The New Pillars of Modern Teaching

to shift from traditional principles of teaching to the modern pillars of curation, design, and feedback to fully engage students in their learning. Drawing on the modern pillars’ positive effect in other fields, Allen persuades K–12 teachers that they can recreate the success for their students. This book helps educators empower and engage all digital learners.

Using this resource, K–12 educators will:

THE NEW PILLARS OF MODERN TEACHING

In The New Pillars of Modern Teaching, author Gayle Allen encourages readers

• Investigate the effect technology has on pedagogy and student engagement • Shift from traditional to modern pillars of teaching to help students own their learning • Read anecdotes from other industries that have adopted design, curation, and feedback principles to great success • S trengthen the relationship between teacher and student and increase the quality of instruction

Visit go.solution-tree.com/21stcenturyskills to access materials related to this book.

solution-tree.com

G AY L E A L L E N

Solutions Series: Solutions for Modern Learning engages K–12 educators in a powerful conversation about learning and schooling in the connected world. In a short, reader-friendly format, these books challenge traditional thinking about education and help to develop the modern contexts teachers and leaders need to effectively support digital learners.

Gayle Allen

Copyright © 2016 by Solution Tree Press All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction of this book in whole or in part in any form.

555 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404 800.733.6786 (toll free) / 812.336.7700 FAX: 812.336.7790 email: info@solution-tree.com solution-tree.com Visit go.solution-tree.com/21stcenturyskills to access materials related to this book.

Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950394 ISBN: 978-1-942496-19-9 (perfect bound) Solution Tree Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO Edmund M. Ackerman, President Solution Tree Press President: Douglas M. Rife Senior Acquisitions Editor: Amy Rubenstein Editorial Director: Lesley Bolton Managing Production Editor: Caroline Weiss Copy Editor: Ashante K. Thomas Proofreader: Elisabeth Abrams Cover and Text Designer: Rian Anderson Compositor: Abigail Bowen

Table of Contents About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction: Technology and Pedagogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Beat of the Ed Tech Drum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Start With Why. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Three New Pillars of Pedagogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Chapter 1: Why We Need to Change Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Challenges of Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Scarcity Versus Abundance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Students Own Their Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Educators as Learning Workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Chapter 2: Pillar One—Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Transition From Instruction to Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Design in Action: Graphic Designers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Design for Educators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Design for Students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

v

vi

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

Chapter 3: Pillar Two—Curation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Transition From Curriculum to Curation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Scanning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Sense Making. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Sharing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Curation in Action: Programmers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Curation for Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Curation for Students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Chapter 4: Pillar Three—Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Transition From Assessment to Feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Feedback in Action: Uber Drivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Feedback for Educators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 The Challenge of Isolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Power to Create Feedback Loops. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Feedback for Students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Chapter 5: Iteration and Failing Fast to Learn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 The Importance of Doing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Failure as a Path to Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 What Failing Fast Looks Like in Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 The Daring to Change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

About the Author Gayle Allen, EdD, MBA, is an experienced educator, researcher, and entrepreneur who helps educational leaders drive transformative change. Her unique blend of theory, practice, and humor challenges teams to become collaborative, research driven, and digitally connected.

Gayle was the founder of two professional learning institutes for K–12 educators, before becoming the chief learning officer for BrightBytes, the world’s leader in research and data for schools. She has been a teacher and administrator, while simultaneously serving as an adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her articles on learning and leadership have appeared in countless publications, such as MindShift, EdSurge, Edutopia, and Getting Smart.

Gayle earned her doctor and master of education degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her master of business administration in innovation and global leadership from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To learn more about Gayle’s work, visit www.gayleallen.net, or follow @GAllenTC on Twitter.

To book Gayle Allen for professional development, contact pd@solution-tree.com.

vii

Preface

By Will Richardson

In the 1960s and 1970s, Penguin published a series of what it called education specials, short books from a variety of authors such as Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, Herb Kohl, Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and others. All told, there were more than a dozen works, and they were primarily edgy, provocative essays meant to articulate an acute dissatisfaction with the function of schools at the time. The titles reflected that and included books such as The Underachieving School, Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Deschooling Society, and School Is Dead, to name a few. Obviously, the messages of these books were not subtle.

Progressive by nature, the authors generally saw their schools as unequal, undemocratic, and controlling places of conformity and indoctrination. They argued, mostly to nonlistening ears, that traditional school narratives were leaving their learners disengaged and lacking in creativity and curiosity, and the systems and structures of schools were deepening instead of ameliorating the inequities in society. A number of the authors argued that universal schooling was a pipe dream from both economic and political perspectives, and schools, if they were to remain, needed to be rethought from the ground up.

Reading many of these works now, it’s hard not to be struck by how precisely they describe many of the 21st century world’s realities. It’s inarguable that an education in the United States (and elsewhere) remains vastly unequal among socioeconomic groups and various races and ethnicities. The systems that drove schools years ago prevail and, in many cases, are less and less economically viable by the day. By and large, education is something still organized, controlled, and delivered by the institution; very little agency or autonomy is afforded to the learner over his or her own learning. Decades of reform efforts guided principally by politicians and businesspeople have failed to enact the types of widespread changes that those Penguin authors and many others felt were needed for schools to serve every learner equally and adequately in preparing him or her for the world that lies ahead. ix

x

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

It’s the “world that lies ahead” that is the focus of this book, part of the Solutions for Modern Learning series. Let us say up front that we in no way assume that these books will match the intellectual heft of those writers in the Penguin series (though we hope to come close). However, we aspire to reignite or perhaps even start some important conversations about change in schools, given the continuing long-standing challenges from decades past as well as the modern contexts of a highly networked, technology-packed, fast-changing world whose future looks less predictable by the minute.

Changes in technology since the early 1990s, and specifically the Internet, have had an enormous impact on how we communicate, create, and most importantly, learn. Nowhere have those effects been felt more acutely than with our learners, most of whom have never known a world without the Internet. In almost all areas of life, in almost every institution and society, the effects of ubiquitously connected technologies we now carry with us in our backpacks and back pockets have been profound, creating amazing opportunities and complex challenges, both of which have been hard to foresee. In no uncertain terms, the world has changed and continues to change quickly and drastically.

Yet, education has remained fairly steadfast, pushing potentially transformative learning devices and programs to the edges, never allowing them to penetrate to the core of learning in schools. Learning in schools looks, sounds, and feels pretty much like it did in the 1970s, if not in the early 1900s.

Here’s the problem: increasingly, for those who have the benefit of technology devices and Internet access, learning outside of school is more profound, relevant, and long lasting than learning inside the classroom. Connected learners of all ages have agency and autonomy that are stripped from them as they enter school. In a learning context, this is no longer the world that schools were built for, and in that light, it’s a pretty good bet that a fundamental redefinition of school is imminent.

While some would like to see schools done away with completely, we believe schools can play a crucially important role in the lives of our youth, the fabric of our communities, and the functioning of our nations. However, moving forward, we believe schools can only play these roles if we fully understand and embrace the new contexts that the modern world offers for learning and education. This is not just about equal access to technology and the Internet, although that’s a good start. This is about seeing our purpose and our practice through a different lens that understands the new literacies, skills, and dispositions that learners need to flourish in a networked world. Our hope is that the books in the Solutions for Modern Learning series make that lens clearer and more widespread.

Introduction

Technology and Pedagogy Step on a plane or a bus. Enter a coffee shop or a grocery store, or just walk down a busy street. No matter where we step, we can see people on their smartphones, laptops, and handheld devices. Everywhere we turn, we see people accessing information and making connections.

I get it. In fact, most of us are doing the same thing. Technology has become a natural part of our lives. For educators, it’s only when we start to think about it in relation to our teaching—to pedagogy—that it gets harder to understand.

That’s the purpose of this book. It’s written for educators who notice how ubiquitous technology has become but who are wrestling with what that means for their teaching. I wrote it to help us understand the “why” behind it all. I wrote it to answer the questions many of us are asking: “In an era when our students have so much access outside our schools, why do we need to bring it inside? Why do we need to use these tools in our classrooms?”

I believe the answers to these questions are nothing short of revolutionary. In fact, I think they lie at the heart of the coming change for us and our students.

They explain why our traditional pillars of pedagogy—instruction, curriculum, and assessment—are artifacts of an era of scarcity and no longer make sense when learners have access to an abundance of online resources for learning. In today’s world, our students’ success after they graduate will directly depend on whether they have gained a new set of skills for learning, skills that require us to rethink our teaching.

We’ll need to give up some control in order to empower our students to (1) design their own instruction, (2) curate (find, group, organize, and share) their own curriculum, and (3) gather feedback. Equally important, we need to look in the mirror and reflect on the extent to which technology will empower our learning, as well.

1

2

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

This is a book about pedagogical change, and that’s something I care deeply about. That’s because I’ve walked in your shoes. I’ve taught middle and high school, undergraduate and graduate courses, led after-school programs and activities, spent nights and weekends preparing for classes, and worked to rethink policies and programs that weren’t in the best interests of my students. In short, I’m a teacher.

The Beat of the Ed Tech Drum As teachers, we hear it all the time: the beat of the educational technology drum.

Global spending on classroom technology reached $13 billion in 2013, the highest it’s ever been (EdTech Times, 2014). At this point, half of U.S. public school districts have adopted bring your own device (BYOD), and many private schools have implemented one-to-one student computing (Schaffhauser, 2014). The headlines and book titles urge us to flip our classrooms, blend our learning, and personalize our instruction. We can feel it. We can feel the pressure to start using the next new tool. We can feel the demand to use technology in our classrooms.

Although the data show we have more devices available to us in our schools than ever before, they also illustrate that the changes in our teaching practice are largely cosmetic—the digitization of what we already do. We’re uploading homework to learning management systems, replacing overhead projectors with presentation software, and substituting online searches for trips to the library’s card catalog. Yet when it comes to teaching and learning, students’ experiences remain relatively unchanged. In fact, a 2014 national survey of over six million U.S. teachers and students reveals the limits of how we’re using technology in the classroom. For example, 81 percent of students are never asked to share content online with an audience, 74 percent spend less than one hour per year on online research, and 96 percent spend less than one hour per school year learning how to use social networks to access information. Nine out of ten teachers never ask students to collaborate online with students at other schools, and eight out of ten don’t ask students to get feedback online (“Technology and Learning Survey,” 2014). These aren’t isolated statistics.

For all the talk about how to incorporate the latest technologies into our classrooms, there’s little talk about why our established pedagogical practices need to change. There’s also been little space to pose the questions, questions like: Why is this moment different than countless other times that something new has come along?

Why are these technologies changing the nature of learning? Why are they important to us and to our students? Most importantly, why is this urgent enough that we should spend the time and the energy to change our pedagogy in significant ways?

We need to grapple with why, and we need to do it quickly because technology has deeply changed learning by irrevocably altering the relationship between learners and their learning. In fact, this change is so momentous that it has laid the

Technolog y and Pedagog y

groundwork for the end of teaching as we know it, upending the three traditional pillars of pedagogy—instruction, curriculum, and assessment—and ushering in three new pillars: design, curation, and feedback. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s start with why.

Start With Why We can’t underestimate the importance of understanding why when it comes to prompting significant and lasting change. In fact, thought leader and author Simon Sinek (2009) argues that until we understand why we need to do something—the “purpose, cause or belief ”—we’ll rarely commit wholeheartedly to the what or the how (p. 39). He contends that we’re neurologically wired to find out “why.” After studying the characteristics of successful organizations, Sinek learns that we’ll eagerly take on challenges associated with complex change—the hard work, the overwhelming feelings, even the threat of failure—when we understand their purpose. If the vision for why inspires us, we’re all in.

Arguments for technology use in the classroom focus on outcomes such as increased student engagement; higher student achievement; increased productivity; enhanced communication among teachers, students, and parents; economic competitiveness; global connectivity; and closing the achievement gap. These are important points (and I’ll talk about some of them in this book), but they’re not enough to prompt a major change in teaching practice.

As teachers, we’re often asked to do things differently. We’re asked to adopt a new assessment, to prioritize different instructional strategies, or to develop and implement new curricula. These directives can feel overwhelming, patronizing, or like one more thing to do. After experiencing a number of failed fads, many of us are tempted to adopt the mantra, “This too shall pass”—especially when we can’t find a direct connection between a new initiative and our students’ success. We need to know why.

Three New Pillars of Pedagogy For me, the hunger to understand the bigger picture led me to pursue a master’s and then a doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University, with a focus on teacher learning. In our cohort, we steeped ourselves in the writings of educators, researchers, and pedagogical theorists like Herbert Kliebard, Annette Lareau, Joe Kincheloe, Henry Giroux, Gloria Ladson-Billings, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and more. Eager to understand how the advent of technology might be changing teacher practice, I focused my research on K–12 teachers doing just that.

Between my research, my students, and my own teaching and learning, I began to

3

4

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

think about how increased connectivity had the potential to close the gap between the learner and the learning.

By the time I was teaching educators in Columbia’s graduate program in the late 2000s, it was clear to me that technology wasn’t a new fad. It was the catalyst for a full-blown paradigm shift, the kind that comes along and upends everything. It’s a shift that’s been muffled by the ever-louder ed tech drumbeat and all the technologies and all the money being spent on them. The drumbeat has drowned out how revolutionary the change really is because the change is about more than efficiency, speed, and economics. It’s about empowerment.

In short, technology has made possible a radical change in who owns or organizes the learning. To be clear, ownership of learning is a responsibility that is always shared between teacher and learner, but scarce learning options available in the preInternet age made that ownership challenging for the learner. Often, learners had access to a single teacher, worked from a single source of content (textbook), and had limited opportunities to receive feedback. As a result, even though teachers were struggling with low student engagement for most of the 20th century, they were taking tighter and tighter control over the three traditional pillars of pedagogy. Similarly, even though learners can now own their learning, their schools are still teaching them to wait and to let those long-standing pillars support their learning instead.

Now these three pillars are crumbling. Twenty-first century connectivity empowers students to organize their learning in ways that mirror their experiences outside school. As the old pillars crumble, we have an unparalleled opportunity to rethink our pedagogy and build new pillars to replace them. We get to surrender the tight control that’s been the hallmark of traditional pedagogy and instead empower learners to design their instruction, curate their own curriculum, and gather feedback to assess their development.

Contrary to what many might think, this change doesn’t diminish teachers’ value. In fact, it enhances it. Although our students have some of the skills they need to own their learning, they can deepen and expand those skills working alongside their teachers. Yet, as teachers, we can provide this expertise only if we personally know how to use technology to design, curate, and gather feedback for our own learning.

About This Book As we move forward in this book, I want to focus on the three new pillars of pedagogy. The first takes us from instruction to design, the second from curriculum to curation, and the third from assessment to feedback. Chapter 1 outlines why we need to change pedagogy. Chapters 2–4 will discuss each change at length, drawing

Technolog y and Pedagog y

on real-world examples and relevant stories. Each of these three chapters consists of five sections.

1. An introduction that provides context for the traditional teaching pillar 2. A comparison that illustrates the need to switch from the traditional pillar to its innovation (for instance, “Transition From Assessment to Feedback”) 3. A compelling story of what the new pillar looks like in action 4. Recommendations for ways to use the new pillar, along with guided discussion questions to support learning 5. Recommendations detailing how we can help students use the new pillar, including guided reflection questions to ask ourselves Following that, chapter 5 discusses the importance of iteration and failing fast as strategies for scaffolding this kind of learning for ourselves and our students.

Each chapter is written to serve as a resource for reflection and discussion among educators. Schools, districts, service agencies, colleges of education, state departments of education, and organizations may find this book helpful. The New Pillars of Modern Teaching is intended to meet the needs of diverse sets of teams, such as leadership teams, academic departments, professional learning communities (PLCs), parent groups, instructional coaches, administrative groups, university classes, and more. (Visit go.solution-tree.com to access live links for the websites mentioned in this book.)

Who’s ready for new pedagogies?

5

Why We Need to Change Pedagogy There are certain students who bring out the best in us as teachers. Often they’re the ones who show so little interest in what we’re teaching that they challenge us to make it relevant to them. For me, Ellie was that student. Each day she’d arrive early and pepper me with facts about the U.S. Civil War. She loved history. The challenge, as I saw it, was that I taught physics. That’s why, as I read her handwritten letter of thanks a decade later, I was so touched by what she wrote that, five lines in, I had tears in my eyes.

Her letter said that she’d been rethinking her life and career. Her love of American history prompted her to start a graduate program to earn her teaching certificate in high school history. She shared that I’d played a role in that decision, saying that she wanted to emulate my passion, my patience, and my hands-on approach. I was deeply touched by her words and excited to hear her so engaged. Yet strangely, part of me was also sad. That part was wondering why it took Ellie nearly a decade to pursue a passion that her teachers saw in her all the time.

I tell that story because it speaks so well to why many of us become teachers in the first place. First, we want to empower learners to reach their full potential.

Second, we take joy in the privilege of being part of the process. Researchers’ conversations with teachers confirm it. We want to share in our students’ successes and challenges (Joyce & Weil, 2008). We want to encourage students’ growth, direction, and purpose (Murphy, 2006), and we also want to play a role in students’ becoming thoughtful, engaged citizens (Nieto, 2005). That’s how I felt when I read Ellie’s letter—that teaching is about more than test performance. It’s about the kind of learning that empowers students to reach their potential, in and beyond school.

© 2016 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

7

8

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

Challenges of Engagement

© 2016 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

If a big part of why we teach is to help learners reach their full potential, then we may be disappointed to learn that we’re falling short of our goal. The thing is, Ellie’s initial dissatisfaction with her work isn’t that unusual, but her shift into more engaging work is. The majority of our graduates are deeply disengaged with their work, and they tend to stay that way, as evidenced by findings from Gallup’s (2013) report State of the American Workplace. Gallup, a research-based, global analytics company, has been gathering these data every two years since 2000. It defines engaged employees as those “involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work” (Gallup, 2013, p. 12).

The Gallup (2013) figures are disheartening, to say the least: findings show that 70 percent of U.S. workers fall into the categories of “not engaged” and “actively disengaged;” furthermore, most “are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces” (p. 12). Even more disturbing is the fact that, since Gallup (2013) began gathering these data, the numbers remain relatively unchanged, with “actively disengaged” workers costing companies “between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity,” as they are “more likely to steal from their companies, negatively influence their coworkers, miss workdays, and drive customers away” (pp. 12–13).

Now you may be thinking, “We’re not CEOs. We’re educators.” Yet for us, these numbers represent former students. These are our young people who’ve reached adulthood but not their potential.

As educators, most of us want a different kind of life for our students, the kind that Gallup describes for engaged employees. They’re the ones driving innovation and growth. They’re the ones who “build new products and services, generate new ideas, create new customers” (Gallup, 2013, p. 13). Equally important, long-term engagement has an impact on our former students’ mental and physical health and well-being. If one reason that we teach is so that students can find their path, then we have to admit we’re not having the impact we’d hoped.

Daniel Pink (2009), best-selling author of Drive, recognizes three environmental factors researchers point to, again and again, as the keys to employee engagement: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In short, students who are most engaged postgraduation operate in environments where they’re in charge of their own lives (autonomy), they learn and create new things (mastery), and they contribute something positive to the world (purpose). In contrast, our less engaged graduates operate in environments of control, management, and compliance.

Then big questions for us as educators are: Can we better prepare students to act with this level of engagement in work (and in life) by laying the groundwork for that while they’re still in school? Can we teach them the skills for learning that will help them in each way that Pink outlines? Can we give them the autonomy to

W hy We Need to Change Pedagog y

Scarcity Versus Abundance Economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (2013), who study the effects of scarcity, define it as “having less than you need” (p. 4). And it cuts across areas like economics, medicine, and education. Learning in a preInternet era meant having access to relatively few resources. It made it difficult to learn the concepts and skills associated with a particular subject. For many, this scarcity bred self-doubt, rather than self-confidence.

It’s a scarcity that learners have experienced throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Systems like free public schooling certainly improved access for learners.

Independent workers who learned easily from texts, and who had access to helpful instructors and peers, benefited from this system. However, a textbook, a teacher, a study group, and a library were not enough for many to own their learning. Most probably gave up on a few learning opportunities along the way when these few options failed to meet their needs.

For many—but not all—that kind of scarcity ended in the 21st century as connectivity spread throughout our schools. To get a sense of the change, consider that on average, in one minute, we upload over 72 new hours of YouTube videos, over 3,400 new Pinterest images, and over 370,000 new tweets, along with new content, explainer materials, games, and apps (SkyRocket Group, 2014). At the same time, news sites push out articles and videos online as events unfold, and academics, researchers, and journalists provide public access to new research findings (James, 2014). Armed with an Internet connection, today’s learners can access dozens of learning resources in less than an hour. It’s a far cry from the meager and highly coveted three or four resources available in the 20th century. That’s what we mean by abundance. Today’s connected learners are swimming in an ocean of resources, while yesterday’s learners were lucky if they had a puddle.

This abundance demands a change in our teaching. If it were still on educators to hold all the knowledge and distribute all the learning resources, then teaching in the same ways might make sense. But when we cling to a scarcity mindset, we assume that our students are neither able nor willing to access resources that are literally at

© 2016 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

choose from among learning options? Can we incorporate into the learning process projects that are meaningful to them and that give them a sense of purpose? If they are performing work with autonomy and purpose, work without easy answers, can they develop a capacity for mastery over time? Would it be possible to teach students to practice these skills right now?

Absolutely! That’s what giving students control over what, when, and how they learn is all about. While that wasn’t possible in the 20th century because of scarce access to resources, all that’s changed in today’s connected world.

9

10

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

Students Own Their Learning Today’s learners can scale the work traditionally performed by the instructor in ways previously not possible. While we can order books or materials for classrooms of students, we can’t personalize the thousands of pieces of content available in real time. While we can employ powerful instructional approaches to illustrate key concepts, we can’t personally teach a single concept in ten different ways to meet dozens of learners’ needs. And while we can assess how well a group of learners understands a specific body of material, we can’t provide nearly instantaneous feedback to each student every day.

The thing is, when it comes to instruction, our students can design their own learning experiences. When it comes to curriculum, our learners can curate their own content. When it comes to assessment, they can accelerate the learning process through continuous feedback. All this can be done if they know how to take advantage of the tools available.

And, as teachers, we play a critical role. To use an analogy, if I dropped a group of students off in the wilderness to survive on their own, they would probably search for food and water, look for shelter, and so on, but how much better would they perform if an experienced wilderness guide taught them how to look for edible roots, fish, hunt, and build sustainable shelter? Likewise, teaching students how to leverage technology for learning lets them own their learning. In fact, giving them skills that produce empowerment and engagement may be the most valuable lessons we teach.

Rarely, however, do students have opportunities to pursue their personal learning goals in school. They may select a sport, club, or activity outside of school, and some may choose electives in middle or high school, but not much else. Also, when we do give them choices, say for paper or project topics, they may be overwhelmed.

Why? Because many have never been asked to think about what they want to learn.

It can be a case of too little, too late, and too high stakes when the teacher suddenly gives up control (Crotty, 2013).

© 2016 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

their fingertips. Rather than empowering them, we’re putting them in a position of having to ask for permission to learn.

Even more concerning, a scarcity mindset requires us to work harder and harder with diminishing returns. It’s not hyperbole to state that it is nearly impossible to individualize the abundance of online resources for each of our students using traditional approaches. In fact, many of us are already feeling the weight of this insurmountable task. While we may find it challenging in the short term to free up time to learn these new pedagogies, we will gain thousands of hours in the long run by doing so. Most importantly, we’ll be empowering our students to own their learning. And we’ll be doing the same for ourselves.

W hy We Need to Change Pedagog y

Educators as Learning Workers Innovation and its close cousin entrepreneurship are getting a lot of attention these days in schools. The focus stems in part from the increased competition for jobs in the global economy (The Economist, 2015), and it’s aided by the bright lights of television shows such as Shark Tank and movies such as The Social Network.

Today’s creative and engaged workers should interest us as educators, because they’re our creative cousins. We share a common bond because we, too, are creative and innovative knowledge workers.

A knowledge worker is anyone who thinks for a living and who contributes to the knowledge in a field (Rouse, 2005). Knowledge workers design, engineer, write, research, and, often, create something from nothing (Catmull, 2014). They include doctors, lawyers, social workers, scientists, and, yes, educators.

Leadership guru Peter Drucker (1957, 1969) coined the term knowledge worker.

In the 1960s, Drucker eerily predicted what work would look like in the 21st century, including the shift in economic emphasis from agriculture and manufacturing to the creation and sharing of knowledge. He aptly predicted the decline of longstanding firms that direct employee learning and anticipate trends on their behalf.

Drucker knew that to survive in the new economy, knowledge workers would need to determine these trends for themselves and then direct their own learning. He foresaw what today’s economists make clear: we need to be agile problem solvers who know how to leverage technology for learning (Atkinson & Nager, 2014; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2014).

© 2016 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

Let’s be clear that this is not about replacing the teacher. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about all the ways teachers can leverage what technology offers for them and their learners: the tools to curate billions of pieces of content, dozens of avenues to design learning experiences, and specific feedback for every learner, through things like games and apps. While we are spending thousands of hours per year working to accomplish these goals using traditional methods, our students could be spending literally millions of hours performing the same tasks for themselves, if they knew how.

That brings us to the final reason that learners should own their learning— so that as teachers, we can focus our time on the things that will have the greatest impact on our students’ future success. Let’s face it. Teaching is exhausting, and every year teachers are asked to do more. By creating more opportunities for students to learn on their own, we share in the responsibility, gradually releasing it to our students. It frees us to design experiences for students that enable them to own more and more of their learning every day. And perhaps just as importantly, it gives us the time to start owning our learning as well.

11

12

T H E N E W PIL L A RS O F M O D ER N T E A C HIN G

© 2016 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.

The speed with which we need to solve these challenges convinces me that the term knowledge worker will be replaced with a new term—learning worker. In field after field, work is changing at a rate that makes amassing knowledge far less important than accessing, analyzing, and applying new information. Successful learning workers will quickly glean what they need to know. They’ll then pinpoint trends across this information that they can share readily with others. Along the way, they’ll know how to design the kinds of learning experiences that work best for them.

They’ll tap into the freedom and responsibility for learning that their skills and the technology make available to them.

Because that’s the hidden secret of learning workers—they’re not just benefiting from the knowledge economy, they’re building it. They’re voracious, continuous learners who own a robust set of skills in design, curation, and feedback acquisition and thereby have the confidence and drive to own their learning.

That raises the question we need to ask ourselves as educators: are we the people building the new system of education that will supplant our current one? To that end, are we curating information in an effort to make sense of where the education field is headed? Are we designing learning experiences for ourselves in order to gain the skills we need to create this new landscape for learning? Are we getting feedback from dozens of sources to help us iterate and make progress in our learning over time? In short, are we learning workers?

If we’re not, we may be leaving our fate in someone else’s hands. While we might like to, we cannot deny that our field is rapidly changing. The rise of blended and online learning is just the beginning of change that’s coming. At the same time, nano- and microcredentials—certifications or degrees students can earn in a matter of months—virtual reality, gaming, and other trends are changing the very shape, speed, and sources of our learning. If we consider ourselves to be learning workers who track and respond to these changes, we’ll be well positioned and better able to take advantage of interesting new developments. If we begin to change our pedagogy now in order to learn these new skills, we’ll be able to apply them when needed.

If we study and emulate the learning workers who are already doing this in other fields, we’ll pave a path for ourselves that ensures our viability and engagement for decades to come.

to shift from traditional principles of teaching to the modern pillars of curation, design, and feedback to fully engage students in their learning. Drawing on the modern pillars’ positive effect in other fields, Allen persuades K–12 teachers that they can recreate the success for their students. This book helps educators empower and engage all digital learners.

Using this resource, K–12 educators will:

THE NEW PILLARS OF MODERN TEACHING

In The New Pillars of Modern Teaching, author Gayle Allen encourages readers

• Investigate the effect technology has on pedagogy and student engagement • Shift from traditional to modern pillars of teaching to help students own their learning • Read anecdotes from other industries that have adopted design, curation, and feedback principles to great success • S trengthen the relationship between teacher and student and increase the quality of instruction

Visit go.solution-tree.com/21stcenturyskills to access materials related to this book.

solution-tree.com

G AY L E A L L E N

Solutions Series: Solutions for Modern Learning engages K–12 educators in a powerful conversation about learning and schooling in the connected world. In a short, reader-friendly format, these books challenge traditional thinking about education and help to develop the modern contexts teachers and leaders need to effectively support digital learners.

Gayle Allen