Teaching is a Discipline

Why with 1:1 devices, your school isn't seeing an impact from implementing EdTech

I have always been passionate about Technology. I grew up playing video games back in the 90’s, beginning when my older brothers introduced me to Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog but becoming much more as I got older. I quickly moved from consoles to the more powerful PC gaming. Those of you who did the same will remember, it was not always a smooth process just to start the machine, let alone launch a video game, and so we learned to tinker, troubleshoot, tweak and twist through the bowels of Windows spending I imagine just as much time doing that as we ever did gaming.

Since those days of youth, modifying the registry late into the night, messing around in DOS and cmd, having to emulate older operating systems to reach games of the past, I have always had a device close to hand. This isn’t immediately obvious to people as my nerdy nature has always somewhat rejected smartphones, seeing them more as a fashion accessory than a useful too. I will admit that over time this has changed and I use one frequently these days, but I have never and likely will never own the latest generation of any of the major brands. My phones tend to be at least 1 generation out of date and out of principle I have them cling to every scrap of life until I eventually replace them. Prior to my current Samsung S21, I was still using a Google Nexus One I bought in 2012!

Fast forward to my PGCE 8 years ago where I was introduced to the Plickers EdTech tool and it should be no surprise I was immediately enamoured and convinced of the capabilities. This simple tool allowed me to assess and engage my entire classroom without requiring student devices, ensuring I wouldn’t be excluding students due to lack of technology access. I utilised the tool in my 2nd placement at Langley Park Boys School to circumvent the inequality of access to tech of students and anonymise responses from learners. The effects were a delight, launching me into my unending quest for the best digital tool in every situation. At this point I will test, and indeed have tested most everything I’ve come across.

Reflecting on Colleague Engagement

Now, 8 years into teaching physics, 2nd in Physics at Whitgift school and I am more cautious in my expectations. I have always been quick to share my love of tech with others and have conducted various staff trainings over the years on these different tools. Sometimes, I’ve seen these tools transform my colleagues teaching and empower them in the classroom but I am ever left wondering why there is always a selection of colleagues the tool doesn’t resonate with.

It is the nature of the teacher (and indeed of society) to conclude the problem must be with the teacher. After all, if the learner hasn’t learned, the teacher just needs to change something about what they’re doing so they meet the needs of, engage, persuade, and drive the learner to success, right? 

So why was I struggling to get my colleagues on board? “I don’t get it” I would say to myself, “can’t they see how powerful this is? Do they not understand how much time this will save, how engaged their students will be?”

I was right about one thing. The fault was with me; but it was not that I had failed to convey to my colleagues the power of the technology. It was in my understanding of the fundamentals of pedagogy that I had slipped up. Make no mistake, I have found good success with EdTech tools myself, and as a digital strategist in my current school I have become one of the go-to voices for advice on tech, but I still felt like something wasn’t clicking with a large number of my colleagues.

I still firmly believe that the right application of EdTech can save time, improve educational outcomes, increase job satisfaction and provide learners previously unachievable success. So I’ve been trying to solve this problem over the last year, and while my adaptations to my training sessions have seen some improvements in staff engagement, ultimately I have struggled to get the mass adoption, raucous cheering and elevation to messianiac status that I was hoping for. 

Thinking critically however, even I will discard certain tools as “not good” despite others telling me different. The irony that until now I “couldn’t understand” why some of my colleagues would be unimpressed or reject my latest fantastic find is not lost on me. It didn’t seem to matter how much I had used a tool to success in my own practice nor how much I felt it could help each colleague. Likewise my reputation for giving solid advice seem to be meaningless in action. Perhaps I was wrong about the tech? Perhaps I was not doing as good a job with it as I felt I was? That explanation just didn’t feel right to me. It has been a perplexing problem.

Your own Pedagogy

Fast forward to this week and I was lucky enough to attend the 14th Festival of Education 2023 at Wellington College. A 2-day bonanza of presenations on pedagogy, tools, exam boards and so forth. The speakers I saw, without exception, poured in vast efforts resulting in a wonderful event of shared pedagogy and best practice.

Now, the morning after the event, I sit coffee in hand and I am left reflecting on a talk given by the fantastic Dr. Aubrey-Smith of One Life Learning. Her research into EdTech has led her to write an upcoming book From EdTech to PedTech: Changing the way we think about digital technology in which she beautifully articulates the problem I and it seems many, many others in the education sector have been overlooking. 

Dr. Aubrey-Smith’s talk has given me the understanding to voice something I have been feeling in my bones over the last year. Deep down the teachers do not want to use the EdTech I’m showing them. They will try it, they are professionals, they are self-reflective, they are earnest in their desires to improve their teaching and their student’s outcomes, but ultimately the implementation will not stick and they will go back to their own tried and true methods.

Now now, before you pick up your pitchforks, light your torches and begin the yelling, it is not because they don’t want to be more efficient, more effective and more exciting educators. It is not that they do not understand what I have shown them. It it certainly not any aspect of laziness or apathy. 

In truth it is due to their practice, methods, and the principles of teaching that they personally hold to. The sense of “how it should be done” that comes from the deep professionalism, integrity, dedication, and hard work they have put in every day of their career.

It is easy to think from outside the profession, and even from inside it, that teachers go through their PGCE, then their 2-year additional ECT training period, and finally at 3 years in are now masters and ready to teach students for a lifetime. It is easy to think that teachers only need to teach all the content once or twice, and then they’re the finished product. But teaching is not a simple exam, it is not a certification. There are so many varieties of learner, classroom, school, topic, tool, and so on. Teaching is a lifelong discipline, not a formula. It is a complex skillset honed over significant time through testing many hundreds, even thousands, of methods of delivery and instruction trying to find the best fit for yourself and your learners, which you must then adapt every year to your new set of learners. It is possible to hone your craft day in and day out for decades, always improving. And like any discipline there is more than one school of thought to it.

This leads us to the central proposition put forth by Dr. Aubrey-Smith:

• Know thy pedagogy

Dr. Aubrey-Smith’s research reveals that the impact of EdTech is determined by how well it is matched to the learning goals of the task, and how well it is matched to the personal pedagogy of the teacher.

By itself a specific piece of EdTech is just a tool and, like any tool, it is not always appropriate for the task at hand. You must understand, this is not because the tool is not good for the task, far from it. It is to do with the teacher and the outcome they are trying to achieve.

Craftsmen have known this since craft began. There is almost never one right tool for the job. Consider a woodworker smoothing and finishing a surface. They might choose the Hand Plane as their tool of choice. A traditional, handheld tool used for centuries. It is seeped in tradition, provides fine control and gives the craftsman direct tactile feedback. Many artisan craftsmen have used it, and a wealth of experience and knowledge can be leveraged to improve your results.

I don’t know about you, but for me that sounds like a lot of unnecessary work. I’m no traditionalist. I am charmed by the romance of course, but knowing myself, I’d much rather take the Power Sander, an electric device that removes the manual labor and speeds up the task. If I can complete the labor quicker, and achieve the goal I set out to achieve, then I can put my mind to the task of improving upon the design, or solving the next problem of the day; so goes my rationale. You may see the sander as a blunt unsophisticated tool and say that the slow working artisan, carefully removing the wood by hand is going to produce the better result. That is a reasonable assertion, but it is unlikely that you would be able to tell which tool had been used if you were simply presented with the finished surface.

You may argue that in certain situations each of these tools become the objectively right choice, and I agree. If working with large surfaces and big quantities choosing the hand plane would be madness! Equally the smaller things get, the harder it is to use either one of these tools and perhaps good old fashioned Sand Paper becomes the choice. But for those “middle ground” tasks, the ultimate factor in the success of the tool is mostly decided by two things:

• The personal philosophy of the craftsmen

• The goal the craftsmen is trying to achieve

Does the craftsman put value in their products being “entirely hand made” or judge that the craft is not even still a craft once electric tools become involved? Whether that is right or wrong is simply not an objective question. It is the craftsman’s belief, and so long as the outcome meets the customer’s baseline expectations, how the craftsman achieves it is entirely up to them.

I’ll say it again. Teaching is a discipline, not a formula.

We each hold to a personal pedagogy that represents our collected experience, training and philosophy on the how and why of teaching. I was shocked to realise these differences are not some insignificant subtleties either. They are profound differences in our belief systems.

During the talk, we were led through a simple activity of choosing statements that best matched our own belief systems. This was done privately, and we noted down the number that we chose in each of four statements. The four categories of statements were about our beliefs regarding:

• Learners and Learning

• Teachers and Teaching

• Knowledge

• The purpose of schooling

At the end we were shown a grid that told us what pedagogical philosophy each statement matched. It is worth noting at this point that there is no right answer to this task. In fact the only right answer is your own conclusion at the end as it will be personal to you and will inform your own practice.

We were told that it is rare for you to choose all four statements matching the same pedagogical belief, but this did happen to two of us, myself included. Interestingly to me we both chose the same school of thought, that of Individual Constructivism.

Dr. Aubrey-Smith would go on to explain that this core pedagogy would influence your approaches in the classroom, the tasks you chose, the questions you ask your learners, and ultimately everything you do as a teacher. Most interestingly she highlighted that this is also true of leaders in educational settings. They too have their own pedagogy and the decisions they make impact everyone.

She reminded us that every decision in a school, at every level, is a pedagogical decision.

And this is the crux of the matter. You and I are different teachers, with different personal pedagogy striving towards, similar but still different outcomes, using different methods. Where you might choose a class discussion, I might choose paired discussion. Where I might apply a comparative analysis approach, you might opt for individual self-reflection. Where I might have learners synthesise the opinions of many and conclude the right one, you may prefer not to risk clouding their thoughts and instead go for the direct explanation immediately.

It might be that you think the purpose of school is to prepare learners to fit into specific communities and be useful members of society. I personally hold that the purpose of school is to enable the individual to develop an accurate model of the world such that they can apply their skills in any setting regardless of society’s particular needs.

You and I would go about things differently, according to our personal pedagogy. Neither of us is “more right” than the other in our beliefs, though certainly some methods are scientifically shown to be more effective, as the growing voices in Education Research tell us.

From EdTech to PedTech, down with GenericTech^TM

Dr. Aubrey-Smith would go on to link the concept of your personal pedagogy with the impact of chosen EdTech, concluding from many research papers that often EdTech is chosen with a focus on the process or the organisation, but rarely with a focus on the learner and the teacher.

When, by intention or fortune, the EdTech tool matched well with the learner’s goals and the teacher’s personal pedagogy, much larger educational impacts were observed. The opposite however, is also true. Where the tool was forced into lessons and teachers were made to use tools without much regard to the particular learning goal or their personal pedagogy it would have limited, zero, or negative impact.

Why does this happen? There are a multitude of reasons Dr. Aubrey-Smith explains but the one that resonated with me the most is that the learners experience your teaching. They experience your pedagogy. If you are using a tool that doesn’t match your own beliefs then you are teaching without authenticity and the learners consciously or unconsciously experience that lack of authenticy.

You can feel the kernel of truth in this. Simply remember the last time you listened to someone and thought “they don’t even believe what they’re saying” and tell me, did you then believe more or less in what they were saying? Of course you believed them less, and so this mismatched tool and pedagogy has significant impact on how learners internalise what you’re trying to teach.

Children really do have incredible intuition. Sadly this is rarely acknowledged, and we are too often stuck trying to do things we don’t, deep down, believe in.

We’ve all seen it; Excitedly the Head of Digital arrives on INSET day, animated while describing how you absolutely must do a class discussion with GenericTech^TM. Some proportion of the school are convinced, leadership being among the faction and before you know it the school adopts the tool. A license is purchased and in order to maximise value, an implementation strategy revolving around maximum usage is determined. Out comes the familiar decree, “include some GenericTech^TM in every lesson!” So, dutifully, the teachers do just that. But slowly the excited buzz dies down due to this poor implementation. The teachers for whom it doesn’t match their pedagogy see limited or no outcomes for learners despite the extra effort they have put in to utilise the tool. Quickly the tool is abandoned, forever shamed and skulks off into the darkness, tarnished forever in the eyes of most. Then next year we come back on INSET day and do it all again with a different tool; how fun!

It isn’t hard to see how many teachers have become jaded regarding the use of EdTech.

So I say to you, as Dr. Aubrey-Smith said in her talk; Let’s break the cycle. Put pedagogy at the front of every conversation about EdTech. There are simple steps to achieving this. Whenever you come to use a piece of EdTech for the sake of it, turn back! Instead do this:

• Establish the learning goals for the lesson first,

• then consider the approach and style of teaching you would like to apply,

• and THEN when you absolutely sure of what you want to achieve, and you’re absolutely sure of how you want to go about it, investigate if there is an EdTech tool that matches your purpose.

• If there is, give it a try and tell me you don’t feel a world of difference.

It all seems so obvious in hindsight and yet, consistently across the sector this trick has slipped by, causing untold havoc.

And so we come to the end

When I am next in front of colleagues to give training on a piece of EdTech, I will be better. I will point out why I think something is good, but this time from a pedagogical perspective. I will extoll the virtues with direct relation to how it enables me to achieve a specific learning goal, and point out that this may not be the case for others. I will remind my audience that I am working from my own perspective on pedagogy, that I am trying to “enable the individual” as my end goal and that this might differ for them. I will include a call to action, asking my colleagues to think critically about what the tool can do and how it could function in their pedagogical approach. I will ask them to share with me how they have used, or intend to use it and I will build a collection of use cases sorted by pedagogical intent and learning goal rather than “capabilities of the tool.”

Next time you try EdTech in your classroom, I challenge you to the same.

1. Consider your learning goal.

2. Consider how you want the students to get there (collaboration? individually? etc)

3. Select an appropriate EdTech tool.

4. Let me know how it goes in the comments.

I’m excited to read Dr. Aubrey-Smith’s upcoming book in August ’23, From EdTech to PedTech: Changing the way we think about digital technology and will certainly be back to discuss it with you all.

Now if only I could figure out what to do about the burden of knowledge problem this leads to…

As ever, thanks for reading and if you’d like to hear my thoughts again, please do subscribe.

If you’re feeling really helpful and want to share it on your various social spaces, here are some useful buttons for that.