In about two weeks, teachers will be dressed casually, wearing shorts and t-shirts, dreaming of summer, and in many cases, just going through the motions of the final in-service days of the year.
We Academic Integration Coaches will be spending the last days in our current position swamped in presentations, facilitating morning and afternoon sessions at different buildings around our district on a variety of topics.
Some of the sessions we will facilitate are designed by administrators, some are of our own design.
The ones we have designed will show teachers several methods to reduce paper use, increase student engagement, and manage a classroom where students use diverse technological means to master curricular skills. Our sessions will be differentiated, so teachers can choose which programs, applications and websites will be most beneficial to their classrooms, and then work hands-on in the area(s) of their choosing while we offer support.
Other sessions will not be presented in quite the same way. In some cases, we will walk teachers through the steps for using a tech tool without allowing them to apply what they are learning or, in some cases, even touch a computer. Why? I can only assume the threat is that teachers will be distracted, or that checking their email will be more enticing than the subject matter to be covered.
Whether it is a lack of confidence in the value of the content, or lack of trust in teachers to understand the value of the content, it can be a recipe for failure, and teachers often do the same thing in the classroom. One of the biggest myths in education is that students won't learn it if we don't make them shut down everything and listen to us tell it to them. Another is that they won't or can't learn it if we don't teach it to them.
But teachers, much like our students, do not respond to spending sweltering June days listening to someone talk at them without being allowed to freely make the connections and applications to their own prior knowledge, experience, and needs. This is not to say that some wouldn't abuse the privilege of being connected while learning; some people, teachers and students alike (myself included), will not be in the right mindset to learn on any given day. However, we lose so many opportunities to let people learn for themselves by making them learn our way.
In thinking about these different approaches to educating students and teachers, I stumbled upon two links that I feel compelled to share.
The first is research from Melbourne University that shows that workers who surf the Internet for leisure, known as 'Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing,' are more productive than those who don't. People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office - are more productive by about nine per cent than those who don't." Read here for a report on something I've long believed, perhaps showing that a little freedom and respect yields better productivity.
The second is a Florida school that has gone against the trend of banning mobile devices, instead integrating cell phones into the entire educational experience, and achieved eye-opening results. While Project Red has already demonstrated a connection between 1:1 computing schools and increased attendance, some people need more proof that the increased student engagement from tech integration can translate to academic success. Consider Florida's Wiregrass High School, where students exchange questions and answers with their teachers, read classroom blogs, collaborate, trade notes, take a snapshot of the blackboard for later studying, and much more, all using the devices that a vast majority of them already owned. Read a blog about their efforts and results here, and decide for yourself if a little trust can go a long way toward our goal of developing lifelong, independent learners.
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