“You actually teach us stuff”
“How come we learn from you?”
At the risk of sounding like a braggart, these are two real statements from students who came to me because they didn’t understand concepts in their content classes, but understood things once I presented them in a way informed by TESOL pedagogy. I’m quoting the students here not to boast about my teaching skills, but to highlight that most subject matter, when simply “assigned” to students via EdTech (which is what happened in this case), does not result in sufficient learning.
This relates to a worrying trend I see in education: the tendency to assign students various tasks with EdTech and then hold them accountable for their own learning by insisting they go through a series of “modules” or “tasks” that theoretically should result in everyone learning the same thing, as long as they call “complete the tasks.” The evidence against this method is simple: I’ve seen countless students who successfully complete all of the Webquests, EdPuzzles, Nearpods, Gimkits, “interactives,” and so on, but then completely fail on summative assessments designed to test their understanding of the content. What’s going on here?
First, teaching is more than just presenting information and checking comprehension through a series of tasks. Despite this, this seems to be the only thing that Ed Tech can offer. As an example, a tool like Edpuzzle is just a presentation of content in video format, with embedded comprehension questions. That the questions are embedded in the video doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a lecture-style presentation of content, followed by comprehension checking in the form of questions.
Another example is Nearpod. Nearpod presents information in chunks and elicits comprehension checking input from students in the form of drag-and-drop, matching, multiple choice, or open response prompts. While there are a variety of activity options here, it’s still just a one-size-fits-all presentation of information, followed by comprehension checking. Nearpod does have “post your ideas”-type activities and open-ended questions, but do students actually read and respond to each other’s posts? Is there any dialogue or discussion happening? Is there a teacher who’s providing additional explanations or adjusting things on the fly based on how students are learning? Do students have any choice in how they show their understanding? No, no, no, and no.
Teachers, as humans, have a unique advantage over technology. They can adjust instruction on the fly based on real-time student feedback. Only a teacher can draw a quick diagram on the board in response to a student’s question; a computer can’t. Only a teacher can observe a student’s struggle with a question and decide how to break it down or highlight specific words to draw the attention toward a clue leading to understanding. EDTech can’t do this, because it has to be designed with a particular purpose, or function in mind. Humans, on the other hand, can adjust their functions and purposes in real time.
The counterargument goes like this: EdTech saves teachers’ time by automatically chunking and providing comprehension-checking to the students. But this comes at a cost, namely that the teacher becomes relegated to a “class logistics operator,” or a person whose responsibility is to operate the content-delivering ed-tech product and manage the logistics of a classroom. In other words, the teacher becomes like the air traffic controller for various ed-tech products.
I see this all the time when I push into classrooms. “Today you are doing an Edpuzzle, followed by the Nearpod I assigned. When you’re finished, go play vocab review games on Gimkit until the bell rings. Got it, everyone?” This does two things that should be concerning: 1) It puts education completely in the hands of ed-tech. 2) It emphasizes to both students and teachers that learning and assessment can be reduced to a marathon of task-completion.
EdTech companies are always looking for a “formula,” a “protocol,” a “platform” that can make education more efficient and streamlined. If only we could perfect the right platform, the argument goes, we could free the hands of teachers to give more support where it’s needed, we could differentiate for all levels of student, and we could generate assessment data that can be used to “drive instructional decisions.” The problem I find with all of this is that teaching is really the art of making micro adjustments on the fly, in real time, with a huge number of variables that are constantly changing. These include students’ interest, background knowledge, motivation, learning style, emotions, and most importantly, the social nature of learning. While the “Cone of Learning” and “Learning Pyramid” ideas have been somewhat debunked as being over-exaggerated, humans do learn more when they have a chance to discuss what they’ve learned, teach others, and use what they’ve learned socially. That’s why reducing everything to an Edpuzzle, or a Nearpod, no matter how interactive, will be a very limited way of promoting learning.
Learning occurs most fruitfully when there is discussion, peer interaction, and adjustments to how information is presented on the fly based on very complex feedback that teachers receive by observing students carefully. Discussion, peer communication, and micro adjustments on the fly are
That being said, AI and EdTech can create none of the following situations:
- Students and teachers discussing concepts with each other
- Students teaching and talking with other students about content
- Teachers adjusting instruction or assignments in real time based on their observation of students and where they might be struggling to understand or complete a task
The bottom line: be careful of EdTech! Don’t let your classroom turn into a “command center” where the teacher’s only job is to assign, monitor, and check completion of EdTech tasks!
