Competitive Play, Privacy and Time+Expertise

For this activity, I interviewed a colleague teaching at a K-8 public school in Ontario with a population of roughly 300 students. “Kathryn” has been teaching in public elementary education for 12 years and is a Drama and Music major who currently teaches 26 students in a 6/7 homeroom residing in one of only three closed classrooms in the building. She has been teaching sixth grade either as a straight or as a split for four years at this location. She teaches all subjects, except for French, PhysEd. and Visual Arts, including STEM subjects. As a Grade 6 teacher there is a particular focus on math because in Ontario sixth grade is a testing year for their province-wide standardized test. This school in general also has a school-wide improvement plan related to improving math scores overall as a goal for this year. The interview was conducted face-to-face on January 24, 2018 in a closed room over the lunch break.  Audio was recorded onto the interviewer’s phone.

While transcribing my interview with Kathryn three themes or topics wove a common thread through her responses: Competitive Play, Privacy, and Time+Expertise.

Competitive Play

Kathryn repeatedly used words related to the power of technology, particularly games, to connect, motivate, and engage students. She describes herself as “enthusiastic” towards technology integration and measures whether her views of technology have changed over the course of her 12 year career in terms related to her enthusiasm and the positive feelings she receives from student responses.  She identifies her favourite apps and the typical uses of technology in her teaching by relating them to how well students “connect” to a screen versus a textbook both for literary understanding and for engagement, and how “positive” her students are about getting to play.  She mentions the use of “competition” as a motivational tool and identifies several apps that her students respond positively to because of the competition created, referencing things like “it can be played like a race” and, “they can see their results real-time” and they compete to get them posted first .  She also uses “house leagues” in her classroom to manage her students and ties in the competitive aspects of certain favourite apps to these house league points and monthly celebrations for the winning team.

Privacy

Another theme that was repeated throughout the interview in one form or another was the value Kathryn perceived her students placed on technologies which allowed them to play and participate in real time but to do so anonymously if they chose. Kathryn’s class is a blend of introverted and gregarious preteen boys and girls, some with persistent behaviour challenges stemming from underlying anxiety disorders. The option for students to engage with or without broadcasting their identity to their peers was mentioned positively more than once.  She identified her wish that the school provided the money such that every student could have their own device “that doesn’t come from home so we could have more control over it” and that would then allow her to “really differentiate instruction but in a private way” [emphasis in original].  It’s clear that Kathryn respects the sensitivities of her students and finds value in technological tools that allow their wish for privacy and teacher-student confidentiality to be maintained even while engagement and differentiation are being leveraged.

Time+Expertise

By far the biggest theme weaving through my discussion with Kathryn was that of time. Technology examples which she used and praised almost always had qualifiers such as “efficient”, “productive”, “that I didn’t have to make”, “saves time”, “not reinventing the wheel”, allows the class to “get through [content] more quickly”, “doesn’t take as much [class] time”.  The problems she identified with technology were the converse, described in terms such as how they “hold us back”, “I don’t have the time to sit down and search for what I need”, “takes me awhile”.  When asked whether she felt she needed to be an expert to integrate technology into STEM subjects she answered immediately, “No, I need time. I don’t need expertise I need time.”  However, I noticed that when asked to expand on this, her example connected the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an app she is unfamiliar with to the deficit in time and the slow down of productive work in her classroom. During transcription, I made the following note: Although K said she did not need to be an expert, her example of time actually is built on the inference that a lack of expertise on her part in how to model and troubleshoot and train her students due to changing updates was the reason that time became the issue in the first place.

This dual theme of expertise having an impact on time arose again at the end of the interview when questions dealt with what she felt her school could do to better support teachers using technology in her building and the biggest hindrance in supporting elementary students in STEM learning.  She identified the lack of content expertise (“specialized instruction”) in elementary teachers of STEM and the lack of well-trained, available support teachers for technology assistance and training for the rest of the staff.  She stated that for technology use in STEM or any subject to support student learning in greater measures in more classrooms, schools needed to “devise a system that doesn’t make one person responsible for its success. We need more staff for those types of things and more training.”  Lack of money for these human resources and technologies was identified as the root of these deficiencies, however the underlying themes remain that Kathryn feels teachers in general are not given adequate access to and/or made sufficient experts in technology for educational purposes and this lack of expertise increases the amount of time individual teachers must invest to teach themselves technology and simultaneously decreases the amount of class time available for efficient, productive work when the teacher feels ill-equipped to both train her students in, and troubleshoot any issues that arise during, its use.