CPD minefield! The secrets to planning and preparing effective technology CPD

In this article, I would like to explore what makes great CPD, as well as what the unique challenges are of organising technology-focused training for teachers. In addition, we will catch the briefest of glimpses into the psychology behind human behaviour and how this may affect how your CPD is received and, ultimately, the success of the technology implementation.

What makes great CPD?

We can all agree that effective CPD should inform and improve our practice. When planning a CPD programme, consider the following:

  • What is the purpose of training teachers? Is there a shared sense of purpose? Are teachers happy about receiving the training or do they view it as unnecessary?
  • What are the needs of the teachers in front of you? Make the training relevant to their practice and their daily experience of teaching in a classroom.
  • Would you deliver material to your pupils as a one-off, never to be revisited? Then why would you do it in a CPD session? Focus instead on spacing out the training so that it takes place over time, preferably throughout an academic year as a minimum, revisiting concepts and tools periodically during this time.

Perhaps the most important consideration, however, is that you should not embark on this planning process alone. Be affiliative and involve colleagues who can help you with both the planning and delivery of this programme. And hang a welcome sign on your door, keeping it open so that colleagues continue to join you as the programme unfolds.

Top tips for running technology CPD

Running technology CPD brings its own unique challenges, some of which are foreseeable, but others may well have the potential to catch you by surprise:

  • Wider than usual variance in teacher aptitude. Technology is one of those things in life – like not being good at maths – that many people feel a degree of pride in when stating their inadequacy with a shrug of their shoulders. And so some of your colleagues will be very technology-savvy but many others may need to start with the most basic training. It is crucial therefore to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach to CPD and build in differentiation into your CPD programme. It would be a good idea for you to offer one-to-one sessions to your most technologically-challenged colleagues.
  • Reluctance to participate. Technology is often seen as a not always welcome addition to the classroom: a luxury that is not really necessary at best or a hindrance to learning at worst. Section off parts of your CPD programme and dedicate them to explaining the whys and wherefores of the technology implementation. Illustrate your points with plenty of examples of the technology in action, achieving the purpose you set out to achieve.
  • Temptation to make the training all about the technology. Avoid delivering sessions that are all about learning to use specific bits of technology. There is nothing more tedious than guiding a large group of people through basic functionality, such us how to open an account or how to log in. Instead send out these details in advance and, during the session, focus on the intersection between technology and pedagogy, highlighting how the technology can help achieve specific pedagogical purposes, with built-in opportunities for initial practice for participants.
  • Does the technology actually work? I don’t mean this in a pedagogical sense, but rather in the sense of technology actually turning on and operating as intended. Double check and triple check that the technology your CPD session is built around is working well. Get your IT support team to perform a check on the technology at the venue. Don’t be fobbed off with an ‘It should work’ – either it works or it doesn’t. Be exacting. There is nothing worse than starting a CPD session on technology in which the technology fails at the outset, with someone quipping ‘That’s technology for you!’ Technology should work, and it is the ICT support team’s job to ensure that it does.
  • Forgetting about the children and their parents. The easiest thing in the world is to forget about the children, or worse: to believe that as children of the digital age they are somehow born with innate digital powers that negate any requirement to introduce the technology and its pedagogical purpose, and train them as you would the teachers. Don’t assume this. You will need to train them too, especially if you are rolling out the kind of technology that involves heavy student use, such as mobile devices (including Bring Your Own Device schemes) or new virtual learning environments. Consider also keeping the parents informed throughout the programme via newsletters or even information evenings.

In-house vs external CPD

External CPD can get a bad rap. Quite justifiably sometimes, as neither parachuting someone in to school for a day nor being sent away from school on your own for a course tend to result in the kind of long-term positive impact that is more securely associated with CPD programmes that are sustained over a period of time. This doesn’t mean that external CPD providers should be ignored, just that their participation needs to be built in throughout the programme, not just in one burst right at the beginning.

If you are purchasing a digital resource, then negotiate a sustained commitment to the provision and participation in a long-term CPD, preferably locking it in on the contract. Apple, Google and Microsoft all have certified trainers that you can draw on. Major educational technology providers will also employ or at the very least be able to recommend specialists that have experience of school implementations. Use them initially to train your group of digital champions – the folks who have been identified as potential allies, helpers and ambassadors for the technology implementations – and then as part of a wider staff CPD programme, alternating between sessions that are led by colleagues (most) and external trainers (fewer).

Planning and preparing your training

  • INSET. Negotiate time allocated to training staff during termly INSET with your school’s senior leadership. These are good times to bring in external trainers, should they be available or should you require them, or to run a carousel led by you and your digital champions.
  • Lunchtime and twilight sessions. Publish a programme of regular lunchtime and twilight sessions, ideally differentiated so that they attract participants of similar levels of aptitude or expertise.
  • Briefing takeover. With your senior leaders’ blessing, of course. Propose to them the need to dedicate a briefing to updating teachers on the progress made or to further illustrate how the technology should be used or, hopefully, how it is being used.
  • Residency. One idea that has worked really well in schools is to invite a specialist trainer to take residence periodically in the staffroom for three to five days. This facilitates a more ad-hoc approach in which teachers spend quality one-to-one time with the trainer when they have a minute, perhaps over a coffee. Heads of department can also invite the trainer to their departmental meetings to discuss the technology implementation in context. This may sound like an expensive luxury, but it may be offered at no extra cost if negotiated at the time of signing a contract or terms of purchase, for example.
  • TeachMeets. These are informal gatherings of teachers, generally after school or at the weekend, in which interested teachers – not just from your school – come together to share and discuss practice. Usually teachers volunteer to speak for a short time about a resource or an approach they have adopted. Not everyone is a speaker; folks are welcome to attend simply to watch and take note. Regular TeachMeets can be particularly successful if themed (e.g. technology) and organised in cooperation with other schools, taking turns as hosts.

Take-away tip

How human beings make and justify their decisions is a fascinating area of study. Psychologists have long warned about our proclivity to fall prey to irrational decision-making, logical fallacies, prejudice and bias, which often determine why new ideas are adopted. Psychology has shown that we instinctively place more importance on our own ideas than on those of others. It’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the Not Invented Here Bias. This bias suggests that your idea could be rejected by others simply because it is not their idea, and not on its actual merit.

This suggests that you should consider carefully how your message is being delivered to colleagues:

  • Be humble and avoid sounding as if you know best. Even if you do know best about the technology, you may not be as familiar with how technology is applied in a particular subject or context.
  • Challenge misconceptions decisively but considerately. Show that you understand the root of the misconception. Treat anything that you might believe to be a misconception as an opportunity to learn about where your colleagues are coming from. And always remember that you too are prone to misconceptions.
  • Don’t be prescriptive. Describe instead the technology use in broad strokes, focusing on how it supports learning and providing opportunities for colleagues to connect the dots so that a picture of how the technology might work in their context emerges in their own minds.

I have often heard colleagues quip that one of the best ways to get school leadership to adopt your idea is to craftily make it look as if it was their own. It turns out that this is backed up by science!

Further reading

The Teacher Development Trust has conducted research on the provision of CPD and has identified the features that characterise effective CPD. You can access their resources here.

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Five evidence-informed strategies for the classroom Signposting the way to great teaching and learning

Effective teaching and learning are highly contextualised. What works really well in one classroom could just as easily fall flat on its face in the next. This is true. But what is also true is that some things have been shown repeatedly to work better than others across a variety of contexts.

It would be foolish, I think, to dismiss what research suggests works well in the classroom on the grounds of contextualisation, ignoring the signposts set out by years of research that point toward what is most likely to contribute to great teaching and learning.

Here are the top five evidence informed strategies we discussed in a recent staff meeting:

1–Take account of what the learner already knows

Many lessons introduce new topics by referring to learning objectives and then diving into whatever new content needs to be covered. But it would make more sense for the instructor to begin with activities that require students to recall and, in a sense, to activate prior knowledge.

This recall approach is supported by cognitive science because it strengthens the connections between existing knowledge and the new concepts about to be learnt. Research suggests that learners are probably best served if we start the lesson with activities that require the retrieval of specific prior knowledge that will help make connections in the students’ minds between what’s already been learnt and what needs to be learnt.

Simply stating new learning objectives and ploughing on with a fresh topic? We may have no choice on occasion, but most times you’d bet better off connecting to previous learning before introducing new topics.

2–Interleave different but related topics and skills

Interleaving is the practice of alternating different topics and types of content. Intuitively we feel that we learn better by focusing on one topic or skill at a time. However, research suggests that better learning is achieved when students interleave different but related topics or skills, rather than focusing on one topic or skill, then another topic or skill, and so on.

Although the illusion of better learning is achieved by studying topics in blocks, it is by interleaving topics and skills that long-term retention and greater overall understanding are achieved. This is problematic for many of us, as many teachers and students might find it counter-intuitive when lessons or explanations, instead of focusing on one topic at a time, as is the norm, alternate between related topics and skills as they seek to connect to and build on already existing knowledge.

In linear courses (such as IGCSE and the new GCSE and A level), which typically last two years, it is conceivable that a topic that is covered during the first term of the course is never returned to before a hastily arranged revision session just before study leave. Although teachers can claim that the topic has been covered – it would have been – they can’t claim to have covered it in a pedagogically sound manner unless they have ensured the topic has been studied more than once during the teaching of the course.

Students and teachers may find interleaving related topics and skills in a programme of study less neat, but the research suggesting interleaving leads to better overall learning in the long term is strong.

3–Take advantage of the properties of dual coding

Dual coding is the idea that the combination of verbal association (spoken or written) and visual imagery results in better learning. Well-designed graphic illustrations contribute to depicting models clearly, representing abstract concepts and revealing underlying knowledge structures that help learners make the required connections to enable learning to take place.

That’s not to say we should populate teaching resources with superfluous illustrations – which in any case often contribute to resources becoming dated prematurely – but that we should focus instead on pairing text with carefully chosen graphics that will support learning by presenting examples and depicting overarching ideas or concepts and explaining how these ideas and concepts connect.

In short, we should avoid illustrations that merely ‘liven up’, ‘add colour’ or ‘add fun’ to a resource and use instead diagrams, tables, photographs or drawings that will serve a pedagogical purpose whenever possible. If the answer to the question ‘Is this illustration helping students to learn?’ is ‘no’, the chances are it is not needed and you should discard it unless you think it serves another purpose.

As a teacher, you are probably already capitalising on this dual coding by providing your students with relevant, learning-friendly graphics, tables or diagrams. Great teachers already make the most of the properties of dual-coding in every lesson, using the whiteboard or a PowerPoint to illustrate their verbal explanations.

But they might also want their students to create their own. Spending some time during lessons to explain to your students the importance of creating their own diagrams, illustrations and mind maps is time well spent. Not only will they find their own visual imagery very handy when it comes to revision, but it will also help them to organise and conceptualise their knowledge more effectively, so that they remember it more easily.

This example by Oliver Caviglioli, below, illustrates how dual coding works. Below are two sets of identical questions. How are you better able to answer the questions? After just reading the text? Or after reading the text and briefly studying the diagram?

4–Modelling solved problems

Modelling is a very effective classroom strategy, as it ensures that students become familiar with both the mechanics of problem-solving and the underlying principles required to master the topic in question. The student can then be guided to more complex but related problems or questions and, as the student becomes more proficient, the teacher can begin to increase the number of problems or questions for the student to solve or answer independently.

Great teaching already makes the most of the powerful effect of modelling by alternating problems with written-out solutions, worked examples – i.e. where the steps to achieve the correct solution are laid out – and problems that the student needs to solve independently. This is also a kind of interleaving (see strategy 2).

5–Teach independent study skills to boost metacognition

Although many schools already promote independent learning by, for example, pointing students to additional sources of reading, relevant websites, videoclips, films or TV programmes, few actively seek to teach specific metacognitive strategies to help students become better learners in a given subject.

The view could easily be taken that, say, a French lesson’s purpose is to teach students French, not to teach students how to learn, which is the essence of metacognition in this context. This view would seem entirely justifiable until one considers the important contribution that metacognitive strategies bring to successful learning. For example, research suggests that encouraging learners how to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning by providing subject-specific strategies and guidance has a great impact on learning.

Effective teaching already interleaves activities in which students are asked to identify where a task might go wrong; to lay out the steps required to achieve mastery of a topic; to produce their own worked examples; or to formulate appropriate questions and provide possible answers.

“This is obvious stuff… we already do this anyway…” are some of the typical reactions after these research-informed strategies are discussed with experienced teachers. Tacitly, that may well be the case. But why wait for tacit knowledge to develop spontaneously? Why hope that this knowledge develops from experience in the 4th, 5th or 6th year of teaching when it could be incorporated and reflected upon from the 1st?

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New book: Using technology in the classroom –Bloomsbury CPD Library

A little while ago, I was chuffed to be asked by the good folks at Bloomsbury to take part in their CPD library series. My contribution would be on technology in the classroom. How technology, pedagogy and curriculum intersect has always fascinated me, but I have long suspected that the use of technology in the classroom is generally poorly understood and, as a consequence, its impact is both unfairly maligned by detractors and disproportionately embellished by many of its proponents.

The book starts from the principle that in order to be able to think critically about using technology in the classroom, you must first know about how technology can be used to support teaching and learning. I adopt the premise that the use of technology can be both positive and negative and that it’s how it is used and for what purpose that really matters. And so the book sets out to dispel myths about what technology is and isn’t good for and is aimed at anyone who is interested in exploring, from an evidence-informed perspective, how technology can be put to good use in the classroom, drawing from both research and classroom practice.

Below is an extract from the opening chapter:

This book is about using technology effectively to support great teaching and learning. It will look beyond the whizz and bang traditionally associated with the use of technology and will explore practical, pedagogically sound ways in which technology can improve outcomes and add value within a school’s context, both in the classroom and beyond. Our focus will be on the great teaching and learning that can happen when technology is used appropriately and successfully, and not on using technology for its own sake.

In the rest of this book’s two main parts we will assess and investigate what we know – both as individuals and as a profession – about the effective use of technology in schools, and will combine this with research-informed strategies that have been shown to improve the quality of teaching and learning. We will explore well-established theory and its implications on practice, evaluating and bringing together findings from the fields of educational technology and cognitive psychology, among others.

Equipped with knowledge about how technology works best, what makes great teaching and how to make learning stick, we will then develop context-specific strategies to adopt the use of technology when it is pedagogically profitable to do so. The goal will be to integrate technology seamlessly into daily practice so that technology is used almost reflexively, intuitively and without fuss. Throughout this process we will evaluate and reflect on the impact of these strategies, picking out the best and using them as the basis of a school-wide professional development programme with the effective use of technology at its core.

The provision of technology-focused CPD often promotes the use of eye-catching digital tools and equipment without due consideration to pedagogical factors and, crucially, the individual school’s context. In the second part of this book we will look more closely at the knowledge and skills required to design, plan and implement an effective, technology-focused CPD programme that will have a positive and lasting impact on practice.

Using technology in the classroom is released on 16 November and is available for pre-order here.

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What does technology look like in the classroom? Technology doesn't change everything, but it does change a few things

Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson have just published their latest book What does this look like in the classroom?, expertly and beautifully illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli. In it they ask 18 experts in their field to answer key questions about classroom practice and research. Below is my contribution on the topic of technology in the classroom.

Would you ban mobile phones in schools?

If I answered no, some would think that I am in favour of unfettered access to mobile phones at any time during the school day. This is not quite the case. Although I would not ban the presence of mobile phones in schools, I would not allow students to use them in lessons unless they are instructed to by a teacher for a specific purpose.

In my view, and with the benefit of experience, it is possible to develop and apply rewards and sanctions policies that focus on promoting the appropriate use of mobile devices. This should be every school’s first port of call. Having said that, I am also mindful that an outright ban may be the most appropriate course of action in certain contexts, where, for example, poor behaviour is the number one challenge for the school.

How can I guard against plagiarism when the internet has increased opportunities for pupils to be academically dishonest?

The facile riposte is that plagiarism has always been an issue. Long before the internet, students copied from their dusty encyclopaedia or their library books. But this dismissal does not acknowledge or address the ease with which we all can feel seduced to pass other people’s work as our own with a quick copy and paste.

It would be tempting but fatuous to focus solely on what negative aspects the arrival of the internet has heightened without also considering the huge positive impact in terms of access to curriculum resources that it brings. From this perspective, a strong programme of digital citizenship and literacy (What are copyright and intellectual property? What do these concepts mean in a world where file-sharing is habitual?) that teaches students honesty, agency and to avoid using other people’s work without acknowledgement is preferable to constant policing.

Another advantage of such a programme would be to encourage students to become critical consumers of internet-sourced information. Arguably it is uncritical consumption of information – not plagiarism – that is the biggest problem facing old and young people alike in the age of fake news and social media-enabled echo chambers.

How far do I need to be a digital spy in order to check that my pupils are using technology positively and not for things like bullying?

Pastoral care in schools encompasses so much more today than it did ten years ago. Social media has added an extra layer of extra complexity that many schools are finding difficult to accept. Yet this is the reality in which we live. Yes, social media can be used by bullies and for other nefarious motives. But social media can also bring hope, joy and satisfaction just as easily.

Schools need to step up and educate the whole child, not just in Maths, English and Science, but also how to flourish and thrive in the society in which we live and not in an alternative reality in which the internet doesn’t exist. Only then will students be equipped with the knowledge and skills to change that society for the better.

Traditional interpretations of the problem of opportunity cost in our curricula often lead to focusing exclusively on curricular knowledge in the hope or belief that good citizenship would develop by unconscious assimilation, as the natural outcome of acquiring curricular knowledge in an academically rigorous environment.

As a consequence, increasingly strict bans and sanctions proliferate in place of a truly supportive pastoral provision, one which tackles the behaviour, not the technology. As Steven Pinker once observed, wherever human behaviour is the problem, human behaviour is also the solution.

Do you think technology is used too much in teaching and learning? What do you think is a healthy balance of use by students?

I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting this is not a very good question on two counts. First is the implied assumption that there is a limit after which, if exceeded, technology is somehow bad for teaching and learning. Second is the implication that, to remain healthy, there needs to be a cap on how much technology we use.

This approach biases our evaluation of the advantages or disadvantages of the use of technology by assigning intrinsic characteristics to technology – in this case harmfulness – and leads us to an ultimately fallacious argument about whether technology should be used at all.

Since the notion that technology can support teaching and learning when used effectively is quite rightly not in dispute, instead the question should have sought to ascertain how teachers can use technology to support teaching and learning and how students can benefit from screen time by focusing on controlling, not the length of time students spend on their different devices, but, as Professor Livingstone of LSE suggests, how they spend that time. Pathologising technology use serves no practical purpose and obfuscates the more important question that we should be asking: how is technology useful?

Do computers help long-term factual recall compared to paper?

My assumption is that the question refers to the known fact that handwriting notes leads to better retention than typing the same notes on a computer. The question once again leads us down the rabbit hole to another fallacious argument about whether technology should be used at all, as if typing is all that having a computer or mobile device available to you would allow you to achieve.

If this assumption is correct, then, by focusing on the narrow point about handwriting, the question ignores how computers can be used to receive timely feedback, deliver curated content, promote the interleaving of topics and distributed learning, provide opportunities for retrieval practice, or redesign and improve the quality of the work teachers set.

The notion that great teaching and the effective use of technology to support learning are somehow mutually exclusive is ultimately pernicious, as it stops us on our tracks from developing professionally by learning to incorporate whichever technology is appropriate to serve a given pedagogical purpose.

As a head of department, what advice would you give me on drafting a department policy on the use of in the classroom?

If you’re starting with “The answer is technology … what is the question again?”, then you’re almost certainly heading down the wrong path. Conversely, if you dismiss technology altogether as a distraction or a hindrance to learning, then you almost certainly don’t have good enough knowledge or understanding about technology in the context of teaching and learning to be able to think critically about technology adoption or avoidance in that context.

In either case, being reflective and informing yourself about research findings and other teachers’ practice is the best antidote against bad practice. When it comes to applying technology, give some thought to how the application of technology can support learning (access to content, enabling effective use of dual coding, facilitating retrieval practice, etc) and include recommendations in your schemes of work and programmes of study as to what technology could be used when and how.

Be explicit in outlining how technology could be used to support learning but avoid being prescriptive. Give teachers the freedom to opt in or out. And above all, remember: technology use is only a gimmick if you make it one.

My school has a ‘bring your own device’ policy. How can I make best use of this?

In a mixed-device environment, the common denominator is access to online resources. On the one hand, I would organise my departmental resources so that they could be accessed online and shared digitally by teachers and pupils (with different levels of access).

This ubiquitous access to curated content can facilitate self-regulation and other metacognitive strategies that have been shown to benefit learning. The mere presence of technology does not generate better learning, it’s how teachers adapt their practice slightly to harness the presence of devices for a positive impact that matters.

On the other hand, I would also investigate ways in which I could review assessment. For example, technology allows us to create banks of low-stakes tests that self-mark (reducing teacher workload) and that can be used by teachers to evaluate progress and inform their practice and by students as a learning aid (frequent retrieval practice). There is a plethora of tools and online resources that allow you to create reusable quizzes, flashcards, tests and assessments.

How can I help my students minimise the distraction that can be caused by their tech?

Technically, it is possible to use filters and device managers that can help to focus students’ interaction with technology, but this is most effectively achieved when accompanied by the provision of the academic resources required by students to put tech to work for learning.

Allowing students to bring devices to school but not altering the way in which teachers assess learning or deliver content is a recipe for distraction. Numerous studies have shown that, when this is the case, no improvement in learning takes place. In this scenario, you would be better off avoiding devices altogether.

If, however, you provide reasons and means for students to engage with technology for academic purposes, the result is that said technology ceases to be viewed and used solely as a tool for leisure, as it would otherwise be the case. In contexts where technology use is focused on academic purposes, teachers don’t relinquish control over to technology; instead they control how the technology is used.

This way, technology does not stand in opposition to learning; it supports it, while students develop agency and learn effective ways to manage their distractions, which is a key skill in this day and age.

I’m a self-confessed Luddite but would like to use more technology. What’s the best way to get more engaged with it?

Being a self-confessed luddite is not an intellectually robust position to take. It’s a bit like confessing proudly that you’re terrible at Maths, what a lark, or that, isn’t it funny, you’re terrible at spelling or grammar. Nobody should feel they can self-confess to such illiteracy and expect sympathy.

Having said that, it is possible to avoid using a lot of technology as a teacher in the classroom but encourage your students to be its primary users. This way, even if you feel you’ve not yet caught up with technology yourself, you can allow your students to take advantage of its benefits while you reflect on your practice. Content delivery, tests and quizzes are all pedagogically sound ways for your students to use technology.

As a self-confessed luddite who doesn’t really understand how technology can be used to support learning you could be prone to using technology as a gimmick, undermining your teaching and cheating your students out of learning. This generates a vicious circle in which your attitude is supported by your experience. Luckily for us all, as with many other self-confessed admissions of inadequacy, greater knowledge is the cure.

What are the most useful apps for learning?

The notion that technology is intrinsically good or bad for learning is one which I strongly dispute. It is how technology is used that produces good or bad outcomes. This applies to apps too. There are numerous apps that can support learning in the school context, but only if its use is guided expertly by a teacher. Delegating teaching to a computer or an app does not generally result in improved outcomes.

However, there are many apps that, when used appropriately, can support good practice in teaching and learning by enhancing that which we know works in the school context: the provision of effective, timely feedback (Showbie); the fostering of self-regulation (Calendar, Homework Apps) and metacognition (Explain Everything); or access to frequent retrieval practice tests and quizzes (Quizlet), just to name a few. But the wisest thing for any aspiring user of technology to remember is this: there is no app for great teaching.

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What does this look like in the classroom? What does this look like in the classroom? Bridging the gap between research and practice is a John Catt Publication.

A digital strategy for teaching and learning —Four years on at Surbiton High School

Unbelievably, yesterday was my last day at Surbiton High School, the wonderful school where I have spent the last four years teaching languages and leading on the digital strategy for teaching and learning.

I have been fortunate to work with inspiring, committed colleagues and under clear, empowering leadership. This created an environment in which the adoption of technology to support teaching and learning was not seen as an obstacle, but as an opportunity to develop new ways in which to deliver our curriculum, improve our classroom practice and foster the learning habits that our students need to thrive and flourish in their endeavours.

A “learning first” digital strategy

Our digital strategy has been evolving for four years. It’s still evolving and I have no doubt it will continue to do so when I’m but a distant memory. Its latest iteration and most accurate representation is below:

Its three main pillars all have one thing in common: they’re there to support teaching and learning. By removing most extraneous apps, tools and even a lot of the most common commercial edtech, we have been able to concentrate on those practices, tools and workflows that show the most promise according to our experience and the available research findings.

Whilst we are aware that any direct impact that technology might have on learning is notoriously difficult to measure, we realised it was erroneous – even irresponsible – to dismiss the use of technology altogether without exploring how it could support those strategies and interventions which have been shown to improve outcomes, such as improving feedback, collaborative learning, metacognitive strategies and self-regulation in learning.

Pedagogy

Right from the very start we realised that, if the adoption of technology for learning was to succeed, we needed to make it explicit to our teachers, parents and pupils how the technology-rich environment we were creating would support teaching and learning.

We set upon creating a culture in which professional development intertwined content knowledge, pedagogy and technological competence and a climate in which using technology was no-fuss, mundane and, perhaps counterintuitively, non-essential. Teachers, parents and students quickly realised that the use of technology was not an imposition, but an addition to their teaching and learning toolkits. Adoption was encouraged, not hindered, by this lack of compulsion.

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Our staff quickly developed ways in which they could use our technology to support sound pedagogy. They understood that effective teaching and effective use of their resources were not mutually exclusive. In our context, we have seen how the careful and purposeful application of technology has improved the quality of instruction, and how it has had a positive impact on classroom climate, classroom management, the fostering of metacognitive strategies, the timely delivery of feedback, and even the type and quality of the homework we can set.

Over the past four years, we have been fortunate to have been chosen as the place to visit to see a successful digital strategy in action by many other schools, educational technology companies and even the UK Department for Education. Those who visit Surbiton High School always remark on how normal and ordinary the use of technology is. At heart, we are a traditional school that makes the most of the resources available to us, digital or analogue, to support teaching and learning.

Curriculum

We also understood from the very outset that in a traditional, technology-rich environment content delivery was going to be a priority. The curricular (and co-curricular) offer at Surbiton High School was already exceptionally rich, but we needed a way to facilitate access to the core content of our curriculum.

Our goal was to develop a means to deliver our rich curriculum while at the same time taking into account how students learn best. With this as our aim, we developed our digital leaning spaces, a means to curate and deliver content to our students that incorporates in its design principles such as dual-coding, distributed practice, modelling of solved problems and retrieval practice.

The use of technology to support teaching and learning at Surbiton High School is now so common place that it is almost unremarkable. We see this as the principal, most rewarding and gratifying sign of the success of our digital strategy.

None of this would have been possible without the support and challenge of my colleagues, to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude. I will miss Surbiton High School and the wonderful people who inhabit it – teachers, support staff and students alike.

Here’s to the future

On 1 September I will take up post as deputy head at Hampshire Collegiate School, an ambitious, forward-looking school set in beautiful, historic grounds and full of inspiring, committed teachers and wonderful students. I am very much looking forward to joining and contributing to the development of the school as a beacon of excellent practice – with and without technology.

Hampshire Collegiate School

 

The Cartography of Learning The core principles of effective feedback

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

— Robert Frost

The travelling analogy when it comes to giving feedback is an apt one. I first came across it when reading Dylan Wiliam on formative assessment. Wiliam writes that effective teaching has three key principles at its core: “finding out where learners are in their learning, finding out where they are going, and finding out how to get there”. This is what I like to refer to as the cartography of learning.

John Hattie agrees. According to Hattie, feedback “refers to the process of securing information enabling change through adjustment or calibration of efforts in order to bring a person closer to a well-defined goal.” Not many teachers would dispute the essential role that these adjustments, calibrations and course corrections play in successful learning, yet teachers habitually view giving feedback as an onerous and often thankless task. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy particularly if teachers are made to follow ill-conceived feedback policies that focus on the gathering of evidence of feedback rather than on its effectiveness in enabling progress.

This article is an attempt to explore what makes feedback effective and therefore where schools should focus their policies, which should encourage teachers to view giving feedback as an integral part of teaching, not as an additional intervention.

Make explicit your learning intentions and criteria for success

We shouldn’t assume that our idea of what success looks like is shared by our students. As novices, it is likely that our students have a rudimentary, low-resolution grasp of where they are going, whereas teachers can see it in high definition thanks to their knowledge and experience.

This means that outcomes need to be well articulated so that students can visualise the destination and begin to make course adjustments to get there. We need to do this clearly and explicitly, defining our learning intentions —the destination— in high resolution by marking out an audacious X on the map. Having painted a vivid picture of what success looks like, we then need to refer back to it frequently in our teaching.

In the wrong circumstances, culture or climate, we might feel that covering content is more important, leaving no room for anything else, but it is critical to understand that feedback is only effective if students know where they need to go, otherwise our directions lack a crucial point of reference for the requisite triangulation.

Deliver feedback regularly in the run up to summative assessments, not after them

Teachers often feel they need to provide extensive, individualised feedback after every task. In reality, the feedback we provide will need to vary depending on the stage of learning and on the task. For example, teachers are habitually encouraged to give detailed feedback after a summative end of unit test or end of year exam. In most cases, this is pretty pointless, as inevitably the unit of study has concluded and there is little the learner can do to alter the result.

It makes much more sense to give feedback regularly during the learning process, prior to the end of unit of study, in order to modify teaching and learning activities accordingly and thus have a better shot at improving student attainment. Formative assessment is only formative if it happens during the learning, not after it.

Focus on how feedback is received, rather than how it is given

Research shows that praise does have benefits to interpersonal relationships, which may indirectly affect the feedback that is given, but it doesn’t show any direct impact on achievement. Teachers often believe that lavishing praise is essential to provide the necessary encouragement and motivation for students to continue achieving. However, research suggests that the belief that improving student self-concept through praise will automatically lead to higher achievement is flawed. In fact, the converse is true: achievement has a much larger effect on student self-concept than praise.

Hattie writes that students tend to be future focused, and that they can find critique “unnecessary, lengthy, personal, and hurtful”. Students are sensitive to the climate in which criticism is given, so teachers need to focus on delivering feedback that does not dwell on negatives and focuses on the positive. Another interpretation of this is that we would be better served by establishing a positive and friendly climate in which the feedback is received, rather than attempting to engender such climate through congratulatory feedback.

Provide feedback that presents the learner with a roadmap to achievable challenges

Active involvement of students in their own learning is key to achievement. As Wiliam suggests, “feedback should cause thinking” and it should generate “more work for the recipient that the donor”. With these two principles in mind, we ought to focus our efforts on providing feedback engages the learner just above their current level of achievement by setting achievable challenges that are related to learning intentions and success criteria that we have already shared with students.

We should not be afraid to stimulate a degree of cognitive dissonance between where the student self-assesses herself to be and where we would like her to be. Providing this cognitive dissonance is not too large (or too pointlessly small), it should motivate the student to strive to make the leap to the next step in their path to achievement.

In addition, if, as argued above, teachers worry less about students’ emotional reaction to feedback, they should become freer to think about their feedback as an integral part of a sequence of lessons, rather than as a remedial addition. Informal feedback should happen continuously and should be woven seamlessly into our teaching. Formal feedback should be given regularly to cause students to act and think about their own learning. Giving feedback and teaching therefore should not be considered as two discrete activities.

Consider alternative ways to give feedback

As suggested above, feedback policies sometimes read as if those who wrote them were more concerned with leaving behind evidence of feedback than with its effectiveness in improving learning. While many of us are guilty of writing lengthy what-went-wells and even-better-ifs, the fact is that students often find teachers’ lengthy comments irrelevant to their moving forward.

As teachers, we should not be afraid to make professional judgements about what kind of feedback is required when. For example, often novices need corrective feedback based on their content knowledge —e.g. this was correct, but this wasn’t. Attempts at lengthy diagnostic feedback at the novice stage are likely to generate a huge deal of work for the teacher and very little benefit for the student. However, as learners develop greater expertise in the subject, they will need feedback that helps to support self-regulation and conceptualisation.

While individualisation and personalisation may seem laudable aims, the truth is that students are more alike than they are different. Dedicating some lesson time after a task to provide general feedback —including opportunities for peer feedback— may be as effective or more effective than attempting to leave individual feedback in writing. This lightening of the workload, in addition to increasing teacher wellbeing, may release —perhaps counterintuitively— time to spend on those students who would actually benefit from a one-to-one approach to feedback.

These are just some initial thoughts about feedback. Your thoughts and considerations would be very welcome.

Further reading

Hattie, J, 2013. Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn. 1. Routledge.

Wiliam, D, 2011. Embedded Formative Assessment. 1. Solution Tree Press.

The Education Endowment Foundation: Teaching & Learning Toolkit

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Emergency EdTech Rations –What's so important we can't leave it at home?

A little while back, David Hopkins asked a group of educationalists to contribute to a book he was writing on the enabling role that technology plays in our lives.  David’s book is now published – click or tap here to get yourself a copy – and, with his permission, reproduced below is my contribution.

Given my manifest interest in educational technology, folks often expect me to own lots of gadgets and to be always up-to-date with the latest smartphone, laptop or what have you. Or perhaps they assume I’m forever ‘staring into’ a screen. In reality, I am the humble owner a single smartphone and that’s about it. I do use a laptop and also a tablet for work, but these are provided by my employer – though I do bring them home almost always. Whether owned by me or by my employer, below is a little run down of the technology I rely on most frequently:

Wearables

I generally avoid wearables. I am not philosophically opposed to them, I just find that electronic devices can, if their use is left unmonitored, reverse the roles and become our masters, rather than the other way around.

For this reason, the only technology I wear – aside from a wedding band and a leather bracelet that my children presented to me – is my glasses or contact lenses that I use to correct the myopia I developed partly due to some suspect genes and partly due to ‘staring into’ books lots during childhood.

I wear no watch – smart or otherwise – nor do I use fitness trackers. If I need to know the time, and depending on where I am, I just check my smartphone, my laptop’s taskbar or look up at the radio-controlled clock in my classroom.

In my pockets

My clothes have pockets. These allow me to carry a variety of useful tools that allow me to do the things I consider normal in my life. The contents of my pockets are constantly changing, but there are three items that are ever present:

Keyring: On it hang a variety of keys and electronic fobs that allow me entry to my home, car, office and the classrooms where I teach.

Wallet: As well as few coins and the occasional ten-pound note, my wallet stores a selection of contactless smart cards that allow me to travel and shop without having to carry cash with me. Even though I love my brown leather wallet and its understated elegance, I look forward to the day when technology allows me to travel and shop even without it and the cards it carries.

Smartphone: It’s an iPhone 6S Plus. It’s not too big, despite what you might think. It’s perfect. Since I hardly ever make or receive phone calls on it, its size is ideal to carry around in my pockets and communicate with others – via email or social media – or comfortably read books, magazines and newspapers on the go. I even use it to regulate my central heating! I also take most of my photos using it, which are of excellent quality, so I don’t need a separate compact camera. I also use my smartphone as a portable music player, so I don’t own a separate one of those either.

In my briefcase/bag

An elegant tan leather satchel-style briefcase allows me to carry the tools of my trade in comfort. Its contents vary depending on the day or occasion, but the things you will always find there are:

Laptop: My three-year-old MacBook Air 13 inch is the perfect laptop as far as I am concerned. It’s thin, it’s light, it’s powerful and it simply will not run out of juice, even after being put through its paces all day planning lessons, writing or editing media. This means that I don’t have to carry a cable charger with me. Laptop range anxiety is thankfully a thing of the past.

Tablet: My iPad Pro 9 inch is a simply fantastic multipurpose device that I use constantly as my teacher planner, calendar and notebook. With it I read, write, watch, listen and generally learn stuff. It’s my portable interactive whiteboard, camera, e-book reader (thank heavens for the Kindle app) and general repository of teaching and learning resources.

Bits of paper: Exercise books, textbooks, crumpled half-marked essays, post-it notes whose stickiness has long been emasculated by dust and fluff and numerous receipts printed on creased thermal paper faded by the passing of time and forgetfulness to fill in the requisite expenses form. Though I recognise I use less of it these days, I love paper. It’s still the best tool for the job on many occasions. Long may it last.

Green pens: Yes, I mark using green. Bite me!

At home

The combination of reliable fast broadband and an Apple TV means that TV watching is more and more an a-la-carte affair. My children don’t remember a world before on-demand TV and to them the confines and limitations of scheduled live TV are as quaint as recording your music on shiny silver discs.

In terms of future tech, I can’t wait to get rid of my smoke-belching, diesel- chugging dad-taxi and replace it with a nice, clean hybrid or fully electric car. That’s what middle class does to you.

As a keen but rather average photographer, I also own a Canon DSLR camera that I take on holidays, day trips and walks. It does only one job and it’s excellent at it. There’s much to be said for that.

Get ed tech right without blowing your budget —A guide for school leaders

IT can be a huge drain on resources, so the key to keeping a lid on costs is for schools to be clued up about their technology needs.

Schools are continuously dripping money into the big river of ed tech that all schools have become tributaries to.

When budgets are tight – as they are now – it is easy to view ed tech as a huge drain on resources. Yet schools would grind to a halt if we simply pulled the plug.

We rely on digital technology for everything from word-processing a worksheet to calculating the tax on staff payslips, projecting PowerPoint presentations and taking registers.

Of course, there are expensive gimmicks, but there’s plenty we can’t do without. We must remember that ed tech can be hugely beneficial to the smooth running of any school, not just in terms of managing ancillary processes but also contributing to the improvement of teaching and learning. Having said that, it’s important that ed tech budgets are managed well to ensure we get the most bang for our buck. Here’s how.

Manage the finances

Many school leaders would admit to “not doing technology” and, even in this day and age, are relieved to transfer all responsibility to the resident technology expert. The problem is that managing an ed tech budget well requires a close partnership between the network manager and the school’s senior and middle leaders.

The person (or, increasingly, the IT support company) in charge of the network needs to gain a keener understanding of the needs of the various sections of the school – support staff, teachers and students.

The flip side of this arrangement is that the school’s leadership needs to acquire a much better grasp of what technology can and can’t achieve, as well as the different financing options available to schools. “I don’t’ do technology” is simply a cop-out.

Get this partnership right and you will no longer have network managers blowing £40,000 at the BETT show just because they must spend this year’s budget, or school leaders cluelessly signing expensive contracts with purveyors of virtual learning environments (VLEs) that don’t integrate with the school’s management information system as promised and nobody can work out how to use the tech anyway. Knowledge, folks, is power.

Clued-up contracts

Mutual trust and understanding between technical and educational leaders is a great start but the partnership needs to be commercially savvy, too. While it is important to build a good working relationship with your suppliers, it probably pays to avoid the temptation to just ping an email to the usual supplier the next time you need to order 100 new desktop computers. Build relationships with several suppliers, not just the one who always buys you a coffee at BETT, and get them to compete against each other as a matter of course.

Good rules of thumb are to never tell suppliers what your budget is and to always get at least three quotes for every major purchasing decision, such as servers, network or desktop replacement programmes.

And if you find yourself frequently chasing the same supplier for a quote, it’s probably time to find one that needs you more than you need them.

Once you have your quotes, remember that everything is up for negotiation: who can get you a fourth year free if you sign a three-year deal? Can you push them to give you one more year’s free warranty than their competitors can offer? Who will throw in staff for free when you buy equipment for your students? But, beware – there may be an opportunity cost to these negotiations. You may be asked to give up one perk to obtain another. Here’s where a keen understanding of what your school does and doesn’t need comes in handy.

It’s important to note that your school must follow the European Union procurement directives, which the UK enforces through the Public Contract Regulations 2015. The threshold for goods and services is £164,176 (until the end of 2017). If your contract’s whole-life cost is above this threshold, you must advertise it in the Official Journal of the European Union.

Potential pitfalls

The journey towards getting technology to work well for schools takes place, more often than not, along a road paved with frustration and disappointment. The attractive promises made by the salesman after opening a generous tab at the bar may look less enticing when you drink in the small print in the cold light of day.

Did you consider what the insurance excludes? Did you spot the hidden clause with the unreasonable termination notice? Are updates required but not free? Will inflationary rises be automatically passed on to the school? Is the renewal of this expensive contract automatic? Would you wish it to be?

And beware of discounted periods, where contracts begin reasonably priced but the cost rises steadily after a year or two. This can be particularly frustrating at contract renewal time, especially if the suppliers perceive you as being tied in to their product.

Technology is continuously developing, which is great, but sometimes a product you bought two years ago can be upgraded with features you don’t really need but now find yourself having to pay for on renewal.

In such circumstances, you should stand firm and, if necessary, threaten non-renewal to keep within the original budget. Changing product or supplier may not be desirable for a host of reasons but it pays to keep your options open. Always remember that, although you may be under pressure to secure a solution or a product, ed tech salespeople are under pressure to close deals. Use this to your advantage.

Do you need it?

In my book, the most important consideration when purchasing educational technology is: will the children benefit, either directly or indirectly? Whether the technology will help children learn, teachers teach and the school run smoothly must be your priorities. The school’s context cannot be ignored in this and you would do well to consider your people and the overall culture.

That new VLE may be a wonderful piece of kit, with huge transformational potential, but it’s only as wonderful as the teachers who utilise it. Have you set aside money and time to train them how to use it? New interactive whiteboards across the school may be great but they won’t make learning better, good teaching will. Is your CPD budget suffering because the cash is being spent on technology? Teachers who are under pressure as it is, and are given neither time nor training, cannot be blamed for concluding that you’ve just spent a fortune on a fad that no one is ever going to use.

Nobody should spend vast sums on technology at the expense of professional development. Do so at your peril.

This article was originally published in the TES.

 

How technology supports feedback at Surbiton High School —A case-study

Below is a case-study of how technology is used to support teaching and learning at Surbiton High School. The case-study was written by Dominic Norrish, Group Director of Technology at United Learning, and it is reproduced here with his permission:

Surbiton High School has had a 1-to-1 mobile learning strategy since the Autumn term 2014, with every teacher and student using an iPad as part of their day-to day work, a strategy led by Assistant Principal José Picardo. Stakeholder surveys of KS3 pupils in 2015 and 2016 indicated that gradual declines in positivity seen in other contexts between Years 7-9 were not reported at SHS (e.g. students were remaining positive about learning) and that many of the well-evidenced processes behind learning (agency, collaboration) were increasingly positively reported. SHS is using the iPad app Showbie as its workflow for digital submission of work, marking by staff and access to feedback by students. The author visited the school in November 2016 to observe lessons and interview staff and students about their perceptions of technology’s impact on marking and feedback.

Notable features

  • Staff perceive both efficiency and effectiveness gains for marking and feedback when technology is used:
  • Teachers are agreed that the use of ‘voice notes’ (audio recording of their narrated feedback) is far quicker than either hand- or type-written marking. Almost uniformly, they are using this reclaimed time to give more detailed feedback;
  • Teachers also consider the quality of feedback they are able to leave through a voice note to be much more effective for learning, due to a combination of factors. They perceive that students are more likely to access feedback in this form, that it reduces the ‘distancing effect’ of written feedback and encourages dialogue, that it forces engagement with the substance rather than the surface of ‘grades’, that they can make themselves understood more clearly, that ‘dense’feedback is more accessible, that it scaffolds self-assessment and target setting;
  • Teachers value some of the administrative affordances of the technology, including the ability to share classes’ marking with co-teachers, the ability to leave whole-class feedback when relevant, the ability to see a student’s entire history of work in their subject at a glance and to be able to access this instantly, the power this gives them to ensure that no student falls through the gaps;
  •  Several staff reported enhancement to parental partnership because of the technology, particularly in supporting Parents’ Evenings.

Students’ views echo the effects perceived by teachers at Surbiton:

  • Students describe verbal feedback as much more nuanced and less ‘black and white’ than written comments, seeing it as a continuation of teaching rather than a separate process;
  • Social distance is reduced through feedback delivered by a trusted voice, using language/ inflection with which the students are already comfortable and familiar;
  • Some students believe that the technology is improving the turn-around speed of marking because of the simplification of the process for teachers – no missing books, no piles of work to carry around, nothing to be lost, the ability to work on it anywhere and in any spare moment;
  • The relative inaccessibility of the medium (verbal feedback can’t be glanced at, it needs to be listened to in its entirety) was reported as a drawback by some students. Staff, conversely, see this as a strength, forcing students to listen (sometimes repeatedly) and to transcribe targets into their own words.

The most notable feature of the school’s use of technology is, counterintuitively, that it is not noted. Surbiton has successfully embedded technology-enhanced practices into the ‘business as usual’ of learning so that students and increasing numbers of staff do not see it as a discrete activity.

Success factors

The maturity of technology use observed at SHS has taken years to emerge and to spread through department structures. It is not a novel observation that successful change must be a gradual process, but it is starkly clear at Surbiton. Equally, the development of internal ‘champions’ seems to have been an important part of the spread of technology-enhanced teaching from isolated islands to the pedagogic mainland.

These changes do not occur organically – strong leadership both from the Head teacher (who has invested significant financial and political capital in the project) and from José as digital strategist is a pivotal success factor.

A focus on enhancing the processes of learning, not other, more weakly evidenced theorised benefits of technology has enabled staff to engage positively. That the core of this approach is a defined strategy of a common toolset and workflow which every student and member of staff can understand and rely on has been an important plank of the strategy’s success.

An aspect of this ‘technology as an enhancement’ mind-set is seen in the practices of the Psychology department, which has used Showbie to strengthen a pre-existing assessment process which had previously been frustratingly easy for students to subvert or avoid.

José has also simplified wherever possible, employing whatever tool is best suited for a specific task rather than attempting to use complex/ compromised all-in-one platforms. A good example of this is the simplicity of the school’s ‘Learning Spaces’ website, which serves as the knowledge and content distribution hub for students. It is organised by subject and then year and thus easily navigated by students, linked to by staff and accessible by both current parents and potential customers.

Ongoing challenges and next steps

Whilst the benefits are clearly understood by those staff and students observed/ interviewed, SHS will need continue to exemplify these and support all teachers in adapting current practices. Dogmatism is unlikely to be helpful here and the school’s leaders will need to show continuing flexibility to specialist subjects’ requirements, as well as challenging simple resistance to change. The school should continue to support a healthy culture of ‘what works’, combining the best of traditional with emerging methods where they support learning most effectively.

Inspectors’ requirements to see evidence of marking is sometimes perceived as a barrier to more widespread adoption, which is an illogical fear (evidence is actually much more easily accessed by inspectors and can demonstrate greater effectiveness, as described above). A linked worry is that absence of marking in books will be negatively perceived by inspectors/ parents. To counter this, the school should clearly define the role of digital methods within its marking policy and publicise its successes to stakeholders. This will also relieve teachers from the perceived threat of internal and external criticism.

Don’t blame the tools —Too often, schools approach technology in completely the wrong way

I was once at a conference where a delegate started chatting to me about iPads in schools. He’d been in charge of the rollout of more than 500 tablets to staff and students in his school and I sensed frustration and a little dejection when he described what obviously had turned into a head-aching predicament. I won’t bore you with his story, but essentially he had ordered a load of tablets and assumed that everything else would be all right.

Only it wasn’t all right. My delegate friend had not foreseen the difficulty involved in introducing new variables into complex systems. He had been persuaded by the transformational, 21st century, digital nativist discourse that, very much like populist politicians, had promised easy solutions to complex problems. Reality was coming home to roost.

He’s not the only one to have such an experience. And it isn’t always tablet related. It might be a new virtual learning environment, a few more interactive whiteboards, another bank of laptops or the introduction of a shiny, easier new way to do X,Y or Z online. The problem is predictably familiar: schools invest readily and heavily in the technology but then fail to invest proportionally in the teaching. I’m not quite sure why schools so often appear to put technology before pedagogy but they’re getting it the wrong way around. And because so many schools get it wrong, it is not in the least bit surprising that we seem to be stuck in a never-ending spiral of mutually assured disappointment, constantly asking ourselves: if technology is the solution, what was the problem again?

Technology, of course, is not the solution.

Perception problem

I was recently discussing the value of technology with a senior leader who asserted, unequivocally, that “technology was a distraction cluttering up teaching”. He proudly boasted that his school was a technology-free area. I know that many teachers would agree with him. And I understand the reasons: they have often had a terrible experience with technology, leading them to the conclusion that technology does not contribute to good teaching; that, in fact, it hinders it.

Dig a little deeper and you often find that these technology denialists appear to have also gone along unthinkingly with the claims that technology in schools is about “transformation” or “engaging” the children and so, when it fails to achieve either of these things in the medium to long term, they quickly blame and thereafter dismiss the technology.

But they are measuring technology with the wrong stick. What they fail to consider is that if technology is not the solution, it isn’t the problem either. The very word technology means “the science of craft”. Technology is nothing more and nothing less than the application of human knowledge to practical tasks. From this perspective, blaming technology for poor outcomes in schools is like a chef blaming his kitchen knife for having prepared a terrible meal.

What technology critics almost always forget is that technology is not a substitute for good teaching. Teachers still need to be good at teaching in the same way that chefs still need to be good at cooking. That’s not to say that some edtech tools don’t well and truly suck, to use the vernacular, but rather that no amount of technology will make a mediocre teacher good. Teachers get better at teaching by studying and reflecting on their craft, and this includes studying how to apply knowledge to achieving the practical aim of engendering rich and successful learning.

Using technology well to support teaching and learning is a feature of great teachers, yet there appears to exist the commonly held notion that digital technology and teaching are mutually incompatible. There’s an element of truth about it. It is true that, for example, technology can be a distraction. There’s no denying it. So, I would understand why you might believe that you’d be better off without it. I might not even blame you. But you’d be wrong.

How to counter the technology narrative

So what should schools do? When it comes to introducing new technology successfully, numerous considerations need to be clearly thought out and weighed up — budgets, infrastructure upgrades, staff professional development, impact on learning — and all the while keeping in mind two very important things: first, that the sole objective of spending thousands on technology ought to be to help children learn and, second, that the outcome of these considerations could well be an unequivocal “we don’t need the technology”.

There are many good reasons why making more technology available to pupils would be desirable for most schools, but the missing ingredient in the sauce is often the lack of a sound educational case for its use. This educational case needs to be built solidly around supporting, facilitating and enhancing the processes involved in teaching and learning. Nothing else will do. Put this on a poster and hang it somewhere where it will serve as a constant reminder because, in the end, the success of any technology initiative will be judged on whether it has had a positive impact on educational outcomes.

A well-informed and hard-headed approach is required to decide whether this avenue is one down which your school should be travelling at this particular stage in its development plan. Therefore, I would suggest that the person put in charge of technology procurement be an expert in pedagogy — an experienced classroom practitioner who can visualise how technology can potentially be put to use in schools from a grounded, pragmatic perspective.

This is why it is so important that the person in charge of teaching and learning keeps an open mind to the adoption of digital technology. A great teaching and learning leader will not dismiss technology out of hand any more than he or she will adopt technology unthinkingly. And if they do either of these things, one must question their suitability for the role because who in their right mind would reject a whole tool box because some of the tools don’t work?

If we know that the quality of instruction can impact massively on learning, let’s look at how technology can help to deliver great lessons. If we know good feedback is essential to students’ progress, let’s consider how technology can facilitate this process. If cognitive psychology is laying the guiding principles of improved classroom practice, let’s explore how the effective use of technology can contribute to making learning more successful.

It really shouldn’t be that contentious to promote the notion that great teaching – the craft – and the application of the most appropriate tool to the task – the science – are irreversibly intertwined; that good teachers will always seek to explore ways in which to be improve their practice; and that, though digital technology clearly isn’t always the answer, sometimes it may well be.

A good workman is able to discern and pick the best tool for a particular task, is committed to improving his craft, and certainly doesn’t blame his tools.

This piece was originally published in the EdTech supplement accompanying the TES on 20 January.

If you enjoyed this piece, you may want to watch my interview at the TES offices, discussing EdTech, leadership and pedagogy. 

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