Redefining my role: Teacher as student

When I was young, I suppose some of my teachers probably told me I “had to learn” many of the things they were teaching me. To be fair, I don’t actually remember them saying this (I don’t remember too much of what they said to be honest), but I think it’s a safe assumption. More accurately, they probably stressed that I had to learn the content because I would need to know it later.

Either way, this argument never meant much to me. Generally, I excelled at the subjects that interested me (that I was intrinsically motivated to learn about) and paid just enough attention during the others to get by.

If a math teacher (one of the subjects that just didn’t interest me during school) told me I needed to learn an algorithm or an equation, I can imagine myself wondering, “Why?” After all, if I didn’t master the new content my friends would still play with me at recess, my parents would still have food for me when I came home, I would still be able to hit a baseball, I would still be able to immerse myself in a fantastic book, etc. In short, the important things were not affected by whether or not I mastered school concepts that weren’t interesting to me.

We learn the things we want to learn (or have to learn)

I’m still the same way as a teacher. I absolutely love my job, and can spend hours of personal time learning about new methods of instruction and new approaches that might help my students become self-directed owners of their learning. I spend hours of my free time doing this not because anyone told me to, but because it’s interesting to me and I want to become a better educator. I’m intrinsically motivated to learn about these things.

However, in all honesty, I give the minimum amount of effort when it comes to learning new assessment tools or top-down curriculum approaches that don’t spark my personal interest. I do learn them, because it’s part of my job and I’m held accountable for it, but it’s like pulling teeth and I generally put it off until I have to use it.

Unlike when I was a young math student, if I don’t master the curriculum or assessment content that is uninteresting to me, there are immediate repercussions - my administrators will ask where the data is, my students may be unprepared for the following grade, my colleagues may question what it is I’m teaching, etc. So, I learn these concepts because of extrinsic motivation.

The real reason I incorporate technology

As a teacher who uses quite a bit of technology (web 2.0 and social media) in both my teaching and in my personal learning, I have a vast professional learning network. In this network I often hear the lament from other adopters of educational technology that “most teachers” just don’t put in the effort to incorporate technology into their instruction. I would have to agree, but I think it’s important to ask, “Why should they?”

Don’t get me wrong, I understand all the reasons why it is important for educators to learn technology – after all, I make it a priority to integrate technology into my instruction because of all the benefits I see for my students. There are many reasons why technology should be a seamless part of education, I’m not questioning that. But telling teachers that they need to learn technology for these myriad reasons is like my former teachers telling me why I had to learn uninteresting concepts when I was young. It has little impact. (It’s like the droning sound of the teacher’s voice in those Charlie Brown cartoons.) Unless teachers have an intrinsic interest in learning technology or they are held accountable for learning it, they probably won’t.

Here’s the thing – yes, I learn about technology because I believe incorporating it into my instruction will benefit my students. But the main reason I spend hours of my free time exploring, using, and implementing technology is because I enjoy it. Would I spend all this free time learning it for the sake of my students if it was completely uninteresting to me? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but I’m afraid I probably wouldn’t.

Why teachers don’t have to learn technology

Teachers are learners – just like our students we all have certain learning strengths and different personal interests. I don’t think most teachers choose not to adopt technology because they are indifferent or unwilling to learn, but maybe it simply isn’t intrinsically interesting to them (or they aren’t familiar with the new mode of self-directed learning that tech involves).

However, just as the student who is bored by math (or literacy, science, etc.), or struggles with its concepts still needs to learn those skills, teachers need to learn the new skills inherent in tech integration.

Or do they?… Are their colleagues telling them they have to? Are their administrators telling them they have to? Are the parents telling them they have to? If not, then they don’t have to learn it. We would like them to because we see the benefits and we enjoy it, but until they have to learn it many of them won’t. If I didn’t demand that my students who struggle with math learn it, they certainly wouldn’t do it on their own. How many of us would carve out time to learn something that isn’t intrinsically interesting to us and isn’t required?

Finding the right motivator

I believe it is our responsibility as educators to integrate technology into instruction as much as we are able to. Those of us that get intrinsic rewards for doing so don’t need any prodding – in fact, we may need friends and colleagues to remind us to “put the tech down” every now and then.

Do teachers that don’t have the same intrinsic interest in tech need administrators to hold them accountable for learning it? Would this result in true ownership and enthusiasm for the learning, or would it be something they do “just enough of” because they have to? If they were given the time and opportunity to explore new ideas (really explore, to construct their own learning), would teachers be more likely to embrace technology integration? Perhaps if tech integration were heavily emphasized in educational degree programs and teaching preparatory courses (as I believe it should be) prospective teachers would be exposed to tech tools and could decide if this is something they have enough intrinsic interest in to pursue. As educators, we have to wear many hats, and now “technology specialist” is another one that perspective teachers need to be comfortable with.

Obviously I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I excel at the things that interest me and I generally do just enough of the other necessities so they don’t interfere with my interests.

Oh, and I am extremely grateful that my childhood teachers demanded that I learn those “boring” subjects that didn’t spark my intrinsic interests. Their high expectations, even though I couldn’t understand the purpose for the learning, laid the groundwork for all the opportunities I now enjoy. I wonder who is going to have those same high expectations for the teachers that don’t intrinsically enjoy technology?

(Many of the ideas in this post evolved from discussions in Kathleen Morris’  marvelous post about Overcoming Obstacles to technology integration.)

I guess I’m a “techy” teacher. I finally accepted the label – given to me by co-workers – sometime in the past year, but I’m still a little surprised by the fact. After all, I had never been on the Internet until after I received my undergraduate degree and it wasn’t until I started teaching (about 7 years ago) that I really began to learn about computers and technology.

How did I get to be here?

Now technology is completely integrated into my life, and more importantly, into my instruction. How did this happen? I never took any classes about how to use technology in class, I never read a book on the subject, nobody sat down with me and walked me through the steps of how to use a blog (or a wiki, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).  So how did I learn all of the technology I use in my instruction and in my online collaborations with teachers? I learned it on my own.

Well, kind of…

I have had minimal PD (professional development) on how to integrate technology into instruction, but much of that has been superficial, focusing on how to adapt old lessons into “new” ones using some specific web tool. However, one technology PD session did have a big impact on me. David Warlick spoke to the entire faculty a few years back and the main idea I got from his presentation was this: Students are using the internet to learn how to do anything they want to do. He was speaking primarily about middle school and high school students, but I figured the same would be true for me as well. So, I started using the internet to learn how to do what I wanted to do – blog, make videos, make podcasts, publish student work, etc. Of course it wasn’t easy, but I wanted to learn it so I did. (That is key – my learning was self-directed.)

I quickly realized that if I had a question about how to do something, chances were that thousands of other people had already had the same question, and perhaps a dozen or even hundreds had left tips and instructions that answered my specific question. I just had to use critical thinking skills to locate the information on the Internet. In that way, I wasn’t actually learning on my own, I was learning from hundreds of people that I had never met.

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Now, after a few years of tinkering with technology, I’m involved with a few committees that are looking into ways to increase technology integration into instruction. The thing that occasionally surprises me about these meetings (and about tech integration in general) is how often everything comes back to PD. If we are talking about the possibility of using Edmodo (just as an example – it could be wikis, blogs, etc.), inevitably the response is, “Well, the teachers need PD first.” Why? I don’t get it.

Why can’t teachers transfer their learning?

I think it’s safe to say that all teachers, regardless of the state or district, have had PD in some web 2.0 tool. Maybe it was blogging, or wikis, or even just how to use the school’s email account. My feeling is, if a teacher can do a few basic computer skills (format in MS Word, copy and paste, attach a document to an email or upload a photo, and perhaps add a hyperlink) they should be able to transfer that knowledge across various internet programs.

Teachers sometimes express surprise when a student can’t write a response to a question that is virtually the same as one they answered the day before simply because it is worded differently. Yet teachers can’t apply what they know about Facebook (or shutterfly, gmail, youtube, etc.) to use edmodo or a wiki? I’m not saying they should be able to master a new program immediately – like anything new it takes time, but they should have the flexibility of thinking to apply what they already know. If teachers can’t transfer their knowledge, how are they going to teach students to do so?

I understand that time and countless other responsibilities are often the hurdles for teachers to integrate more technology into their instruction, but that’s a topic for another time (Kathleen Morris has a great post about overcoming obstacles to tech integration.) What I’m wondering is whether we teachers know how to transfer our technological knowledge and use the Internet to actively seek answers to questions on our own. In other words, are we independent learners?

Dependent on PD

I suspect that the main reason many teachers don’t transfer their knowledge and actively seek answers to their questions about tech is that they simply aren’t very interested in learning it. The key to David Warlick’s statement is that people can leverage the internet to learn anything they want to learn. But let’s put that aside for now and assume for the sake of argument that teachers need to learn how to use tech whether they want to or not. Why do they often profess helplessness and state that they can’t learn it without PD?

If we expect our students to use “critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making” (ISTE student nets 4) and “apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes” (ISTE student nets 1.a), shouldn’t we be able to do the same as teachers? If we can’t apply these skills in our own learning, how can we teach our students to use them?

Besides the lack of time and/or motivation, I’m beginning to wonder if teachers really know how to learn new skills independently. We come from a system of education where everything was fed to us. As a student (even through my master’s degree), if I was told I needed to learn something there was a clear process I had to go through to learn it; sign up (and pay) for the right course with the available expert, buy some textbooks, go to class, follow directions, and collect my credits to show that I had learned it. Most PD follows a similar process (although greatly abbreviated).

So that is the paradigm that teachers have for their own learning – they feel that they need to be taught something in order to learn it. I’m not sure that they know there is now another way to learn, especially where learning about technology is concerned. But how would they know this new way of learning if it’s rarely been modeled for them? And if this is how they view their own learning, can we really expect them to teach students how to be independent learners?

A different kind of PD?

So perhaps instead of endless PD sessions for each “new” technology or different web application, teachers need PD on how to be self-directed learners. I’m not exactly sure what this would entail, but it could start with learning how to do an efficient web search – not just Google, but YouTube and other video sites for tutorials. I think it is also vital that the similarity between applications is emphasized so that teachers begin to understand that they can transfer their learning. I think specific skills such as these are necessary to help teachers begin to become more self-directed learners, but ultimately it is a shift in thinking.

Learners are no longer dependent on learning directly from an expert, the information is literally at their fingertips, they just need to know how to access it. And most important, learners of all ages need to be the drivers of their learning. Just like our students, teachers need to seek answers through active exploration. Again, if we are not independent learners, how can we expect our students to be?