11.26.2017

Decentralizing the Technology Integration Department with "Tech Deputies"

In the last decade, schools have contributed significant resources to educational technology in an effort to improve instruction and to prepare students for a rapidly changing workforce. Schools have created new positions, or entirely new departments, for technologically savvy faculty members to act as liaisons between teachers and technology departments and to act as integrators of new educational technology software. In theory, for that faculty member or department to succeed--to integrate technology fully--they would have to run themselves out of a job. In other words, they would have to train a technologically savvy faculty, which in turn, wouldn’t need a specialist. So how do we get there?

Our Tech Deputies and their specialties in the Faculty Lounge

The Tech Deputy Solution

At Flint Hill, one unique way we--in the Technology Integration Department--have chosen to train our faculty is by deputizing additional members of our faculty. Two years ago, we started a new program where we recognized technologically savvy members of each department called “Tech Deputies.” Instead of having to answer every educational technology question ourselves, we could outsource it to the Tech Deputies in each department. As the Tech Deputies taught their peers, we hoped the amount of technologically literate teachers would increase. Additionally, by starting this program within departments, we hoped it would encourage departmental teams to try new things knowing they had support from within the department.

Interestingly, one of the greatest successes of this program is that we really didn’t know what was going to happen, so we pitched it as a fun idea to recognize some faculty members that are leading in the area of educational technology. That turned out to be the greatest strength of the program. The first time we met, one member thought it’d be funny to call the group, “Tech Deputies.” Of course, the title was about all we could do for them, there was no compensation involved, and they were doing us a huge favor.

Using humor as a buy-in, the deputies met with us biweekly to help us identify complications and prepare for tricky technological projects in the future. When we pitched the program to the rest of the faculty they laughed too. But it worked. The faculty was happy to recognize their peers who had gone out of their way to help out in the past and signed up to continue to do so with nothing more than a humorous (yet meaningless) title.

In the first year alone, we saw many unintended benefits grow out of this program. Our Help Desk staff saw a decrease in tickets for simple troubleshooting, like connecting to projectors or issues with Apple TVs. Our Tech Integration Specialists received fewer questions about how to use the CMS (Content Management System) and basic GAFE (Google Apps for Education) issues, which allowed for more and deeper conversations about pedagogical and instructional strategies being used in the classroom. With regularly scheduled check-ins, we successfully created a network within our faculty to learn from one another. It also allowed for a forum to explore topics beyond the scope of tech integration where we discussed institutional deficiencies and how we as a team could approach them and support each other. Finally, it led to a lot of fascinating interdisciplinary connections and opportunities.

The Tech Deputy Solution: Year Two

Continuing with our planned obsolescence mission, in year two we expanded the amount of Tech Deputies from one per department to anyone interested. Several people willingly signed up to join, again with no incentive other than this silly title. Building off of our success with humor in year one, to ensure buy-in from the faculty, we created playing cards. The cards display department, location, “specialties”, “interests,” and a humorous narrative (see below).


We unveiled these cards at a faculty meeting to highlight which Tech Deputy faculty members should see if they need technological help. And we encouraged faculty members to see deputies if they wanted to try a new application or streamline a classroom technological process. Once again, the biggest reaction we received from these cards was laughs, but those laughs have turned into questions that faculty members ask Tech Deputies all the time, in meetings, in the hallways, via email, etc. Once again in year two, the Tech Deputy program has made a huge difference for us in the Tech Integration Department and in the IT Department.

Having introduced our new and expanded lineup of deputies, we then posted the cards on a corkboard in the faculty room so that teachers will always know who they can go see if they have technological questions. The colored thread stretches from each Tech Deputy to his/her “specialties,” the applications that he/she uses and would like to help others use as well. Want to add exit tickets to your class? See Mr. Uher to teach you Go Formative. Want help with Google Classroom? See Ms. McKain, she’s an expert.

The Tech Deputy Solution: Applying Our Success

First, we intend to continue to increase the number of Tech Deputies on our team. We’d like everyone to feel comfortable enough to be considered a Tech Deputy. We also hope to apply the success of this program to our students, and to other areas of student life at Flint Hill like Diversity and Inclusion, Advisory, and Instructional Support.

This year we created a Student Technology Integration Team (STIT) to support our students who aren’t as technologically savvy. The members of STIT will get training from the TIS Department so that they can help their teachers with projects and lessons that require technology. They’re also working with campus groups like our school newspaper and student council to help them use technology more meaningfully and tactfully to raise awareness and improve their products. Like our Tech Deputy group, the plan is to grow this really big. That way we can ensure that we are graduating technologically savvy students that will thrive in the 21st-century workforce.˘

We’ve also been thinking a lot about how to apply this success to other groups around campus who can benefit from this style of ambassador program. Our Diversity and Inclusion Director just added two faculty members to her team. Our Dean of Students and his grade-level deans hope to use a similar model to improve advisory programming. We’re working with these groups to help them see the same success we did. But most importantly, we’re just trying to train and support our faculty so that they have the knowledge, tools, and confidence to handle the challenges associated with being a full-time teacher in a rapidly changing world.

The Tech Deputy Solution: Try it at your school!

This program has been a fantastic success at Flint Hill. We have more teachers trying new things with respect to technology, and we have more teachers talking about pedagogy in general. The faculty knows who to talk to if they want to revamp an old unit, if they want to add technology, or if they want to streamline one of their classroom procedures. And given the number of deputies we now have, teachers can work with a deputy that they trust. The convening of Tech Deputies once a month has led to a more proactive approach to technological issues in the building and another forum in which teacher-leaders engage in interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. And finally, this group has freed up more time for the TIS and IT Departments to dream bigger and plan more substantial professional development knowing that not only is there day-to-day support amongst the faculty at large, but there is also an appetite for rolling out new technology initiatives and processes.

This article was co-written with my Department Chair, Melissa Turner. A version of this article was published by EdSurge!

11.19.2017

A Case Against Rubrics


In the last two school years, I've taught a project-based learning course in the History Department called Contemporary World History and a personalized learning course in the Innovation Department called Disruptive Innovation through Social Media. Educational leaders have heralded these types of courses as innovative because they encourage individual agency, strong research, problem solving skills and real-world application. But in practice, I've found that students aren't prepared for these innovative courses. As a result of education's obsession with comprehensive rubrics and completion points, students are more concerned with graded outcomes rather than process and self-discovery. Consequently, many teachers have been dissuaded from developing innovative courses or, even worse, they have brought rubrics into these courses, which defeats the purpose.

More and more, our students want to be told what they have to do and how to do it in order to get an A on an assignment. That's what success looks like to them, as it will give them their best chance to get into a selective college. Teachers rely on rubrics to make grading fair and efficient. They're a great way for teachers to protect themselves from students or parents angry about a grade. And when the stakes are high, teachers don't want to be the person standing between a student and her grade.

Rubrics in Education

Rubrics make for less subjective grading; either the student did something or he didn't. Easy. Objective grading allows teachers to easily defend the grades they're giving. Teachers have even adapted rubrics for traditionally subjectively graded assignments like essays. For example, does a student have a certain number of quotations? Even when evaluating something complex, like analysis, the difference between an outstanding paper and an average paper is represented by a one-column difference in said category, and with some rubrics, that might carry only a one word difference ("excellent" analysis vs. "good" analysis). Regardless, a teacher just has to circle a few of the rubric categories and voila! Done grading.

This is not to say that all rubrics are bad.  They can be useful to make the teacher's expectations clear to a student and push him to do more. In other words, they can be helpful in evaluating effort. But when students are working to complete a rubric, they're extrinsically motivated. We want to encourage intrinsic motivation as well.

Another way to think about this problem is with student homework completion. A student is more likely to complete an easy assignment than a hard one; he's more likely to complete a straightforward assignment than a creative or open-ended one. That's because we've reduced grades to the most straightforward measurement possible: checking boxes on a rubric. Students know that a teacher will tell them exactly what they need to do to get an A. And that's what we're getting back from students: "I'm going to do what I have to do to check these boxes, and no more." We're pushing them towards that lowest common denominator attitude.

Beyond Rubrics in Education

By the time students get to my course, they've lost their intrinsic motivation to learn, their creativity, and their understanding of the real world outside of education. In both my project-based and personalized learning courses, I have to teach students how to unlearn traditional school, and embrace a new style of learning that I want going on in my classroom.

Creative, open-ended projects where students have choice confront many of the problems described above. Students have to think for themselves, set their own goals, and learn something that they care about. This type of student agency leads to better, more meaningful projects and increases retention. Students won't be turning in the same project meeting the same requirements; they will be defining their own.

Now that we've thrown out the rubric, the question becomes how to assess this style of learning. I submit the coaching model as a solution. As long as teachers ask the right questions to learn from the student what he's doing, why, and how. It then becomes easy to provide feedback and steer the student in the right direction. One consistent question I ask in my personalized learning class is, "How will I know if you're learning?" Asking that type of question, that encompasses an opportunity for self reflection, should be enough for a teacher to know if a student is truly putting in effort and learning in the course. Only with this style of assessment and feedback is it fair for a teacher to say that a student "exceed expectations," a term that ironically appears in many teacher rubrics.

Project-based and personalized learning courses that are evaluated in this manner emulate what our students will do in the real world. Workers that just complete the tasks of a rubric, or training manual, are low in demand and paid little; in the future, box-checking jobs will be automated. Instead, we want to train workers that are intrinsically motivated learners with strong communication and creative-thinking skills. Finally, we want to prepare our students to be resilient in the face of constructive criticism. This is a tough lesson to teach in schools, but it's made tougher when students work off a teacher's rubric, rather than defining their own projects and metrics of success.

Ultimately, we're trying to change student attitudes from "what do I have to do" to "what do I get to do." We're working to train creative, lifelong learners, who break the mold. We can't do that when teachers are grading them with a mold.

11.05.2017

Pushing back on the STEM Craze

Schools all over the country are spending a disproportionate amount of time and resources trying to build up STEM programming at the expense of crucial humanities education. This approach is no doubt driven by the statistics promising bright careers for STEM graduates: According to the US Department of Commerce, over the last decade, STEM occupations grew 24% while non-STEM field grew by just 4%. And they're going to grow by 9% from 2014-2024, versus non-STEM growing by just 6.4%. This week, New York Times pointed out that the vast majority of the available jobs come in the "T" of the STEM field, notably in computing (the article also noted a $70,000 median base salary for computer science majors over five years). To be sure, statistics like this prove that there's good reason for schools to be proactive about teaching computer science and robotics.

However, schools should not push STEM at the expense of other educational pursuits--most crucially our students' communication and critical thinking skills developed through humanities education.  The erosion of these skills comes at the worst possible time, corresponding with a shift in the way people connect with each other and understand the world around them thanks to technology. For example, never before has the country been so politically divided with its citizens stuck in echo chambers often duped by hyper-partisanship and misinformation.

It's no secret that the country is becoming more and more politically polarized, and that polarization is making us more stressed.  This past week, the American Psychological Association also concluded that "nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) say the future of the nation is a very or somewhat significant source of stress, slightly more than perennial stressors like money (62 percent) and work (61 percent)." And "when asked to think about the nation this year, nearly six in 10 adults (59 percent) report that the current social divisiveness causes them stress." Some of this polarization is no doubt caused by changes brought by technology. Advances in technology, and especially social media, result in users becoming stuck in echo-chambers, whether willfully or as a result of algorithms, in which they are not exposed to ideas contrary to their own. The nation is polarized and the two poles are not being forced to engage with one another civilly.

Students, too, are feeling the effects of the intersection of technology, polarization and stress. Over the past few years, I've noticed (and have recently written about how) our students don't converse face-to-face anymore when it comes to controversial issues. Like many adults, they'd rather have it out behind screens in social media applications than in the classroom. As I have argued, it is our job as educators to draw students into in-person conversations. (I have noticed my colleagues tend to shy away from these controversial conversations, whether out of fear of parents or administrators, or an unwillingness to have difficult exchanges.)

These problems in our schools--echoed nationally--are the product of advances in technology. Carefully orchestrated reward systems (that work exceedingly well on teenagers) keep us hooked on our apps. And, algorithms coded behind closed doors push us the information we want to hear.  But neither of these creations by coders has helped us become more informed citizens, quite the contrary.

As schools continue spending time hiring computer science and engineering teachers, adding STEM classes to the curriculum, and providing technology-based professional development for teachers, we're missing a problem that's right in front of us. We need to invest just as much time and resources into revamping our humanities curriculum, providing professional development for teachers to encourage them to host tough conversations, and working to bring our parents in on these conversations. That's the only way we can push back against our current politics of division, hatred, and fear. Face-to-face conversations where students, parents and teachers have to listen to understand one another's opinions will go a long way.

At a very fundamental level, our obsession with STEM education reflects the capitalistic urges of our schools. We want our students to be prepared for the workforce, poised to make money and benefit our country. But at what cost? Our tech companies are booming, making billions and billions of dollars. Our democracy on the other hand, is far from stable.

I am not arguing that we shouldn't teach STEM. But we have to be able to do that and teach the humanities. We can't graduate STEM students without them understanding, and prepared to address, the moral and ethical problems created by technology in the past decade.  We need students who value and seek an exchange of diverse ideas. We can't graduate citizens that don't know how technology is mining their data, taking advantage of their emotions, misinforming them, and dividing them. We need citizens that have the critical thinking and communication skills that can push back against the current state of technology and politics that's dividing us. This comes from humanities education. Now is not the time for educational leaders to overlook the value of humanities education just because STEM promises paying jobs to our graduates.

What's at stake here is the strength of our democracy through one of democracy's most important institutions (education) and its most important members (the youth).