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Education Week
Why Ed Tech Is
Not Transforming How Teachers Teach
By Benjamin Herold
Wilmington, Del.
Public schools now provide at least one computer for every five
students. They spend more than $3 billion per year on digital content.
And nearly three-fourths of high school students now say they regularly
use a smartphone or tablet in the classroom.
But a mountain of evidence indicates that teachers have been painfully
slow to transform the ways they teach, despite that massive influx of
new technology into their classrooms. The student-centered, hands-on,
personalized instruction envisioned by ed-tech proponents remains the
exception to the rule.
"The introduction of computers into schools was supposed to improve
academic achievement and alter how teachers taught," said Stanford
University education professor Larry Cuban. "Neither has occurred."
Indeed, a host of national and regional surveys suggest that teachers
are far more likely to use technology to make their own jobs easier and
to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students
in control of their own learning. Case study after case study describe
a common pattern inside schools: A handful of "early adopters" embrace
innovative uses of new technology, while their colleagues make
incremental or no changes to what they already do.
Researchers have identified numerous culprits, including teachers'
beliefs about what constitutes effective instruction, their lack of
technology expertise, erratic training and support from administrators,
and federal, state, and local policies that offer teachers neither the
time nor the incentive to explore and experiment.
The net effect, said Leslie A. Wilson, the chief executive officer of
the One-to-One Institute, a nonprofit based in Mason, Mich., that has
consulted with hundreds of schools and districts across the country and
world, is that schools rarely realize the full promise of educational
technology.
"There's nothing transformative about every kid having an iPad unless
you're able to reach higher-order teaching and learning," Ms. Wilson
said. "If schools take all this technology, and use it like a textbook,
or just have teachers show PowerPoint [presentations] or use
drill-and-kill software, they might as well not even have it."
Modeling Good Digital Teaching
A clear description of what student-centered, technology-driven
classroom instruction entails is laid out in standards developed by the
Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education.
"You can do student-centered teaching without technology. There have
been teachers doing that for a long time," said Wendy Drexler, ISTE's
chief innovation officer. "But tech is not going away, and we want to
have teachers using it effectively."
In the digital age, the ISTE standards say, teachers should be
expected, among other strategies, to "engage students in exploring
real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools
and resources." They should also "develop technology-enriched learning
environments that enable all students to become active participants in
setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and
assessing their own progress."
That pretty much describes Robyn L. Howton's Advanced Placement English
class at the 1,100-student Mount Pleasant High School, a neighborhood
comprehensive high school with just-above-average state test scores,
located on the outskirts of Wilmington.
On a warm May morning, 26 Mount Pleasant 11th graders were scattered
around Ms. Howton's room, sitting in groups of three or four. They were
midway through a project-based unit on social-justice movements. Their
goal: Produce independent research papers on topics of their choice,
then collaboratively develop a multimedia presentation of their
findings with classmates researching the same issue.
After a brief welcome and introduction, the teens were on their own.
The 15 iPads on a cart in the back of the room were quickly gobbled up.
Nicole Collins, Courtney Norris, and Quincy Vaughn, all 17, went to
work at a small table. Using iPads and a cloud-based tool called Google
Slides, they collaborated in real time on their group presentation
about injustices in the U.S. criminal-justice system.
Ms. Collins said she had chosen the topic because "my own family has
problems with the law, so I understand part of it."
Mr. Vaughn expressed a different motivation: "With everything that's
going on with Ferguson and Baltimore, it's a little overwhelming," he
said, referring to the police killings of black men and the resulting
protests in each city. "Sometimes, you need to speak out."
The trio worked enthusiastically for 25 minutes without any interaction
with their teacher. Ms. Howton slid to the back of the room. On her
laptop, she logged into the Google platform to check students' work.
Occasionally, she circulated around the room, asking probing questions
or issuing challenges to individual groups.
"I've probably stood in front of that class for three hours the entire
school year," said the 24-year teaching veteran, who has received
intensive training in technology integration from a local foundation
and a consortium of Delaware school districts that promote personalized
learning. "I decided my personal goal was to turn my classroom into a
model so other teachers who want to start down this pathway have
someone to come and [observe]."
But Mount Pleasant Principal Heather Austin said that only about 5
percent of her school's teachers are even in the same ballpark as Ms.
Howton when it comes to making effective use of classroom technology.
Another 5 percent are extremely resistant to use just about any ed tech.
"The 90 percent in the middle, they all have overhead projectors,
there's a teacher computer, they use some sort of PowerPoint," Ms.
Austin said. "They're using [technology] to enhance what they're doing,
but they haven't really given students control over it."
Research suggests that's more or less the standard distribution of
technology use in most schools nationwide.
The most authoritative national study on teacher technology use was
conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2009. A
survey of 3,159 teachers found that when teachers did allow students to
use technology, it was most often to prepare written text (61 percent
of respondents reported that their students did so "sometimes" or
"often") conduct Internet research (66 percent), or learn/practice
basic skills (69 percent).
Far more rare were teachers who reported that their students sometimes
or often used technology to conduct experiments (25 percent), create
art or music (25 percent), design and produce a product (13 percent),
or contribute to a blog or wiki (9 percent.)
Student-centered use of classroom technology "isn't going to happen
overnight," said Ms. Drexler of ISTE. "This is about the diffusion of
innovation."
A Pessimistic View
Mr. Cuban of Stanford has a more pessimistic take.
"Most teachers have 'domesticated' innovative technologies by
incorporating them into their existing repertoire of teacher-directed
practices," he wrote in his 2013 book, Inside the Black Box of
Classroom Practice: Change Without Reform in American Education.
In his research for that book, Mr. Cuban revisited the technology-rich
Silicon Valley high school featured in his seminal 2001 book, Overused
and Oversold: Computers in the Classroom.
At the turn of the 21st century, he had found that "most teachers [at
the school] had adapted an innovation to fit their customary practices."
More than a decade later, some things had changed. More teachers
regularly used digital devices for classroom instruction. And many of
those teachers had incrementally changed their approach, using
technology to plan lessons more efficiently, communicate with their
colleagues more frequently, and access information via the Internet
more regularly.
Still, Mr. Cuban wrote, "all but a few of the teachers at [the school]
used a familiar repertoire of instructional approaches: lecturing,
conducting a discussion, and occasional use of technologies such as
overhead projectors, videos, and computers."
For the most part, he concluded, "even in computer-based classes,
teacher-centered instruction with a mix of student-centered practices
was the norm."
Similar findings resulted from a 2010 study of 21 Texas middle schools
by private researcher Kelly S. Shapley and her colleagues. The schools
had been provided with abundant technology, including laptops for every
student and teacher, wireless upgrades for schools, digital curricula
and assessments, and professional development, paid for with $20
million in federal funds.
The End Result?
"In general, teachers at many schools seemed to view technology as a
more valuable tool for themselves than for their students," Ms. Shapley
wrote.
While spotty Internet connections and Wi-Fi networks continue to cause
problems in some places, access to technology is no longer the main
barrier to transforming instruction, most researchers point out.
Instead, their focus is now on so-called "second order" obstacles.
In 2010, for example, researchers Peggy A. Ertmer of Purdue University,
in West Lafayette, Ind., and Anne T. Ottenbreit-Leftwich of Indiana
University, in Bloomington, took a comprehensive look at how teachers'
knowledge, confidence, and belief systems interact with school culture
to shape the ways in which teachers integrate technology into their
classrooms.
One big issue: Many teachers lack an understanding of how educational
technology works.
But the greater challenge, the researchers wrote, is in expanding
teachers' knowledge of new instructional practices that will allow them
to select and use the right technology, in the right way, with the
right students, for the right purpose.
A 2014 paper by researchers at Michigan State University, in East
Lansing, provides a tangible example: Teachers and students in the
small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online
word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support
collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being
realized. Teachers were not encouraging group-writing assignments and
their feedback focused overwhelmingly on issues such as spelling and
grammar, rather than content and organization.
Even more important than knowledge of how to use classroom technology,
Ms. Ertmer and Ms. Ottenbreit-Leftwich wrote, may be teachers' level of
confidence in trying it out in their classrooms. If they do not believe
that they can use technology to accomplish their classroom goals, they
appear unlikely to seriously attempt it.
On top of that, teachers' "pedagogical beliefs" are increasingly
believed to play a central role in their willingness to use ed tech.
In a forthcoming study by researcher Emily Rodgers of The Ohio State
University, in Columbus, and her colleagues, 1st graders in
low-performing elementary schools showed statistically significant
gains in their ability to identify letters after using an iPad app
called LetterWorks. Their teachers, however, expressed reluctance about
continuing to use the app, in large part because they held a
philosophical belief that tactile learning is important for young
children.
Classroom Realities
Those barriers to good technology use are made worse by school-based
factors and problematic policies.
Researchers have found, for example, that even innovative teachers can
be heavily affected by pressure to conform to more traditional
instructional styles, with a teacher as the focal point for the
classroom. Newer teachers inclined to use technology in their
classrooms can also be deterred by experienced teachers who feel
differently.
And the current test-based accountability system isn't exactly
supporting the transition to student-centered, technology-driven
instruction, said Ms. Drexler of ISTE."We're telling teachers that the
key thing that is important is that students in your classroom achieve,
and we're defining achievement by how they do on [standardized] tests,"
she said. "That's not going to change behavior."
Perhaps the most obvious—and overlooked—barrier to effective ed-tech
use is that totally changing the way you do your job takes a ton of
time and work.
That's the challenge facing Scott Bacon, a 13-year-veteran educator who
now teaches 9th grade economics at Mount Pleasant High.
As his students returned from lunch on that recent May day, they
settled into paired desks, all facing the front of the room.
Mr. Bacon launched into a combination PowerPoint presentation-lecture
about various types of unemployment.
Periodically, he stopped to ask a question of the whole class. A few
students' hands shot up. After hearing from one or two of the students,
Mr. Bacon continued, clicking a button to bring up his own answers to
his questions on the PowerPoint.
When the lecture turned to "technological unemployment," Mr. Bacon
joked to the class: "Eventually, everyone is going to be replaced by a
robot, right? I'm being replaced by computers as we speak. You can just
watch Khan Academy now, right?"
Despite tremendous access to technology, most teachers have not
transformed their instruction. Experts will discuss how tech is
actually used and the barriers to technology-enabled, student-centered
teaching.
Later, he described his own experience trying to implement the
technology-integration training he has received through the same
multidistrict consortium on personalized learning in which Ms. Howton
takes part.
While he's very motivated to make his instruction more
student-centered, Mr. Bacon said, "What I'm finding is I'm having a
hard time doing it that right way, a wholesale change."His attempts to
move in that direction have been frustrating and draining.
He described, for example, an earlier lesson in which he conducted an
experiment involving a National Public Radio segment on recent federal
unemployment statistics. The whole class listened together. Mr. Bacon
asked half his students to write a summary and reaction using a pencil
and notecards and half to do so using the online discussion forum on
the school's new learning management system.
Describing his own experience during the experiment, Mr. Bacon said,
"I'm up there juggling different remotes, a mouse up here versus a
mouse [attached to a computer in the back of the class.] It felt crazy.
Doing that was a lot more work than if I had just given them all
notecards."
Ingredients for Success
So how can schools and districts better support teachers in
transforming the way they teach?
Most often, that discussion begins with professional development. There
are a lot of ideas and theories on what can make such training more
effective, but rigorous, independent research remains frustratingly
rare.
One strategy that most researchers and experts seem to agree on:
so-called "job-embedded" professional development that takes place
consistently during the workday and is tied to specific classroom
challenges that teachers actually face, rather than in the isolated
sessions often preferred by district central offices and written into
districts' contracts with their teachers.
"When learning experiences are focused solely on the technology itself,
with no specific connection to grade or content learning goals,
teachers are unlikely to incorporate technology into their practices,"
concluded Ms. Ertmer and Ms. Ottenbreit-Leftwich, the researchers who
wrote the 2010 paper on the factors influencing teachers' use of
educational technology.
Another oft-cited strategy is putting to work those "early adopters"
inside a school who are making innovative, student-centered use of
technology in their classrooms. "The smarter districts use those
teachers to teach other teachers how to integrate tech into their
lessons," Mr. Cuban said. "The dumb ones use vendors to provide
professional development and force teachers to attend those sessions."
That smarter strategy is what Ms. Austin, the Mount Pleasant principal,
is attempting.
But even as she described her approach to scaling up student-centered,
technology-driven instruction during an interview in her office, a
whiteboard loomed over her shoulder. On it was a circle, representing a
Mount Pleasant student. Surrounding that circle were 19 other shapes,
each representing a major initiative or issue the school is currently
trying to balance, from new online exams linked to the Common Core
State Standards to Delaware's intensive new teacher-evaluation program.
"I'm going to keep [technology integration] as my priority," Ms. Austin
said.
But the reality is that goal will be as much a challenge for the school
leader as it is for her teachers.
Such dilemmas are part of why it's most realistic to expect that, for
the foreseeable future, teachers' use of technology in the classroom
will typically follow a bell curve, with those using student-centered
approaches in line with the ISTE standards mostly remaining outliers.
"When all the stars are aligned, you can think about fundamentally
changing how you've always done business," said Ms. Wilson of the
One-to-One Institute. "But remember, changing how we do education is
like trying to move Mount Everest."
Librarian Holly Peele contributed to this story.
See this and other articles at Education Week
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