Going Online with Chancellor Klein
Chancellor Joel Klein has announced a series of bold technological initiatives in his determined attempt to give every child the best education possible in the 21st century. The Chancellor is challenging teachers to use technology to each student’s advantage. Yet, the digital revolution is stuck in the closet—literally. Smart boards, netbooks, and laptops are gathering dust in many schools across the city as teachers fall back to their innate preference for blackboards and over-head projectors. Bore-them-to-death chalk and talk lectures are still very much alive in classrooms while students continue to fail.
Why? Why would teachers prefer a failing method to one that offers so much more for their students? In their seminal book, Liberating Learning, Terry Moe and John Chubb argue that entrenched interests such as teacher unions actually prefer the status quo and the antiquated models of teaching because it protects certain economic interests. I agree.
Yet, there is a less insidious answer: teachers, like all human beings, simply prefer to keep doing what they have been accustomed to doing. They like their comfort zones. This is understandable—and might even be acceptable, if the old ways of teaching were in fact the best ways of reaching this new generation of students. But it is not so. Chalk and talk lessons peppered with a few fact provoking questions might leave teachers feeling good about themselves, but there is no way of truly assessing student understanding during or immediately following the lessons. Nightly homeworks assigned from copious texts with comprehension questions often go ungraded for days. Classroom quizzes and tests are equally ineffective assessments. By the time teachers understand what their students didn’t understand, the students have failed the test and learned failure again. In short, while unions battle over their own future, comfort zone teaching is depriving our students of the education they deserve—and most desperately need.
Teachers accustomed to this one-way communication, one style fits all model must now embrace the opportunities for personalized teaching and effective assessment wrought by the digital revolution. Some are already doing so. In schools such as the I-School and ScholarSkills Academy, teachers are implementing simple, effective technologies that are making excellence exciting for students. Principals and parents should see at least three benefits to implementing effective technology in the classroom.
1. Technology helps teachers to teach the way students learn:
Interactive multi-media tools equip educators to present knowledge in ways that are intuitive to the digital generation. From the earliest ages their toys and books are interactive. The internet has been their classroom before pre-school. Effective multi-media tools such as smart boards, digital books, and online tools help kids to learn they way they have been learning everything else from birth.
2. Technology offers personalizing learning and assessment (The Classroom of One)
Technology allows teachers to give individualized instruction in the midst of the larger classroom. Personalized online chats with students both during and after class help teachers to gauge understanding immediately and effectively. Finally, online quizzes and homework assignments can be graded automatically. Teachers can then use that data to tailor their lessons for the following day.
3. Technology provides test preparation that works
Principals no longer have to leave their students to the mercies of teachers who refuse to prepare them for important tests. Test preparation can now be outsourced to digital education providers. The best of these test preparation experts create interactive materials that students can use throughout the entire semester to prepare themselves for state and citywide exams.
Teachers must be more concerned about their students and less concerned with being comfortable. The digital revolution is here. But like any other massive paradigm shift, it will be resisted by those who fear the future and hunger for the long gone past. Some people are still ruing the advent of the calculator and dreaming of a return to the abacus. But our students must compete in a digital world. That’s why daring educators like Chancellor Klein are taking our students online.
