After reading the article, Designing Change, I agree with pretty much everything that was stated. I feel that it is vital to change with time and incorporate technology in order to make you a better teacher and your students more actively involved. Since I do work in a computer lab, I am totally for students being active learners instead of passive learners. But what is the best way for my fellow teachers to change with the times and technologies?
Getting fellow teachers to change their ways could be very challenging if they are not shown a way to effectively replace the lecture teaching or the “stuff and dump” teaching methods they are used to. Getting teacher to change and/or employ new ideas or teaching practices probably can’t be done without proving to that particular teacher that it will be more effective and it won’t take a lot of work. I think a lot of teachers already have a tremendous amount of planning and grading, so applying something new that will take even more time is going to be a hard sell. I believe ideally the best way to demonstrate how effective a new teaching method might be is to have two sets of students learning the same material taught in different ways. If the students took a pre-test and a post-test (written, multiple choice, or other) to compare the knowledge before hand and after the fact could be a great gauge for how effective a certain teaching style and method can be. But as the article mentions, a lot of the times teachers are forced to teach to a test’s content, so when could a study group as previously mentioned be tried? Well it would first have to be tried and shown effective in a subject area that is not going to be on a standardized test, so there is not a fear of the districts/school’s test scores being affective.
Displaying examples of the work done in the classroom could be one of the easiest ways to show fellow teachers new ideas. Since all the schools that I know of have ‘School Improvement Days’ maybe a teacher with a new idea that they learned in their Master’s program could show off their ideas and answer questions about what they just demonstrated. The drawback to that idea is getting teachers to show off what they are doing in their classroom, because maybe they don’t want to be critiqued or viewed as a brown-nose because they are presenting in front of everybody. Bottom line is, if you do something that you are proud of in your classroom, show it off, whether it is to fellow teachers, principles, or administration.
Getting to integrate more technology can be very simple if your school has good technology teachers and/or good technology facilitators. Unfortunately, not all teachers have access to good technology people, or maybe you have great technology people but the district doesn’t want to spend money on technology. This is how I somewhat feel about my district, they will spend money on certain things but I personally feel that when they when they do spend money, they don’t look into the practicality of it. For example, they buy ELMO’s for our school, but instead of buying 4 or 6, they buy one for every single projector in the building. We don’t need an ELMO for every single projector in our school, we have 20 projectors in our building. The problem in this case was our technology coordinator made this decision instead of asking teachers first. I would have told her to buy several other items for my classroom instead of an ELMO for my room.
In the end, there are plenty of factors that hinder the adoption of the 21st Century Classroom. New technologies must be shown to be better then the previous methods. Unless teachers are fully sold on changing their ways then I don’t believe they will change. I think the person in charge of purchasing new technology should be in touch with the classroom teachers. Otherwise they might be purchasing things that will sit and collect dust. Also, the technology purchased needs to be explained how to be properly implemented, or it will just sit there and become obsolete. I totally agree that active learners will retain the information better then passive learners.
1 comment:
Hi Andy,
Nice discussion on active learning and how to help teachers change to integrate technology. I think you'll find most teachers will agree with you, most teachers want to change, but even after most professional development they revert to the 'stuff and dump' method. It's easier and it's what they know.
Your idea for experimental research would be nice, but in education it rarely occurs. I'm sure there are 2 different classes that are doing just what you suggest, teaching content in various ways, you could student each of those independently then compile your results for comparison.
Good ideas here, getting teachers involved in the decision making is critical, and I hope you can put them into action.
Randy
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