Infrastructure, Whole-picture, Questioning

For my interview, I decided to talk to two teachers at my school- the first is a Math teacher in our high school, and the second is our Educational Technology coordinator. The interviews were conducted in a classroom at the international school I work at. Teacher X is an IB DP and MYP teacher, who is teaching Grades 6,7,9,11, and 12 this year, and is in his second year at the school. Previously, he worked at a private school in Brazil. Teacher Y is a technology integration specialist, who has also been teaching internationally for a number of years. His current position is coordinator for technology integration and education, but his role has evolved during his time here. He is also in his second year at the school. The interviews were conducted separately, and the set of questions varied slightly, as indicated below:

Both Teachers X and Y:

1. How has integrating technology affected your teaching practice?
2. What are the biggest challenges you face in integrating technology in your classroom? Within your school?
3. Are 1:1 device programs necessary for integrating technology effectively in mathematics/science? Are students at an advantage if they do have their own device?

Teacher X:

1. Which topics in math and science are best supported by the use of technology?
2. Are there any ways that you have previously used it that you deemed ineffective?
3. Does digital technology allow you to do anything that isn’t possible using traditional teaching methods?

Teacher Y:

1. What type of students do you think benefit most from using technology?
2. How do you use and model technology in teacher professional development?
3. Do you feel it is important or necessary that you as the teacher/coach are an expert with the technology? Why or why not?

The key themes I found were:

Infrastructure

Both spoke to the need for good infrastructure for learning, and how important it is that the systems are in place school-wide, if initiatives are going to be effective. One of the important factors are personnel and having the availability to work closely with classroom teachers. In his current role, Teacher Y states that his time is divided unevenly, in what he feels is an imbalance, as he works in both the elementary and the high school as a coordinator and implementer. He says, “On the two ends of the spectrum, I get to spend not very much time with people who have decent practice, and I spend much more time with people who have more ‘growth areas’ I’ll say, vis-à-vis technology, so there’s a certain group of staff that are under-served, if not unserved by me being here.” Teacher X’s view on good infrastructure focused instead on the idea of good habits within the classroom for the students. He stated that it was important for the students to be taught explicitly how to use their devices, particularly as they can quickly become distractions. Of importance is that our school runs a 1:1 device program in the high school. He said, “[challenges] especially with the younger ones [are] managing expectations of appropriate use and being on task. It’s something they get better at, and it’s something that has to be taught alongside the actual content of your course. How to use a device appropriately, how to use it properly, when to put it away”. The transformative experiences within the math and science classrooms come after students learn to be responsible with technology. School-wide, this can be as intensive as a digital citizenship curriculum, or as simple as time allocated to teach appropriate device usage.

Whole-picture

I asked Teacher Y to tell me a little about who he thought benefitted most from technology, and his ideas came with a bit of narrative from his time as a teacher and as a coordinator studying best practice. He insisted that the technology is only part of the picture, and that “the ones with good teachers” benefitted the most. He said, “I think if I had answered this question 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘kids with learning disabilities’, or something else, because I think that the way we were looking at tech integration a while back was like, ‘start with remediation’. We were looking at tech as a way to catch up kids who were behind, as opposed to looking for ways to make kids at the top move forward.” Both Teacher X and Teacher Y’s experience impressed me, but Teacher Y’s proficiency in the whole-picture approach made me appreciate and value the people I work with even more. Naturally, it’s necessary to step back and evaluate technology usage in this way; both interviewees insisted that “tech for the sake of tech is bad practice”, however Teacher Y went in-depth about what makes integration effective. He talked about previous schools, and how good practices were reinforced, in addition to places where he was actively seeking out opportunities on his own to further his understanding, because it wasn’t supported by the school. Upon asking him about devices and access to technology, he reiterated his point about good teaching and replied, “1:1 devices are an advantage, maybe. If you’re in the right classroom, absolutely”.

Questioning

Teacher X spoke a bit about how tech has affected his practice, how technology “has made me more efficient”, and spoke about the ways in which it manifests itself in an inquiry-based classroom. It allows students to question openly about new concepts, or in his words, “when something interesting comes up, it’s much more natural to take an interesting question and run with it, than be forced to plan everything that has to be done ahead of time. It allows for more inquiry. You get more authentic and interesting questions and results.”

Additionally, Teacher X commented that it can help facilitate learning and catalyze commentary/inquiries among the students and with him. He says, “I like academic conflict, I like when kids have different answers. They come to different conclusions based on something, and when they’re seeing what each other thinks, it’s a really nice way to stop and pause and resolve everything, because there’s a bit of an incentive. Kids want to be right, and you can kind of exploit that, to kind of get them into this idea, and I think if you have the right culture that it’s okay to be wrong, then it’s not a problem. You’re trying to resolve something. When you have that kind of culture in the classroom, tech makes it easier to share viewpoints and then ultimately get resolution, which is satisfying for everyone.” Not only resolution, but this also helps create questions to do further research on a topic, as the conversations spur more curiousity.

Though Teacher X spoke about a range of different technologies that he has used and continues to use, his reasoning for sometimes opting for the simple use of technology caught my attention. Using technology to enhance learning and dispel misconceptions in the math and science classroom works if all students have access to the understandings and vocabulary. He brought up the point of “… this idea of using videos or images to present something interesting, when it’s a video or image and no words, no text, it has a really low barrier for entry, and I think this is really important for kids who are new to English, kids with learning disabilities”, which was poignant for me.