Converting Teaching to 21st Century Learning

I have been involved in a few discussions recently about technology’s role in education. I hear everything from, “I just want kids to be able to type,” “They need to be able to pass the PARCC,” “I want them to be able to make a PowerPoint.” You get the idea. I have done TONS of reading and research on the idea of, What do we really want kids to be able to do? Many states and counties make this very clear, mine does not. In all of this research I have found out some things that have thrown me onto different paths, or simply just made me think. There is an infographic put out by Rosetta Stone about Technology in the Classroom. Most of it contains things that we have heard before, but one bullet point on one page caught my attention. It is talking about how students learn differently in the digital age. There are obviously hundreds of articles, papers and websites devoted to this. What caught my attention was, immediate feedback. I have been successful at convincing most teachers that the skills that are gained through integrating technology into the classroom are useful as students matriculate up through their education and eventual careers. However, I think that I have been less successful in showing that students are actually coming into the classroom with different expectations around gathering and retaining information. I think this idea of “immediate feedback” really brings this home. Time for an example. If I give a quiz to students, let’s say on Thursday. I take it home to grade it, but get side tracked, have to do laundry, deal with family stuff, whatever. I attempt to do it on Friday during planning, but a parent calls and now my planning period is gone. So I, like a good teacher, spend my weekend grading a quiz on fractions. Give it back to kids on Monday. Here is the issue. I taught math on Friday, so we are already one lesson beyond the quiz. What if on Friday they “got it.” This data is already so outdated. Plus, it is not at all useful to students. They had no concept of what to study, or how to get more practice. If they play an online math game, or do an online quiz, they know immediately. I know immediately. I can totally change my Friday lesson if needed. They know right where they stand. Also, I didn’t have to spend my weekend grading papers!

However, it is so much bigger than that. If I want to know what year the Declaration of Independence was written, I can ask Siri, or Google, or Cortana (insert your brand of OS platform personality). I don’t ever have to wonder about dates, facts, who was that actress in that movie? I can have that information instantly. So can students, and they are used to it. The idea of walking up to the library, looking in a catalogue, finding the book, flipping through and index, reading a page, sounds exhausting to someone who is used to just saying “OK Google.” So they don’t do it. Some would brand this as lazy. I don’t. I think it is using tools, and being efficient. That student who didn’t go all the way to the library now has, probably, a half an hour more time to do something with this new information. I now have time to fold my laundry and put it away, instead of leaving it in a huge pile next to my bed. OK, so what does this mean for teaching? If students, and teachers, are used to immediate feedback, they also have, or will have, the tools to use that feedback to change course, or create action. So it is the paradigm shift, of we need to not just know information, we need to know what to do with it. Information is so easy to obtain, that it is no longer a skill to be able to know a date, or name in history. The new skill is knowing WHY that date and person are important, how they relate to the whole story. Also, now that you know this, how are you going to use it to better yourself or others? This is the shift. Obtaining information, or “learning” information is not the objective. That is what we all did in school, we learned how to find specific information, how to memorize it. This is no longer a necessary skill. Why are we still teaching it? If you really believe in this idea, your textbooks become obsolete; dictionaries and times tables charts become useless. This shift in mindset is important. It is also not happening. How do we convince teachers that the way that information in obtained and processed, in 2016 is like no other time in history, and that teaching and learning needs to adjust?