Which Came First - The Technology or the Pedagogy?

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/09/09

A new spin on an old riddle goes to the heart of a conflict between K-12 schools and the colleges of education responsible for cultivating and providing them with new teachers.

WHY IS A GENERATION of teachers more knowledgeable about technology than any before it arriving in classrooms with little understanding of how to teach with it?

It's a debate that, according to Ann Thompson, director of Iowa State University's Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching, has K-12 and higher ed engaged in mutual finger-pointing. "School districts say, 'If colleges of education just better prepared new teachers in technology, we'd be all set, but they're not doing their job,'" Thompson says. "Colleges of education say, 'We're doing a great job, but then students go out into schools and they don't have access to technology or don't see other teachers using technology, so some of this prep goes to waste.'"

Thompson believes that on their end, colleges of education can help cross that chasm by instilling in preservice teachers a sense of humility for their first year or two in the classroom and deference for veteran faculty members. "It's important that they understand that they may bring a lot of technical expertise, but that they have a lot to learn from the [other] teachers in schools in terms of pedagogy and content," she says. Thompson also concedes that higher ed has been guilty of paying too much attention to the devices themselves. "We all did at first: 'If we just teach teachers how to use technology, they'll figure out how to teach with it.' Although it was an understandable approach, it really wasn't the approach we should be taking."

Glen Bull, co-director of the Curry School of Education Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the University of Virginia, is more blunt. "A Smart Board doesn't teach anything," he says, noting that at his institution, knowing how to operate a device is a baby step toward understanding tech integration. "Five years of prep are what we think are needed to take advantage of it."

Tying Technology to Topic

The five years of prep Bull refers to is the Curry School's fiveyear program that integrates subject-matter education with teaching expertise, coordinating students' undergraduate and graduate work. The student's undergraduate major is matched by that same area of concentration in the education program. With the help of academic advisers on both ends, preservice math majors, for example, will focus their education studies on math teaching. At the end of the five years, students receive from the university both a bachelor's degree in the given subject matter and a Master of Teaching degree. The program has since evolved to include technology as a content area.

"The formal expression of this is 'technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK),'" Bull says. "TPACK says that you have to know three things to use technology well. You first have to know the content. It's going to be hard to teach calculus if you don't know calculus yourself. You also need to know the pedagogy associated with that content-- the instructional strategies that will be effective. Finally, you need to know the innovation or technology that you're going to then use."

Math teachers, he explains, might need to know how to integrate The Geometer's Sketchpad into lessons. "If you were in language arts, you might need to learn about digital storytelling. In social studies, you'd learn about the use of primary source documents at the Library of Congress. It's grounded in the subject."

Iowa State's education program also adheres to the TPACK approach, which Thompson says is a dramatic change from earlier methods that focused on the tool, not the instruction. "When we first started this venture, a lot of what we did was teaching them how to do things like use a spreadsheet," she says. "What TPACK does is help to get us away from emphasizing technology.

"There's very little emphasis on how to blog, how to create a wiki, how to create a digital story. The emphasis now is on how to use storytelling in a classroom situation, how to create a lesson where students are using blogging in a classroom."

For example, in an Iowa State math methods class, students watch videos showing K-12 kids at the interactive whiteboard explaining their thinking about how to solve a specific math problem. After the video is over, they discuss as a group various solutions for addressing student misconceptions. "We're really interested in having our students understand the thinking in math that second-graders or third-graders are doing and what typical errors might look like," Thompson says.

A LOT TO LEARN Iowa State's Ann Thompson (standing) says new teachers need to recognize that technology expertise is no substitute for pedagogical skill.

When those same preservice teachers go out to do field work, they can emulate those math lessons with an interactive whiteboard, creating an opportunity for students to explain their thinking and reflect on the solution. In addition, the veteran classroom teacher receives a valuable lesson on how to integrate a digital whiteboard into math instruction.

The approach is facilitated by Iowa State's policy of allowing its students to check out equipment such as iPod Touches, computers, and video cameras in lots of 10-- quantities large enough to use in the classrooms where they're student teaching.

"At the beginning, we used to be concerned about breaking equipment and things being stolen. It hasn't really happened," Thompson says. "We really want to give preservice teachers a chance to have the technology they need to try out ideas and lessons in the school as part of their field experiences."

Mentoring Programs

Field experiences that pair a preservice teacher with an experienced teacher who acts as a mentor while picking up information on how to use the latest technology tools are essential to the work being done by colleges of education. At the Curry School, the Curry/Albemarle Technology Infusion Program places about two dozen preservice teachers into semester-long internships at nearby schools in Albemarle County Public Schools and Charlottesville City Schools. The local classroom teachers, who have to apply to the program, then work with the interns to identify ways to integrate educational technologies into their specific classroom practices and curricula.

At Iowa State, the College of Education's faculty mentoring program is a bit of a misnomer; it's really the students who serve as the mentors. The program teams education students one-on-one with the college's faculty members to discuss, design, and apply instructional technology ideas. The relationship enables faculty members to gain help in areas where their tech savvy needs a boost.

"It's like having a personal trainer for faculty," Thompson explains. "The personal trainer is there to show particulars about using the equipment, but also is cheering the person on. It isn't an experience where students come in and say, 'Do this, do that, and do the other thing.' They really work together to derive an application."

Thompson says that the popularity of the mentoring course, which in-house research has shown to be regarded by students as one of the most valuable of their training, is an even bigger hit with the professors: "I always have more faculty signed up than students."

An even more determined take on the mentoring approach is the teacher residency program, wherein the education student spends the first year out of school as an apprentice to a veteran teacher. Citing as examples the Boston Teacher Residency program and Chicago's Academy for Urban School Leadership, Kathleen Fulton, director of Reinventing Schools for the 21st Century, an initiative of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, compares the arrangement to a medical residency.

"[Students] work with that teacher as well as other teachers in the school," she explains. "They work in a cohort team. They visit other schools. They have coursework."

However, it's an expensive model and a "hard one to pull off," Fulton adds. If the district pays the apprentice, that means making a financial commitment to two teachers in a classroom. That said, there's a lot of interest in it right now, she says, "because there's some money," most of it supplied by grants from the US Department of Education.

Reality Strikes

Grounding in real life, however, doesn't always prepare the preservice teacher for life after graduate school. "When you go into your classroom in your first and second year, there are a lot of contingencies and issues to deal within a new system," Bull says.

This is where colleges of education can fairly argue that they are unsupported by a K-12 environment that doesn't always provide optimal conditions for technology use. To illustrate, Bull explains that for the last three years, all math and science teachers in the Curry School program have been given visualization technology, including a projector, laptop, and an interactive whiteboard, which they tote with them to wherever they are doing their student teaching. "Then when they go out into the teaching practice, they're in great demand," he says.

But, Bull points out, as the junior-most teacher in the school system, that person may not always find those resources useful-- or usable. "One of our math teachers in the first year did, in fact, have a Smart Board, but taught in a two-story school with no elevators. And, of course, you could imagine it would be unfeasible to drag a Smart Board up the stairs and set it up in different classrooms."