Are we losing to technology?

Keywords: Dilemma, Flip-classroom, Challenging

I decided to interview my sponsor teacher from my practicum two years ago. The reason why I decided to interview her was that she was the only teacher who I had seen using the “flip-classroom” teaching technique with her students in my two years of teaching/pre-service teaching experience. I am going to refer to her as Ms. P in the rest of my post. Ms. P has a Master’s degree in math education and has been teaching for over 15 years as a math teacher at a high school in Delta. She has been the head of the math department at her current school for about 5 years. I admired her teaching style her insights in math education during our small discussions during my practicum two years ago. While I was doing my practicum, I did not get a chance to try her “flip-classroom” teaching technique but I remember observing a few of her classes. Just to give some background on “flip-classroom” teaching technique, it is a teaching technique that has been known to be present for a little while. Students are asked to watch videos at home online, such as Khan Academy website and others, and they get to practice their practice questions in class while they can get help from their teacher if they run into a problem. While students are working on practice problems in class, they also use their phones and other devices to look at the videos they were to watch for homework at home, just to review some of the concepts.

I asked Ms. P if I could come in to interview her about her teaching technique and the how technology plays a grand role in this certain teaching technique. I met with her earlier this week and she gave me her whole 45 minutes of her lunchtime which I cannot thank her enough for. We decided to sit in her classroom while there were students dropping by to re-write a test or drop off an assignment or two.

As I asked Ms. P my first question about her experience with technology, she started laughing and told me that she is not the right person to talk about technology in a math classroom. I asked her why and she said she tried doing things “differently” for a year but technology seems to “win” every time. I still remember her stressing on these words in her explanation on why she was not the right person for this interview, “different” and “technology seems to win”, which I will get back to later. As I assured her that she still is the right person for this interview as she can share things that she has learned during her experience with her teaching techniques that involved technology.

As we got started, she started by praising whoever came up with the idea of flip-classroom teaching technique and how it is a brilliant idea to enhance student learning. The main reason why she thinks it’s a great teaching technique is that it gives her the whole class time to work with students one-on-one on problems that they may come across. She gets to see students struggle and learn and achieve all at the same time. All of that was possible because her students were doing their “classwork” at home where they were watching online videos, either prepared by Ms. P through YouTube or some other sources such as Khan Academy. Ms. P suggested that when she started this new teaching technique, she was very excited about it and so were the students. In the beginning, everything was great and most students were watching videos at home and working on problems in class and asking her questions to get the help they needed. However, she said it did not last long. I was interested to know why it did not work in the long run. Ms. P said that students started to start falling behind, more and more students came to class unprepared. They would either forget to watch their videos the night before class or they would go to the computer to watch the videos but get distracted instead and do other things. She said that this resulted in students not being able to do any of the practice questions during class and hence not ask questions to get help from Ms. P. She said as much as she was excited at the start of this teaching technique, it seemed to have fallen apart.

Ms. P said that she kept this going for the whole year just to be consistent with her class but decided that it was not going to work as it was difficult to make sure that all students watched their videos before coming to class. At this point, as much as I wanted to ask the rest of the questions on my question list, I wanted to know more about this certain situation. I was curious to know what she thought as a solution in the result of this situation. Ms. P suggested that the only solution she could think of was to go back to the traditional way of teaching. I asked her to explain why she thought that might be the solution as she could make some changes to her teaching technique and still continue with “flip-classroom” setting. She said that she wanted to keep teaching that way where students learned the information on their own at their own pace and asked me for help in person on whatever they did not understand. However, she said she could not trust her students with technology anymore. I was a little surprised by the statement she had made about technology. She suggested that technology has a lot to offer to us but teenagers and technology cannot be put together in an educational setting as there are way too many distractions. We ended the conversation by talking about if she is using technology in her current classroom setting in any form and she suggested she uses it for research or computational purposes but it is not a big part of her classroom. I thanked her from the bottom of my heart for giving me her time and sharing her experience with me and left with a lot of questions on my mind.

One of the main questions I had left this interview was, is Ms. P right about the distractions that technology brings with it can be the reason to step away from technology in an educational setting? I also wanted to think about two of the words she said at the beginning of the interview, “different” and that “technology seems to win”. I think when she said she wanted to do something different, she meant that trying technology is still out of the norm in our educational system. Majority of our classrooms are mostly based on traditional learning/ teaching styles. “Technology seems to win” was still bothering me as it was portraying technology as the culprit in the situation, which it is not. Ms. P’s teaching style did not work because her students did not have enough motivation to keep up with their homework and be consistent on watching videos at home every night, technology is not to be blamed here, in my opinion. Technology has a lot to offer to us if we learn how to use it in the right way and encourage our students to take use it in the same way, only then can “technology win”.