Teachers vs Tech? — Julian Girdham

I started reading Daisy Christodoulou’s new book, Teacher vs Tech? The case for an ed tech revolution, a few weeks ago. One morning shortly after finishing it, the teachers in our school gathered around my laptop in our staff room as we watched the Taoiseach, live from Washington, announce that all Irish schools would close by 6.00pm that evening.

Then, the tsunami. Schoolteachers and pupils across Ireland, like so many others globally, were suddenly thrown into the most extraordinary test case of just what the limits and possibilities are for technology in education. Hangouts, Zoom, Loom, Kahout, Padlet, Quizlet, Seesaw: it sounded like an unsuccessful Disney movie. Every tool going was recommended, reached for, enthused about, used badly, used productively, discarded. Hundreds of pieces of advice were given online to parents, pupils, teachers. it was cognitive overload on steroids.

Without even addressing matters of access and disadvantage, these are obviously not ideal conditions on which to base effective and sustainable learning. We are not talking about delivery to adults via a well-designed online course like the famous Learning How to Learn MOOC from Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski (or its young sibling Learning How to Learn for Youth). This is triage teaching, and I am one of 1000s of teachers who are urgently trying to assess what blend is effective as we prepare for the summer term (and we should bear in mind that however important education is, there are more immediate priorities right now).

So it is particularly welcome that at this time, by coincidence, one of the sharpest minds in education, Daisy Christodoulou, should turn her attention to the relationship between teaching and technology. Her first two books, Seven Myths About Education and Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning, were forensically sharp examinations of some of the central issues in learning, informed by cognitive science (and her third book helpfully revisits these in the context of technology). She is always driven by cool logic rather than ideology, and she presents her arguments crisply.

As she states in her introduction,

the greatest irony of all is that education technology has perhaps been the faddiest part of education. Far from establishing sound research-based principles, technology has been used to introduce yet more pseudoscience into the education profession.

I think most teachers will agree with this. Technology has so often (usually?) promised more than it has delivered (a scathing and entertaining account of this was recently given by Audrey Watters in her post The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. Yes, 100!). Christodoulou looks for instance at the promise that learning can be ‘personalised’ (a covert route back to learning styles), that we can ‘just look things up’, as well as the financial and opportunity costs of big hardware deployments like interactive whiteboards. In Ireland we have recently had an example of the perils of this promise in a controversy about an iPad-only school. I recognise this, and have myself been guilty of over-rating technology, maybe because at heart I’m still a little boy who loves the latest shiniest thing. Shiny things are seductive.

Christodoulou does see promise in some areas, though, such as in adaptive learning, data for sequencing practice, improving assessment and helping retrieval practice (she strongly recommends Anki. I use Quizlet, which is slick and easy for classes). We should also give a nod to tools which have become valuable infrastructure, like Google Docs, on which our pupils now compose their English Extended Essays in Transition Year, sharing them live with their teachers, getting regular formative feedback and advice ahead of completion.

But then there is the area which came on us quickly and recently, the online always-connected world, particularly with the widespread adoption of mobile devices. Not many of us saw how overwhelming that would be, and how the most precious educational commodity, attention, would face such a dramatic challenge. As Daisy Christodoulou writes near the end of Chapter 4,

Innovations will only be possible if we accept the limitations of our working memory, and the consequent value of breaking down complex skills into smaller parts. Unfortunately, a cavalier attitude to human attention is central to much of modern technology.

So many schools are struggling with this: to what extent is technology a distraction or an enhancement? (Quite recently there has been a backlash from parents, who see their children at home hooked on devices, scarcely looking up from the screens, and want their ‘screen-time’ reduced in school.) How can learners pay proper attention to their learning when they are simultanesouly being pulled in different directions? I write about this in my review of Maryanne Wolf’s vital book Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world, in which she writes:

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focussing of our attention?

(and check that post for the Latin origin of the word ‘distraction’).

This winter I read Timothy Wu’s interesting book The Attention Merchants: the epic struggle to get inside our heads, in which he gives an historical account of how the attention ‘merchants’ have moved steadily closer and closer to us.

Beginning with radio, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content.

and

At one time, tradition set limits on where people could be intruded upon and when. Even with the necessary technology, it was not always so easy to reach people in their homes, let alone while walking or in a taxi. For the majority, religious practice used to define certain inviolable spaces and moments. Less formal norms, like the time reserved for family meals, exerted considerable force as well. In this world, privacy was the default, commercial intrusions the exception. And while there was much about the old reality that could be inconvenient or frustrating, it had the advantage of automatically creating protected spaces, with their salutary effects.

Now, those forces (driven by massive financial clout) are inside our pockets, and the pockets of younger and younger children. Our steadily-increasing challenge as teachers is how to curate access to really useful technology, but filter out what is distracting, ineffective or even counterproductive.

One consistent message from Daisy Christodoulou is the enduring importance of the teacher in the classroom. She deals with this in an excellent chapter called ‘The Expertise of Teaching’. Our current situation has highlighted to me how how difficult it is to teach responsively unless you have your pupils in front of you. So much of what we do consists of micro-adjustments, minute by minute, as we work out what they do and do not know, what needs bolstering, what gaps there are, and when we can move. In relation to this she quotes Gary Klein and the great Daniel Kahneman’s research on expertise:

Humans can develop expertise in ‘high-validity domains’, which are ones that are regular enough to provide you with cues about what might happen next… Nurses and firefighters encounter highly complex, uncertain and dangerous environments, but they can pick up on reliable cues that indicate a building might be about to collapse or an infant has an infection.

Though we are not dealing with dangerous situations, expert practised teachers have a similar skill (I think of the entertaining TV series from a few years back, Faking It, in which experts like a bouncer tried to train novices in their skills). It is difficult to imagine this being replaced by any form of technology.

Technology is gathering pace all the time, and education needs to take what is best about it and use that, while protecting itself against the century-long cycle of hype and disillusionment. Well after the current situation has eased, whenever ‘afterwards’ is, the sharp-sighted analysis in this book will be enormously valuable as we deal with the challenge. I highly recommend it.