Doers and Watchers: A Tool's Implied Pedagogy

Are you a doer, or a watcher?

A doer creates what a watcher consumes. We all are both at various times of any day, but one could argue that, in a specific context, most people are primarily one or the other. Since there are a lot more television watchers than actors, the presumption is there are a lot more watchers in that context.

Are your students doers, or watchers?

      This question is a great deal different from the previous one, influenced by what we might infer from the word "student." Here's what Dictionary.com says about that word:

stu-dent. [stood-nt, styood-] - noun

1. a person formally engaged in learning, esp. one enrolled in a school or college; pupil: a student at Yale.
2. any person who studies, investigates, or examines thoughtfully: a student of human nature.

The first definition points to a state of being (formal or informal), the second to a behavior. But even the first uses the word "engaged," implying that being a student is, primarily, an activity requiring one's conscious participation.
              That’s actually different than one might guess, since most people (even many teachers) presume that a teacher is the doer, and students watch. That’s the traditional “lecture” instructional paradigm. But current research on learning indicates that knowledge is constructed by a student, rather than induced by a teacher. Research in effective technology use and integration into instruction goes further, pointing to student-directed work in knowledge construction, especially in the case of higher-order learning: "depth of knowledge 4," or "synthesis" or “evaluation” from Bloom's Taxonomy (see LoTi, ACOT2).
From this perspective, the act of teaching is the act of providing the tools, materials and environment whereby students can successfully engage, interactively participate in, and direct the learning process.
       So, we're back to the question.

Are your students doers, or watchers?

...and the answer should be that, if they're truly students, they must be doers. That isn't to say that watching must never happen in the classroom, but if it does, it should be aimed at lower-order goals, or as a preparation for doing.

Are your educational technology purchase decisions aimed at doing, or watching?

       Every education technology purchase carries with it an implied pedagogy, and sorting that out has never become more complicated than in the digital age. Fifty years ago, when television first became one of the available technologies for the classroom, the implied pedagogy was “watching,” and many teachers were upset that we'd be turning an entire generation of students into passive consumers. But no consistent and measurable negative impact was ever found. One might speculate that, since the primary instructional paradigm at the time was lecture, TV just replaced one "watching" context with another. The “TV in the classroom” controversy simply ran out of steam.

       But that's quite different from today. Students at MIT -- one of the best universities in the country (and, not incidentally, one of the most digital) -- spend, on average, over 50 hours a week engaged in digital media (see Digital Nation, a PBS FrontLine special). This media is interactive: email, Skype, Facebook, texting, Twitter, etc. Clearly, when such students are left to their own devices (pun intended), they are usually doers. So when we try to work out how best to allocate limited educational resources and tech purchase budgets, we’re not doing it in the same context as the teachers of 50 years ago. The selection of education technologies today is taking place against a backdrop of interactive "doing" by almost every young person, as soon as their school day ends. The expectation for engagement, and the social and intellectual presence of a student in such engagement, makes the selection of any classroom technology very different from fifty years ago. We're no longer competing with the lecture, we're competing with Facebook.

       We’ll now look at the underlying implication for "watching" vs. "doing" for several popular categories of instructional technology, to see what they’re implied pedagogy actually is.

Classroom Response Systems.

       "Clickers" are all the rage. They make assessment fun. They give instant feedback, which can provide direction to instruction. They are very engaging for students (at least for now, while they're still new).
       For our discussion, they're a really great metaphor for making succinct what we mean by students' "doing" the business of learning. Assessments, whether delivered by paper or classroom response systems, do ask students to do something. But it is impossible to avoid the implications of response systems -- students do not inherently build knowledge interactively through any assessment tool. They do not control the process, and usually interact with the content in a teacher-directed manner.

"Smart" Classroom Tools
       These tools are associated with digital projection systems and interactive whiteboards, as well as hand-held devices such as the Smart Slate. These systems differ a great deal from classroom response systems in that their effectiveness is in direct student manipulation. Like classroom response systems, these tools can be very effective in producing engaging and interactive activities for students in a classroom setting.
       However, once again, all students in the class will usually be doing the same thing. As a matter of fact, even when students are interacting directly with the technology, the number doing so will be small (usually one, often zero when a teacher uses it exclusively as a presentation tool), and all others will be truly watching.

       Before you conclude that I am against such technologies, let me qualify. As any student of Norman Webb and Benjamin Bloom will tell you, there are important learning goals associated with each of the levels they describe, even the lowest ones, with activities (some of which are just watching) appropriate for each. In addition, a great teacher can very effectively use any tool to encourage a wide array of instructional approaches, just as they can turn an ordinary chalkboard into a student-driven knowledge construction tool. But in current instructional practice, higher-order thinking and learning are usually the neglected goals. Not incidentally, they’re also the ones which benefit the most from student-directed, socially engaging learning activities. So we need to make sure that we deliberately provide technologies which inherintly support these higher goals (and, not incidentally, reflect the practices students are using outside of school). The implied pedagogy of the above tools means that they will not, in themselves, satisfy the needs and goals of higher order learning goals.

       In the 21^st Century, where information and interactivity is delivered in large part over digital networks, that usually means an individual computing device. There are dozens of ways a classroom can provide such devices to students: PDAs/iPods, iPads and eReaders, netbooks/laptops, classroom workstations/terminals, even smart phones. All have advantages and disadvantages (a topic for a future blog entry).

       So when you map out how your classroom, your school, or your district supports and purchases technologies, ask yourself…

Are at least some your educational technology purchase decisions aimed at "doing?"

It's a Mash-Up, Google/Amazon/Netflix World -- Data-Driven Instruction

         Something very odd happened when I finally got around to updating my Facebook profile: suddenly the ads appearing at the right hand side of my wall were, shall we say, just a little bit more targeted. The mention of my love of sailing produced ads for tee-shirts with sailing themes. My use of the word "education" produced a slew of ads promoting degrees and lesson plans. And, of course, the politics -- the suggestions for interested "likes" and connections were selected through Facebook's best prediction of what I already believed and thought. The same has been true of my perusals through the pages of Amazon.com, where "suggestions" are obviously coming from data gathered from the very few things I've purchased, and the dozens of things I've examined. (I'm one of those who uses user reviews there to help evaluate things I really have no interest in buying.) Netflix is also trying to do that as well, though it's even further off the mark.
        I admit to the traditional conspiratorial take on such processes, but I also know that, since I am aware that's how such things work, I can avoid the problem by simply avoiding the services. After all, since I use them to gather data, it is probably unfair to assume that these services don't have a right to gather data from me. I also have never purchased a tee-shirt suggested by Facebook, so I do not feel a loss of control simply by the ad's presence.
        But there are implications there for how we do the business of education. After all, as education professionals in the world of "data-driven instruction," high-stakes student (and teacher performance) assessment, so-called classroom performance systems, and lots of other data-gathering tools, we are, in fact, encouraging our teachers to produce and analyze such data about their students, and then using that data to drive our interaction with them. Is that a bad thing? No, as long as we know its limits. And, even more important, as long as we know the implications such data-driven activities have for the nature of learning, interacting, and being human.
        A brief article in this week's New York Times Magazine (Sept. 19, 2010), written by Microsoft engineer Jaron Lanier, helped bring this home for me just a bit. In celebrating the personal way in which his father taught in public schools, he decried how information access seems to be doing damage to the way in which students invent themselves...

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen...What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don't learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good (p.35).

But then, that's what we're encouraging our teachers to do with them, and what they're watching us do to them as they negotiate the world we (and the commercial interests we endorse and embrace) present them online.
        It is not my intent to make this yet another call for the teaching of critical thinking (though it is that), or an indictment of our over-indulgence in data-driven assessment cycles (though it is that, as well). What we should do, as teachers, is to take a very long look at the technology tools we choose, and the way in which we choose to use them, to see what sorts of pedagogical and learning level implications they carry.
        A simple online computer does not, in itself, come with much implied pedagogy. But Google, of course, does -- it assumes that the user's interests, needs, and understandings can be well predicted by algorithms written by (as Lanier calls them) geeks pushing key words and concepts around. The kinds of questions Google answers can only be basic and informational, the lowest sorts of learning goals on Bloom's ("taxonomy of learning") or Webb's ("depth of knowledge") scales. At the secondary or post-secondary level, even at an information level, Google won't be able to reach out to the best minds on many topics, even if the student asks a well-founded question of it. But unless the results of this work is used to encourage a student to start with a blank screen, it is unlikely that the results will be reflective of much of a change in the student.
       Probably the hottest types of educational technologies these days are so-called smart classroom tools. These tools are becoming quite clever in their presentation, the types and quality of the questions they present to students, and the speed in which the answers are processed and presented back to teachers. But what pedagogy do they most often imply? What opportunities do such tools present to allow students to invent themselves?
        That is not to say that the questions a classroom performance system asks of a student are not worth asking, or the answers worth knowing. There are lots of pedagogical goals which are excellently served by such systems. But Arthur C. Clarke once stated that "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!" This rather callous assessment of bad instruction might be revised somewhat...any pedagogical/learning goal which could be best delivered by a machine, should be. Most of the questions a teacher-driven performance system asks could be asked and taught quite successfully in the absence of the teacher. If, however, our instructional goal is for a student to process and present information, opinions, and products drawn onto a blank slate, then a teacher is required, and different tools should be selected.
        This sort of examination of goals and implied pedagogy has, as its core, huge implications for instructional delivery and selection of appropriate tools. It also has huge implications for the current structure of instructional delivery. If we are selecting tools to place them in the hands of teachers to support the ways in which they already teach, then we're missing out on huge opportunities to improve efficiency, and better manage the advantages a teacher brings to a student. If we are selecting tools which simply support a student's ability to mash-up learning fragments rearranged for teacher consumption, then we have squandered an enormous opportunity for students to create, and in creating, re-define themselves.