Intersection #1

Harrison

I have always found everything Nell Duke writes to be original, important, meticulously researched and well written, and this chapter [in Reading at a Crossroads] is no exception. However, with her co-authors she specifically invites the reader to question the trustworthiness of everything they read, so I’ll attempt to do that.

Of course if you are an academic this can be serious fun. For example, Duke and her co-authors suggest that inaccuracy in historical sources is not new, and that in fact the ‘Father of History’, Herodotus, was ‘fanciful’ in his historical descriptions of 5th-century Greece, and they cite in support of this point Fehling’s (1989) critique. But was the writing of Herodotus ‘fanciful’ and therefore untrustworthy? A more recent re-analysis of his work suggests that Herodotus was not ‘fanciful’, but rather that he had a different view of history. Instead of the pragmatic way of thinking of those he called the ‘polymaths’, Herodotus, in adopting a freer and more literary style, advocated a version of historical writing that explicitly valued sophiê , a more symbolic, or ‘wisdom’- based approach to historicism (Węcowski, 2004). You could argue, therefore, that Herodotus was 2,500 years ahead of his time, and that he understood that a ‘scientific’ claim to truth was fraudulent, and that what was needed was not a claim to ‘truth’, but rather to wisdom–a necessarily subjective but ultimately more culturally valuable quest for meaning. In short, a postmodern approach. On this analysis, the tension between a quest for ‘truth’ in a textbook versus an explicit acknowledgement that there isn’t a single ‘truth’ but rather a series of dialogic debates and uncertainties was prefigured two thousand years ago, and Herodotus wasn’t ‘fanciful’ but instead should be recognized as the first postmodern historical textbook author.

So what should we expect of a textbook? Should we expect a school textbook to be ‘trustworthy’? Chester Finn is very clear that in the US, ‘Textbooks, by and large, suck’ (Finn, 2010); Tobin and Ybarra carefully evaluated 28 social studies textbooks and came to a parallel conclusion: ‘Textbooks are flawed” (2008, p.28). Indeed, while researching this brief response I have come to have some sympathy for textbook publishers: recent US textbooks have been criticized for being too liberal, for being too conservative, for being too flashy, too pro-Israel (or too pro-Palestine), and too superficial to support any real critical thinking. Tobin and Ybarra accuse textbook authors of presenting ‘biased scholarship’, ‘inaccurate generalizations’, ‘imprecise conclusions’ and ‘false “facts”’ (2008, p. 6).

All this leads me to feel that it is as important for children to be taught to challenge the trustworthiness of school textbooks as determinedly as the Internet sources available through Google. But at what age can children make such judgments? This chapter reports the important Zhang and Duke (2011) study of fourth graders learning to use the WWWDOT protocol, the first question of which is ‘Who wrote this and what credentials do they have?”, but at what age are students really capable of judging the trustworthiness of an Internet source such as a neo-Nazi white supremacist site? Ellen Markman’s (1979) groundbreaking work showed just how insecure was sixth-graders’ ability to make judgments about the trustworthiness of a text, even when it contained startling inconsistencies.

I share Duke’s view that teachers everywhere have a massive task on their hands to help children deal with evaluating as well as comprehending texts. Teaching children to mistrust texts does indeed represent a paradigm shift, but what also needs to be understood is that only a student with a good vocabulary, extensive world knowledge and a mind alert to the possibility of error, prejudice and propaganda will be well equipped to deal with the reading challenges of the 21st Century, and this is a much broader notion of comprehension than that which we usually adopt.

References

Fehling, D. (1989). Herodotus and his sources: Citation, invention and narrative art. (J. G. Howie, Trans.). Prenton, England: Francis Cairns Publications.

Finn, C.E., Jr (2010) School’s Out. http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/diane-ravitch-education-schools-opinions-book-reviews-chester-e-finn-jr.html (accessed 19 February 2015).

Fitzgerald, F. (1979) America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 35-6.

Markman, E. M. (1979). Realizing that you don’t understand: Elementary school children’s awareness of inconsistencies. Child development, 50(3), 643-655.

Tobin, G. A., & Ybarra, D. R. (2008). The trouble with textbooks: Distorting history and religion. Lexington Books.

Węcowski, M. (2004). The hedgehog and the fox: Form and meaning in the prologue of Herodotus. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 124, 143-164.

Duke

I appreciated the opportunity to read Colin Harrison’s insightful chapter. Although we are an ocean away, the first two (inadequate) teleologies he identified—motivation and communication—are commonly invoked in and regarding technology in U.S. schools as well; his description of the turn-around of Stephenson School, and the multi-faceted role of technology in that turn-around, inspires on any continent.

But Colin’s chapter, like ours, raises pressing questions about how teachers can learn to take greatest advantage of the educational affordances of technology and continually update and upgrade curriculum and instruction as technologies evolve. How did Stephenson teachers come to teach and learn with technology in the ways that they are? How do teachers come to teach and learn effectively about source evaluation, search, and graphical comprehension, as my co-authors and I argue is essential? And how can teachers evolve their teaching as technology itself evolves?

We can guess that a traditional approach to teacher professional development will not work. Ball and Cohen (1999) describe a traditional teacher development as “often intellectually superficial, disconnected from deep issues of curriculum and learning, fragmented, and noncumulative” (p. 3–4). We can guess, for example, that it will not work to provide professional development consisting of one-time workshops in which an outside expert is brought in to present some new app or technique. We can guess that it will not work for each teacher to work in isolation, doing his or her ‘own thing’ with technology.

Rather, it seems likely that professional learning will be most effective when it occurs within true communities of learning. Learning Forward’s Standards for Professional Learning state:

Professional learning within communities requires continuous improvement, promotes collective responsibility, and supports alignment of individual, team, school, and school system goals. Learning communities convene regularly and frequently during the workday to engage in collaborative professional learning to strengthen their practice and increase student results. Learning community members are accountable to one another to achieve the shared goals of the school and school system and work in transparent, authentic settings that support their improvement. (http://learningforward.org/standards/learning-communities#.VPB_CildU7Q)

Indeed, professional learning communities are consistent—at least as envisioned, perhaps not always as enacted—with many characteristics of effective professional development identified by scholars in this area (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2012; DeSimone, 2011; Wilson & Berne, 1999). I look forward to hearing from Professor Harrison’s comments about the degree to which professional learning at the Stephenson School could be similarly described, and in general what he views as promising approaches to professional learning about and with learning technologies.

References

Ball, D. L. & Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In G. Sykes and L. Darling-Hammond (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp. 3–32). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2012). Creating a comprehensive system for evaluating and supporting effective teaching. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.

Desimone, L. (2011). A primer on effective professional development. Phi Delta Kappan, 92(6), 68–71.

Wilson, S. M., & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher learning and the acquisition of professional knowledge: An examination of research on contemporary professional development. Review of Research in Education, 24, 173–209.

Harrison

As usual, Nell is acute, thought-provoking, well-theorized and determined to seek answers to the most challenging questions. And (unusually for me) I have already attempted an answer to the first question she asks about how the teachers at the Stephenson School came to be so well-informed and professionally expert. My answers are in a paper that reports research on the relationship between teachers’ intentionality and their behavior, and on the ways in which there can be a lack of congruence between the two (Harrison, Tomás & Crook, 2014).

What we argue in that paper is that research into technology adoption tends to look at individuals, whereas more often than not, as Bagozzi (2007) has pointed out, we tend to act in ways that are determined not so much by individual, but by group, cultural or social aspects of technology. Within the social milieu of a school, the dispositions, goals and intentions of the teacher need to be aligned with those of the senior management team for technology adoption to be successful. Clearly the need for such alignment was paramount at Stephenson school, since technologies were in place that connected students, teachers, curriculum and assessment in one dynamic and pervasive system. Buying into this system was not an option. Every teacher used the VLE every day, and was required to upload at least two new lessons every week. Every student used the school’s network every day. As the head teacher put it, ‘ICT and learning, interactive learning, [is] happening in every curriculum area, in every classroom, in every lesson every day of the week, all the time.’

In our view, a number of factors had contributed to this policy’s success. First, the head teacher’s vision of an integrated and coherent ICT policy was instantiated in a network that worked efficiently across subjects, and that required active participation from every teacher and every student. Second, the head’s staff development policy had been gentle and encouraging, but was actually non-negotiable. A teacher who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept it would have to leave the school; but those who stayed (over 90%) received bespoke one-to-one sessions of professional development, after school, in their own classroom, on a day of their own choosing. Third, the school’s goals related to technology use were not aimed at making students independent learners, nor about increasing motivation; the goals of adopting technology were to improve attainment and improve students’ life chances. And these were goals that every teacher could accept and respect.

Nell’s other questions are more difficult: I don’t believe that we have as yet enough solid, research-informed data on the best way to teach students what I call Critical Internet Literacy. Neither do we yet have enough data on the ways in which pedagogy needs to evolve to keep pace with technological change. But I absolutely share her view that the need for pedagogical change is just as urgent as the need to understand how technologies can support learning. Perhaps in the end it will be our students who change us: their technologies are creeping into our classrooms, and as they do, we shall discover that self-directed learning, peer collaboration, and learning through social media have established themselves, and our teacherly intentionality will have to catch up with that of our students.

References

Bagozzi, R. P. (2007). The legacy of the Technology Acceptance Model and a proposal for paradigm shift. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8 (4), 244-254.

Harrison, C., Tomás, C., & Crook, C. (2014). An e-maturity analysis explains intention–behavior disjunctions in technology adoption in UK schools. Computers in Human Behavior, 34, 345-351.

Duke

I was so pleased to read that Colin has offered yet another important contribution to the field in the article, “An e-maturity analysis explains intention–behavior disjunctions in technology adoption in UK schools.” This is precisely the kind of scholarship that we need in order to address what I see as the most pressing question related to ICT and schooling: how we can actually get ICT used to its best advantages in schools.

Up to Colin’s second post, the importance of (1) a particular teleology around technology and (2) a community of teacher learning had been emphasized (in Colin’s chapter and my first post, respectively). In his second post, Colin adds a critical third point: the role of school leadership in successful use of ICT. Literature on effective school reform and effective schools routinely points to school leadership as an important factor. Colin provides a compelling example of the role that leadership, particularly the policies enacted by school leaders, can play in reform and effective practice around ICT specifically.

A fourth point about getting ICT used to its best advantages in schools—one closely related to Colin’s discussion of teleologies around technology—is that the focus should be not on the latest and greatest ICT tool, but on the specific teaching and learning goals that we want to address with ICT tools. I was taken by a blog post that argued we should “fall in love with the problem, not the product.” Sometimes I see school and district leaders, individual teachers, and (dare I say it?) university researchers so enamored with some new app or device, bell or whistle that their attention veers from the actual educational problem(s) and/or opportunity/ies that they were originally trying to address.

Of course, it will help us stay focused on the problem(s) and/or opportunity/ies if ICTs that address them are readily available. In my area of focus, early literacy development, I find that there are far more ICTs designed to address some areas—particularly sound-letter knowledge—than other areas, such as early vocabulary and comprehension development. At its worst, this can lead schools and districts to redefine the problem(s) they are trying to address, for example putting all students in sound-letter knowledge software when in fact some of them have far greater needs in other areas of literacy development—a hammer for which everything comes to look like a nail. To return to our chapter (Duke, Zhang, & Morsink), I wonder whether there are innovative ways not yet uncovered in which ICT tools could be designed to support students in the relatively neglected areas of learning to search, evaluate sources, and comprehend graphics. I am in love with these as problems and look forward to products that address them.