How do we trust and regulate at the same time?

My position often pits me against others in the district in terms of policy. I fight for policy that treats teachers as the professionals they are, or at least ought to be, but I'm always fighting against several others who say something like, "But if we do x, then some people will y". They have a great point. There are certainly those who will abuse any right or privilege they are given. There are others, though, who are trying to forge a path into 21st Century teaching and learning, only to find roadblocks at every turn in place because of their less than professional colleagues.

My usual answer to this argument is that it is a management issue. Teachers who violate policy, whatever the policy is, need to be documented and shown the door if their actions continue to be a detriment to students (I am assuming here that the policies are in place to benefit students in the first place). Today I had a conversation with a librarian whose husband is a principal, and it got me to thinking differently. Her point, and again I have to concur, is that the administrators are not available to "police" their buildings, whether they want to or not. They are often at meetings in another location, or tied down with administrative duties that restrict them from documenting anything going on in classrooms outside of scheduled evaluations. It is a struggle just to complete all of the evaluations, and that is when not everyone is evaluated every year.

So, back to my original question: how in the world can we open things for teachers while getting those who would ruin it out of the classroom?

Funding Learning: A Monumental Disconnect

Every time I turn around, there is a roadblock in the way of getting to where we need to be as an education system. The frustrating part is that the roadblock is almost always the same: money.

In my little corner of the world, a lack of funds places itself between where we are and where we'd like (or need) to go in all kinds of ways. If I want to train anyone to do anything, it takes money. If I want to offer incentives, it costs money. If I want to improve access to technology resources, it costs tons of money. Basically, anything and everything we need to do in order to move forward costs money. This isn't a problem, as long as everyone recognizes the importance of education. Right?

Apparently, I assume too much. Sure, every government entity and figurehead, every politician will talk about how important education is, but then guess what is usually first to appear on the chopping block when cuts need to be made?

Educating our citizens should be priority number one, and money should NEVER be an object. Sure, we should scrutinize spending and look for ways to be more efficient whenever possible, but to cut spending, or even to limit spending when it comes to educating the next generation of Americans, is anti-American. If you love your country and want it to be the best it can be, you better believe in having intelligent citizens capable of critical thinking and problem solving, regardless of their eventual chosen endeavors.

So how or why do I arrive at the opinion that government leaders don't care about this priority? Despite the fact that the Department of Education talks a good talk in a recent publication advocating for systemic change nationwide (see netp documents and information at http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010), they still fail to fund the lofty goals contained within its pages. On the contrary, one only needs to Google "government waste" to find a mind-boggling amount of information on just how little government does to shore up its own spending, which could easily afford the national public education system a nearly unlimited budget. Take a look at the Heritage Foundation's list of the top 10 examples of government waste, for starters. (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/04/top-10-examples-of-government-waste)

After the last round of elections, I'm afraid the GOP will look to education yet again to increase available spending elsewhere in the state budgets. But what could possibly be more important than an already underfunded system intended to prepare American citizens for world leadership?

Government leaders: Quit stealing from our kids. Go pick on your own departments and hold them accountable before giving the education system any more of your mandates tied to underfunded programs. Figure out what you can do to ease the burden on teachers so that they can spend more time with students. Find the billions of dollars that are spent each year by people you don't know on things you can't find before you talk to us about accountability or efficiency.

Educators as Life Long Learners

One of the things I hear about all the time in my position is, “I don’t have time to…” fill in the blank with whatever technology it is that I’m trying to help teachers learn. It’s probably the single most irksome thing that I deal with, and I’d be happy to tell you why.

When we ask ourselves what we want educationally for our students and our own children, “lifelong learning” appears near the top of every list in some form or another. Why, then, are we as a collective group of educators NOT modeling this very behavior?

How did it ever become acceptable for an educator to refuse to learn something vital to their students? How many times have you heard that it is important for teachers to model the behavior they expect from students? What message does it send, then, when we say we don’t have time to learn something that is critical to our students’ education?

Maybe the last point is where I lose some of you; you don’t agree that technology is an important part of the education for all students, and so you have been holding out on learning new skills in the hope that it will just go away, like so many other educational initiatives. Two things are wrong with that logic; one is that I don’t believe anyone can argue that at least SOME of their students would benefit from the use of technology in the classroom (and if even one student needs it, you should be using it), and the other is that this is not an educational initiative-it’s the way the world operates now. It’s time to catch up with it. Just because teaching hasn’t changed much in the last several decades doesn’t mean that most other professions haven’t. If anyone would like to debate this issue, I welcome the discourse.

I should clarify what I mean when I say “use technology”. I don’t want anyone to use technology in a classroom if it doesn’t have an impact on the learning. Sometimes the impact comes in the form of motivation when using a “cool” tool, but that’s not what I advocate. Nor do I advocate automating tasks to free up time. Sitting students at a computer to do drill-and-kill types of activities is NOT good technology integration. Yes, the instant feedback offered by many of these sites and programs is supported by research, but true integration goes much deeper.

Good technology integration uses appropriate tools to accomplish tasks that students couldn’t do without it; it helps them to think more deeply about subjects, interact with peers and experts all over the world, create and publish authentic work that is both useful and relevant, interact with the world when disabilities would otherwise be a roadblock, analyze information that was once held by one person in the room, provide access to all the world’s knowledge collectively, and the list goes on. Hopefully the difference between these approaches is clear.

Back to my argument-how is it acceptable practice for teachers to refuse or avoid learning how to empower students with these tools?

When I was in college studying to become a teacher, my professors made a point to remind us that we would not have much of a life outside of school; that if we were there for the summers, we needed to choose another career. It was made painfully obvious to us that continuing to learn would be an integral part of our professions. New things are discovered all the time. Maps change, books are rewritten, scientific discoveries are made, opinions change, and on and on. This should not be news to anyone. Why, then, is it acceptable to keep up on whether or not we call it Istanbul or Constantinople, but still not know the difference between a blog and a wiki? Let me put the period on this point by asking another question; when you go to the doctor, do you expect him or her to be using the latest advances in medical technology, or would you be fine with them pulling out a jar of leeches to suck out the evil spirits causing your ails?

Now let’s talk about the ‘time’ issue. When you consider all the things that technology can do-from removing roadblocks to providing a platform for expression, thought, and growth-it should be the top priority for every educator when they budget their time.

I am a former fifth and sixth grade teacher. Believe me, I understand the fact that there are hundreds of things teachers are responsible for above and beyond simply working with kids. We’ve all seen the comparisons of what we do today vs. what we did a hundred years ago. Sometimes it feels we are solely responsible for the upbringing of an entire generation. I get that. But, when you look at all of the tools at your disposal to accomplish the impossible, how is it that we tend to overlook the fact that technology may be our greatest “multi-tool” for getting there? Time is precious to all of us, and technology can help you accomplish more in less time, and with better results. So when we look at how to spend our time, we should recognize that learning how to better use the technology tools at our disposal is maybe the most efficient use of it.

Teaching is an art, and technology can provide an entirely new and vast set of brushes, let alone canvas on which to paint your learning experiences. The time to embrace that concept is long overdue.