A new school year is knocking on the door and already the whispers have begun. "They're making changes." "They" is different in each school district, and "changes" seem to be pretty much amorphous. All that the teachers seem to know is that change is coming.
In my district we have a new superintendent. He is a shaker-upper and some teachers are waiting with great anticipation and some with great consternation. Those reactions are pretty much just what they always are when change is coming. But it didn't start with the new superintendent and it didn't start this summer.
In many, many conversations about the state of education and where it is going, I have heard and read about how the current system is not working and that we need a transformation. For ten years I have been waiting to hear what kind of transformation that should be. For a long time, educational change was synonymous with technology. That led to the misinterpretation that just adding a computer to the lesson plans would make it all better. Even worse, it led to a me-thee attitude that if you didn't use tech, you were a bad teacher, and if you did use it, you approached awesomeness.
The real problem is not with technology. Tech is a tool. The changes are coming with a new attitude and implementation of what education means for our students.
We have been educating the masses with an assembly line technique. Through the years it became apparent that more and more learners were not able to be fitted with normal factory parts. It took some heart, some understanding, some research, and even some court cases to reach the point where we understood that there were outliers whose needs were not being met in the standard classroom. These students were grouped into various sub-populations and we thought we were rocking the system with a good thing. What a surprise that it only made a dent in the issues of education.
What we fail to realize is that each and every student is an individual sub-pop. There may be some overlap, but no one learner is exactly like the next. It doesn't matter how many labels you place on a student, you can't teach him or her in the same way you did last year or ten years ago. Change is inevitable because we never deal with the same population.
I don't have answers. I teach a specific sub-pop so my ideas and beliefs are skewed. Applying the logic of Christensen's Disruptive Innovation (http://www.claytonchristensen.com/disruptive_innovation.html) to my students lets me understand that change comes from the un-served and the under-served. If we think of each student as under-served in some way or another we begin to see the magnitude of the problem.
We have many educators who are great teachers based on current parameters of today's schools, but who resist the (no-longer-new) tools of the age. They don't see that these tools are not the threat. The changes coming for these teachers are that we have been grouping for economy, mass-producing curriculum, and measuring learners based on accumulation of facts, not the application of ideas, and these practices need to cease. Our standardized testing only grades and ranks the ability to accumulate, not the connection of the learning. The tools of tech are making mere accumulation obsolete. Will those educators still be considered great teachers when the whole point of education has shifted and they're still playing Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit? They sure can be, but not without changing.
