High (Digital) Expectations for All

Good day, everyone.

We in education hear a lot about high rigor and high expectations, and we apply that well to the curricula we teach. We do not seem to apply the same ideas when it comes to technology integration, where we instead tend to "dumb it down" in a way we would never dream of doing with our curricular content.

I make this reflection without any data or numbers; it's not like I have found a way to accurately measure rigor, or a teacher's comfort level with different topics and how that relates to what he or she will expect from students. Instead, these musings are based purely on my observations working with K-12 teachers over the past four years. I can assure you, though, that it is a clear trend in our district, and perhaps with teachers everywhere, to expect a lot less from our students than they are capable of when it comes to their use of technology, the Internet, and 21st Century Skills such as collaboration, communication, tech fluency, and problem solving.

Why we might not have high expectations for student technology use...
Perhaps this is because we are used to being masters of the content we teach, and as education experts we have a good understanding of what challenges students within our content areas, but we are certainly not as fluent with our own use and understanding of technology, so we are not as well versed in how to challenge students to operate at a higher level with 21st Century Skills.

What we could do to raise the bar...
I've seen some very well-intentioned teachers, who fully understand the value that mastering 21st Century Skills will have for their students, attempt some very bold integration strategies only to end up lowering the expectations by over-managing the project. For example, the teacher who wanted to expose students to myriad web 2.0 sites, and introduced all of them to her students, but then created a rubric requiring her students to use every single site in the project they created. What if, instead, this teacher was able to step back from being the expert on the technology, and focus on the other curricular lesson objectives, while allowing her students to demonstrate their mastery of these objectives in different ways? If we apply the same principles of D.I. to technology use, we'd see that it is not about the specific technologies our students employ to learn, it is that they learn by collaborating, creating, discovering, and solving meaningful problems.

This week I saw a teacher pull back from assigning a project (one that would have been excellent even if done with scissors, glue, construction paper and pencil) because he wasn't fully versed himself in the medium (Google Docs, in this case) that the students would use to create, share, and collaborate on the project. His hesitation was based on completely understandable, responsible and professional concerns. But the bottom line is that this teacher, like many of us, was not ready to have the same high expectations for his students' technology use that he would have for the standards he teaches in his course.

The students were going to make publications that would have been set in the 1920s as a project to show what they have learned in a unit on that decade (and they would have certainly discovered new knowledge in the process of creating this publication). The teacher wanted the students to work together, and he had an excellent overview of his expectations for the final product, as well as a well-planned rubric for how it would be assessed. The only hold-up was that this teacher is not a regular user of the website where his students could create, share, edit, and publish their work. It would be the students' responsibility to design the layout of their publications (or find the appropriate templates), and it would be their task to share the document with each other and their teacher. The project would be completed largely outside of class, other than a day or two to explain and set up the project in class. The teacher would have had to turn over a lot of responsibility to his students and allow them to discover and master the technology end of the project, but really no more than he was expecting them to do with discovering and thinking critically about the content. But he was not ready to put a task like this on the shoulders of his students, most likely because this would have been a challenge for the teacher himself to complete if he were the student.

I am not criticizing or singling out this teacher, or anyone who draws back from challenging students with high expectations for their technology use, because we all have reservations about expecting from others what we cannot yet master ourselves. All I am saying is that, for the good of our students, we need to make ourselves comfortable teaching outside of our comfort zones. We need to be able to assign challenging tasks that our students can solve, even when the solutions are not 100% clear to us.

We can master the content and simply manage the students as they master the technology, and perhaps discover solutions together.