turn here” or “go there.”  They cannot tell me streets.  They cannot tell me directions.  They cannot tell me what neighborhood it is in.  When I push, the student turns red, becomes embarrassed, and repeats the mantra:  “MapQuest it.”  We are producing a generation of people who cannot speak or communicate a thought, but for whom short, highly codified, simplistic nonsense tapped into a miniature keyboard is a top skill.

I don’t want to give up what has worked before.  I believe in thinking and questioning and writing on real paper in real time.  Technology has its place, and definitely has merit as a tool for teaching, but it is not the end all.  We must keep a perspective:  technology is one more tool to reach students and get them involved in active learning.  We still need textbooks, even if they are open source textbooks, or are available online.  There are some excellent books available with additional material online, such as videos, pictures, and interactive maps.  We can update our classrooms and methodologies without throwing out everything we have ever learned from educating kids.

Socrates had the simplest of methodologies:  ask a question.  He knew the secret to good teaching was student involvement in learning.  The fire can be lit in a student’s mind not only with touch screens and smash cut video snippets.  Sometimes, a question will do the job just as well.