Barriers to Change in Education

The biggest barrier to change in our public education system is, ironically, that teachers are preparing students for what comes after high school.

Students have been earning their postsecondary degrees, specifically the undergraduate degrees that universities sell, in the same way for at least a century:

• Lectures
• Assigned Readings (never chosen by the student)
• Tests and Examinations
• Essays
• Oral Presentations and Seminars

(Before I go any further, I will add the following disclaimer: the evidence upon which I base my argument is anecdotal and coloured by my experiences both as a recent graduate and as a Humanities student.  However, in education, anecdotal evidence can be some of most powerful and convincing evidence there is).

This pedagogy and these assessment and evaluation practices may have worked when universities were small and when professors knew who their students were, but when first year classes have as many as three hundred students in them, these strategies stop working, and not because they’re inefficient.  Au contraire, given the number of students that universities are willing to enroll, professors and their teaching assistants have been forced to find the most efficient means possible of teaching and evaluating students.

These efficient means, however, involve students teaching themselves and the professor occasionally popping his or her head in the door so that there is some evidence upon which to base a grade.  No standards exist within departments for essays, and a student can write an A+ paper and never find out why it was brilliant, or more commonly, a C+ paper and never find out why it was so bad.

The picture painted here is that of the Dark Ages of Education, and it is an age that teachers in public school system recognized long ago and have been working fiercely to push past.  Teachers have changed the way they instruct and evaluate students.  Teachers now use assessment as, of, and for learning, and they vary their instructional strategies to engage students with diverse learning styles.

There’s only one problem.  The closer students get to graduation, the further away teachers move from these new practices.  The reason for this distancing is that the teaching practices at university are so vastly different from the new teaching practices in the public education system that when high school students head off to university, they won’t be prepared for it, despite having received an excellent education.

Teachers of senior students are, therefore, held back by sense of responsibility.  Teachers expose their students to university-style instruction and assessments because they don’t want their students to be frustrated or think poorly of them when they are struggling in university.

I’m not arguing that learning cannot happen in universities.  I had the opportunity and privilege of completing two independent research projects during my undergraduate years, and during these projects, I received one-on-one help and attention from tenured professors.  It was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had, but unfortunately, students often have to venture into grad school to get this kind of mentorship.

It’s not the universities’ fault that they teach the way they do.  They simply have too many students, or at least they teach too many of them at a time.  Everything requires more education than it used to, and one doesn’t have to delve into the past to find that this is true - it’s on the horizon.  Very soon, Teacher Education in Ontario will go from a one-year program to two.  I’m no math major, but I can say with a certain degree of certainty that that’s double!  More and more young people have to go to postsecondary institutions for more and more time.

This mentorship is key and is what we should be aiming for in education.  To truly make not just learning, but meaningful learning happen, teachers need the resources and the institutional infrastructure to become mentors to their students.

Society has reached the point where the Backwards/Design-Down Lesson and Unit Planning that teachers do becomes insane.  If we begin with the end in mind, and if the end is postsecondary education, then that’s going to change how we are assessing and instructing their students.  If our preferred method is to start from the top and go down, then why are we frustrated when starting at the bottom and going up fails to work?

As a society, we have two options: (1) change the end we have in mind, or (2) change postsecondary education.  However, we seem to have all generally agreed at some point that given how technology is rapidly changing, we simply don’t know what society will look like in the next decade.

And as always, our crises boil down to a question about the human condition: how do we prepare for a future we cannot see? 

Digital Citizenship

Without consultation, those responsible for the world wide web in which we find ourselves trapped have bequeathed to 21st-century students the title of “Digital Citizens.”  

This unsolicited inheritance comes with the following drawbacks:

• Students are vulnerable to having their data mined.  Their data is the product that most free online sites and services are selling.
• Bullying is rampant online among students.  Social media is like building a brick wall between two people so that they have to shout over it to communicate.  People become emboldened by this brick wall because if they say something rude, the person on the other side can’t punch them.  I suppose that if one was angry, then one could simply walk around the wall, but if this wall is so inconvenient, then why did we build the wall in the first place?
• Students aren’t listening to what the teacher is saying because they’re all checking their phones and other mobile devices.
  
  

The implication is that teachers must help their students to become responsible and ethical digital citizens.

7 Humble Suggestions and Thoughts to Share with Your Class:

1. Set Some Ground Rules: Teachers need to spend some time working with students to discuss what appropriate online behaviour looks like.
2. It’s a Tool, Not a Weapon: Cell phones and other mobile devices can be a great help in the classroom (dictionaries, research, etc), but teachers must coach and monitor students as they learn to use these tools effectively in the classroom to improve their learning.
3. It’s Not a Video-Game: We cannot simply hit the reset button when we do something we regret.  Teachers must impress upon students the permanence of what they do online.
4. Bullying is Unacceptable No Matter Where It Occurs: Bullying someone using social media is still bullying, and must be appropriately addressed and handled.
5. You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide: It’s easy for others to track what we’re doing online, and many people who don’t have our best interests at heart do so every second of every day.
6. Let’s Not Air Our Dirty Laundry: Information online can be copied and shared infinitely.  Teachers must impress upon their students that even if they think they’re communicating within a limited audience, they must assume that the information they put online is public and could be read by anyone.
7. The Future is Foggy: This technology is too new for anyone to fully understand how posting information online when you’re young is going to affect your adult life. There are already young adults who are having trouble establishing careers because of what they posted online in high school, college, or university (see CBCtv's Doc Zone, "Facebook Follies.")

Here is the link to a blog by Howard Rheingold called Netsmart, which explores “What you need to know to use social media intelligently, humanely, and mindfully.”

http://rheingold.com/netsmart/ 

Here is a link to a video by Cyberwise.org that explains what digital citizenship is and outlines some games and activities that teachers can use with their classes to explore ethical behaviour online.