Went to a mandatory two-day training last week to be introduced to a digital platform for housing our curriculum. The platform is a component of a system our county has been using for about 8 years. Throughout the training, the facilitators touted the benefits for teachers of having the curriculum available digitally. We were shown how the teachers would be able to take the core documents and develop and change them to fit the needs of their students. They would be able to add resources to make the curriculum fit their needs. WAIT! HOLD UP! Haven't our teachers been doing that forever? Maybe not storing their changes digitally but certainly they have been supplementing the county curriculum however and whenever they chose. Many of them have supplemented and changed programs so much that the core purpose of the course is barely recognizable. As our office has pushed to make courses student-centered; writing instructional guides for the curriculum that suggest interactive activities, connections among content, and ways to improve the pedagogy, many teachers have consistently supplemented or ignored the suggestions giving students worksheets and tricks; offering the same old same old and wondering why their students can't retain information or problem solve. How will a digital platform change instruction?
Regardless of how the curriculum is housed, the teacher is the strongest indicator of whether students will learn the content. Great teachers need nothing more than a good, solid curriculum and their expertise, creativity, and relationship-building skills. It doesn't matter whether the course is built on paper, carried around on a thumb-drive, or accessible online. Showing a video that peels away the layers of a cell is no more effective than when a teacher had a pile of transparencies overlaid in such a way to peel away those same layers. If we think students are more receptive to watching and hearing a stranger on a video present content then we better look inward to find out why they aren't tuned into us as their teachers.
The biggest disappointment at the end of the last day of the training was when the facilitator showed a video of the digital platform being used by a teacher in another state. This commercial for the program did more to turn off the audience in the room than anything that had happened previously. It was the end of the second day and we were starting to brainstorm the capabilities of the program. This video showed the worse case scenario. The teacher in the video had built a 'playlist' of assets that became her 'lesson'. She then turned on the playlist, which played on a Smartboard, and the students sat taking notes. She basically was unnecessary after she hit 'play'. REALLY?! How is this different than death by PowerPoint or death by teacher droning on for 45 minutes? This was new? No, this was kids staring at a screen taking notes while someone spewed information.
Thank goodness our curriculum office personnel were appalled at this scenario. The video gave us a chance to share ideas for using the platform that would make our classrooms look different; a chance to talk about how to use the platform to individualize learning, and a chance to realize that without the principals on our side this will not work. We have been trying to change what happens in the classroom for many years. But, what is evaluated at the schoolhouse level will always trump any pedagogy shifts initiated in the curriculum offices. If our principals interpret what that teacher did as 'using technology', no change will occur.
Nothing is really new. Great teachers will use whatever means necessary to help students achieve. The means may look different but great teachers will never become obsolete because they will continue to grow and reflect. It will be up to the rest of us, principals and curriculum offices, to make sure the other teachers step up and attempt to achieve greatness or at least effectiveness.
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