Hysteresis: Teachers, technology and red herrings

Even the most ardent advocates, (those paid to proselytise over the integration of  ICTs into New Zealand education), would concede over a Speights at the Springfield pub that the status of ICT use in New Zealand classrooms is variable –

... and after a three or more Speights  most would concede that many primary and secondary teachers remain locked in Cuban’s limited use cycle, Knezek and Christensen’s Stage 2/3  Instruments for Assessing Educator Progress in Technology Integration, or Moersch’s LoTi Level 2 / 3. of the Levels of Technology Implementation (LoTi) Scale.  

However, gaining a Speight’s fuelled concession from the crusading champions of ICTs in school, those digital prophets, (e)visionaries, and techno advocates, doesn’t interest me as much as my gradual realisation that the level of use that exists in any classroom (or across any school) is a system of hysteresis – an event that seems independent of the things we identify as significant inputs.

The craziness of the day job ensures that I have spent too much time focussing through a 100X eyepiece on technology adoption by teachers rather than stepping back and looking at why we would want technologies in school at all.

All of this means that I am so overly rehearsed in all the (e) excuses, in the “long list of barriers to teacher use of ICTs”identified  by researchers across the globe (including our very own Lai, Pratt and Trewern, 2002), that I could rip off a FAQ Troubleshooting page for the “teachers who fails to implement technology” without pausing to draw breath.(except to apologise to Microsoft's XBox Help and Support site)

FAQ: Teachers who fail to implement technology

CAUTION: Before you begin any of the procedures in this section, follow the safety instructions in the Product Information Guide

Notice: To avoid electrostatic discharge, ground yourself by using a wrist grounding strap or by periodically touching an unpainted metal surface (such as a connector on the back of the teacher who is failing to implement).

Step 1.  Determine whether the indicator light on the teacher who is failing to implement technology remains green or whether it blinks.

a. If the indicator light repeatedly blinks green and orange, the teacher is not functioning correctly. If this is the case, follow steps 2 through 4. If these steps do not resolve the issue, continue to step 8.

b. If the indicator light remains green, continue to step 2.

Step 2.  Verify that the teacher can easily and flexibly access ICTs. If this is not the case, contact the person in charge of ICT budgets and remedy any access barriers. If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 3.

Step 3. If you can connect your teacher directly and flexibly to an ICT, make sure that you have connected the teacher correctly – that is competently and confidently,  (does the teacher know the ICT and understand the value of its use), and check that the teacher has good technical support.

a.  Turn off power to your teacher and to your ICT.

b.  Connect the ICT cable connector to the teacher output of competence/ confidence in ICT use and to the RGB input of understanding the value of ICT use to student learning outcomes.  Make sure that the connections are firmly connected. A dodgy connection means the “teacher who is failing to implement” will not sustain progress past start up.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 4.

Step 4.  If you can connect your “teacher who is failing to implement” directly, flexibly, confidently, competently and understandingly to the ICT, make sure that you have connected the ICT correctly to teacher planning of learning experiences, learning intentions, success criteria, learning outcomes, and assessment for learning rubrics

a. Verify that you are using the same type of RGB cable for the student learning outcomes and for the ICT connection. If this is not case, the student performance may not be as expected. If you connect your teacher to an ICT without them knowing and understanding the goals for student learning, they may not implement well when un-monitored. Note that this does not affect the performance of teachers whose green light never goes off, they will continue to implement technology in the absence of any identifiable student learning outcome.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 5

Step 5. Verify the input selection. Make sure that you have tuned the teacher and the ICT to the correct input curriculum channels. Typically, you can find the Input Curriculum Select menu by using one of the following methods:

a. Look for a hidden panel on the front of the teacher or ICT.

b. Look for a button on the original remote control.

c. Use the on-screen menu option.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 6.

Step 6. Try different connection configurations.

a. If the teacher is connected directly to an ICT, try a different ICT.

b. If you connect your teacher to a planned student learning experience through an ICT, try to connect your teacher directly to a planned student learning experience omitting the ICT.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 7

Step 7. Determine whether the behaviour of the teacher who is failing to implement technology occurs with one ICT, with two ICTs, or with more than two ICTs.

a. If the problem occurs with only one or two ICTs, search the ICTPD Cluster Knowledge Base for known issues for that particular ICT.

b. If no known issues exist, return the ICT to the retailer.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 8

Step 8. The teacher may be malfunctioning.

· I     If  removing the teacher from the ICT does not resolve the issue, you may need to repair the teacher.

Step 8 is the telling step..... it alerts us to the fact that we are looking so closely at the teacher who fails to implement  - that we don’t examine the assumptions inherent in this approach.

We neglect to ask the could we/ should we question/s altogether

The “Just because we could integrate ICTs into classrooms should we?” question.

Perhaps the reason why the level of ICT use that exists in any classroom (or across any school) appears to be a system of hysteresis – (an event that seems independent of any of our “identified as appropriate inputs”)-  and has been like this ever since the 1920’s - is that we have neglected to clarify the outputs we value in education and in doing so misidentified the inputs.

Instead of talking about change management for the teacher who fails to implement we should be clarifying the kinds of learning outcomes we want for children and evaluating whether these are the outcomes that ICTs bring.

Cuban’s “What kinds of learning are most important to children?” is a great place to start the discussion 

“Harriet Cufaro asks what a youngster learns when she presses the keyboard to call up cars and garages on a screen to figure out how to park a car in a garage. Eye hand co-ordination? Perhaps. A sense of control? Not really, since the programmed instructions produce alternate paths from which the child chooses. She directs the car on the screen, unaware of the mysterious programme as she presses the keys. Cuffaro then asks what occurs when the same girll parks a car when playing with blocks. Her eye-hand coordination now must deal with three dimensions, not just the two on the screen. The block that is the car must be manoeuvered physically by hand to fit into a garage made of blocks. Cuffaro says , “The computer version of parking a car is action in a vacuum, motion without context, and with reality twice removed.”

She argues that the unanticipated lessons that children pick up informally when working with microcomputers should give educators pause before plunging ahead with the new technology.

“It is the presence of these collateral learnings – the distance and narrowing of physical reality, the magical quality of pressing keys, the “invisible” sharing of control, the oversimplification of process, the need for precision and timing – that merit great attention when thinking about young children’s learning and the use of microcomputers.”  P95 and 96 Teachers and Machines.  The classroom use of technology since 1920

Cuffaro and others single out the computers power to teach many significant, misleading, and unintentional lessons to children beyond the programmed ones. 

All this means we have to be especially careful about what and how we choose to use ICTs with students of any age …. and that the teacher who fails to implement may well be a red herring.

 

Comments

[Karen]

I loved this one. Very droll but also absolutely serious.
The issue of 'what is important for the learner' can unpack another series of 'malfunctions', namely, teachers' understandings about the nature of learning. Recent conversations around the revised Curriculum are revealing some intriguing (and worrying?) gaps in this kind of thinking. You'll be, I'm sure painfully aware of the gaps that can exist between some teachers' actions and understandings around, for exanmple, the nature and purpose of learning objectives. For some, the fact that specific learning should be articulated in a teaching experience is a huge jump, before we even get into whether ICT should be thrown into the mix.

Underpinning our poor malfunctioning teacher is an assumption, perhaps, that teachers can be directed to reflect on and subsequently adjust practice. How do we meet the need for teachers (and ourselves) to develop the kinds of personal/professional competencies / meta-competencies that are needed to be able to reflect on each of their understandings?

Also, what about the paradigms of the professional developers who are attempting to check these different stages? What assumptions, what theories-in-use, do we as teacher developers bring into such operations?

Mind you, I tend to find that the Speights makes these kinds of hairy thoughts gently disappear....ah, yes, there they go.....

[Artichoke]

Hi Karen,
You read me well ... this is an absolutely seriously serious post ... in truth it is a marker for what must follow

...and you are right about the complexity that "teachers' understandings about the nature of learning" bring - is why we use SOLO Taxonomy in an attempt to discriminate between deep and surface learning outcomes with both teachers and students.

What you might not have read into the post is that I am talking to myself at the Springfield Pub ... the advantage of having an online identity that is different from my offline one - for in my offline identity I am one who is paid to proselytise over the integration of ICTs into New Zealand education.

I have been doing the ictpd Vatican Rag for a while now and each year I engage in a new "we are changing the milestone reporting" conversation

It makes me feel like I am trapped in some viral form of the The Vatican Rag ms reporting with "the guy" who's got religion'll" ...

You know the one ... "there the guy who's got religion'll tell you if your sin's original!" but the constant changes in reporting landscapes has me exhausted.

This post marks a turning point, a stake in the ground ...It marks me as Arthur the Human Chameleon

The Vatican Rag
Tom Lehrer

First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect
Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff
Everybody say his own kyrie eleison
Doin' the Vatican Rag
Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original
If it is, try playin' it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate
So get down upon your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect
Make a cross on your abdomen
When in Rome do like a Roman
Ave Maria, gee it's good to see ya
Gettin' ecstatic an' sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag

[nix]

Excellent FAQ that I will be turning into an embedded Zoho Creator survey that outputs to a simple spreadsheet for my Lead Teachers to be able to identify if they have thoroughly exhausted every avenue before taking recalcitrant teachers through their school's appraisal system.

Becuase that'll teach 'em.

I would like to see a similar FAQ with a series of trouble shooting steps for school systems and adoption / uptake of ICTs. I don't see the issue as being only about teachers and student's understanding of deep and surface learning or about what contitutes good and appropriate activities or usage of the technologies. One of the big disconnects that I see (and I use the word with some irony) is school's (the school as an entity...) own reasons for buying, owning, having, maybe even using ICTs.

And meanwhile in another part of town I too will be sitting in a bar, crying a lonely lament into my beer. But will I have something to prop up on my handle and read?

[Artichoke]

Hang in there Nix, Amazon has a gift wrapped Cuban winging its way to that bar on the other side of town

...and I pick up the school as an entity argument ... is one that Cuban makes ... the technology (or way of doing stuff) that is school intersecting with the technology (or way of doing stuff) that is ICTs.

once we button the school FAQ ... I figure we will realise that the focus needs to pull back still further to look at the "social fabric" we are intoducing communication technologies into ... Janet will help here ... BUT Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. can be woven here as well

[Janet Hawtin]

I wish we had some TED content from Illich.
It would be lovely to hear these thoughts spoken.

Hearing and seeing people expressing their thoughts has been something powerful from ICT based learning for me. I can read texts but I get something more about heart vulnerability passion and a different kind of authority when I see the people speak for themsleves.

I see Illich is a reverberation across education thinking.
There is a conceptual aftershock like a named natural event.
The internet makes me feel a sense of timelessness as though all these people are part of the current hivemind. People feel more quantum. When I found the first papers I tracked wikipedia to find ground0 only to find he has logged off. It is strange to miss someone you have not met.

[Artichoke]

I smiled when I read your preference for hearing and seeing Janet ... I always put the podcasts and video clips last - partly because my chances of uninterrupted viewing / listening time are not high but mostly I realise because I prefer to engage with text .... I use the TEDtalks like txt - viewing making margin notes on a blank page ... pausing ... rewinding ... listening again for deeeper meaning ... it takes me ages to unpack them satisfactorily ... given the way I interact with new ideas reading a printed page is easier for me ... likewise when I meet someone interesting I have the same need to question them ... to interrogate/ discuss their ideas ... is hell at conferences where the expectation is that you sit and listen until they have finished broadcasting ... and even then asking more than one question is not the norm ...

As for Illich ... I also think he is a great loss ... would help the clarity and insights missing from our current conversations on WEb2.0 open source etc etc ... you see so many of his ideas re-presented in "Chinese whisperery" misinterpretations ...he gets closest to the core of my understanding of institutions and education, text and conversation than anyone else ... and has done ever since I first read him at varsity .. I collect his books ...and the books written by others about him ... I have a set of audio tapes of his thinking on The Corruption of Christianity but as you may guess I return to the books rather than the tapes