5 minute read
THE FOREST AND THE TREES - DIGITAL LIFE AT GERMANTOWN FRIENDS SCHOOL
John Henderson
Background
In recent years, technology has become increasingly essential for school success, impacting students, families, educators, and administrators alike. For whole periods of time students and teachers learned with one another solely through the use of technology. This shift in the method of our teaching has led to several areas of institutional growth in technology: more readily available devices, increased filtering of internet use, the introduction of more student support tools, and the use of more invasive IT tools in general. In addition, AI has risen to become a very important topic of current discussion.
The question I often sit with is “Who decides what is best?”. The burden of decision-making often falls to me and my team. As our school community continues to change and grow, so does our role in that work. Requests for new technologies and technological solutions abound. We often grapple with how our decisions, even seemingly minor ones, will have impacts on students, both present and future, throughout the school (figure 1). We need to marry our expertise with a pedagogical and human understanding of the points of view of the folks making requests in each zone.
Explorations
As I sort through the various disparate requests that come across my inbox in a given week, I often ponder what types of decisions ought to sit solely in my zone. What would be better addressed by our Chief Advancement Officer, In-house Counsel, Division Directors, Associate Head of School, or others?
And yet, it is clear to me, in particular when considering conversations throughout and following the COVID-19 pandemic, that this is a puzzle many schools are working on and that it is a topic ripe for discussion within GFS. In response to the willingness within our GFS community to engage in these conversations. I formed a committee charged with addressing the various issues and questions associated with Digital Life at GFS.
The committee is composed of Division Directors, Director of Academic Program, Associate Head of School, In-house counsel, our Health Education Department Chair, and members of the IT department. I am uplifted by the depth of consideration these constituencies bring to each topic. So far, we’ve addressed device use at different grade levels, software adoption and removal procedures, modifying the schools fltering, email quarantining, and gatekeeping of applications for minors. Let’s look at some upcoming questions on our agenda:
• How fast do we need to adapt and change?
• What new tools should we adopt to enable deeper learning and more feedback for students?
• What should our stance on Social Media on campus be?
• Why and how do we decide to filter, block, or unblock specific sites? What circumstances and criteria should we consider when we receive a request to unblock a site?
• Do AI technologies, including assistive applications, help or hurt our students in learning? Are they safe?
• How much privacy is too much? How much is not enough?
This work is expansive. It is ever changing. Even as I prepare agendas for the Digital Life Committee, even as we enter into our Meetings for Business, I find that the work shifts. The topics we need to discuss and how we understand them as educators can change.
Is it working? I see definitive progress in defining how the moral compass of Quaker pedagogy applies to digital life. Committee members are enthused and all the feedback relating to this work has been positive. What more can we do?
The committee will become a standing committee, meeting once a month indefinitely in order to establish momentum, consistency, and dependability. I foresee intentional discourse around both big-picture questions and smaller, day-to-day issues. Through dedicating time to listen, research, and reflect, we will make space and time for contemplating our digital lives.
Next Steps
1. First and foremost, I wonder the following: How can I balance committee-paced work with the need to efficiently respond to acute issues in a way that includes all zones of influence? A constituent may want and need answers from me or my team quickly, but we are obligated to respect what zones of influence that question may touch. How can we create a committee agile enough to respond to such needs and requests?
2. Would an incident-response protocol, akin to our established bias-incident response protocol, enable us to better manage tension and change in the digital landscape? Would a tool like this enable greater transparency and communication surrounding digital incidents?
JOHN HENDERSON
Director of IT, Head of Computer Science and Digital Media, CS TeacherGermantown Friends SchoolPhiladelphia, PA
I have served as an administrator at both large and small schools and taught science, math, and computer science in grades 6-12. I joined Germantown Friends School in 2017 and was immediately moved by the impact of an institution led by shared values and focused on community building. I now serve as the IT Director and Computer Science and Digital Media Department Chair. As I’ve watched the landscape of digital life and educational technology change drastically over the past 5 years, I’ve been grateful to be at an institution such as GFS that puts ethical considerations frst. Quaker education demands that we prioritize every voice and I’ve seen that we must take as much care with our digital spaces as our physical ones. Through building warm, welcoming, and inclusive technology spaces, both physical and digital, we help students build the lifelong skills of empathy and collaboration.
