Hype and Never Arriving Next Big Thing

Maker Spaces, STEM, VR, Ed-Tech, MOOCs, PBL I drank from the well during the era of peak ed-tech euphoria which seemed to occur sometime around 2013.  Remember when MIT put all of their courses online and everyone would take courses by the best lecturers in the world?  Remember the ed tech promise of individualized instruction and student led learning? The revolution was just over the horizon. The hype is still out there. SXSW EDU is happening this week.  David Brooks is there. So is Jeb Bush. So is Google. So is my boss. Heck, next week I am going to a regional camp conference and the ever-ubiquitous Sir Ken Robinson will present the keynote. I drank his Kool Aid too. Surely you've seen this circa 2010 video by now. 

I'm still a believer but the hype has proved hollow. There are many reasons why the revolution hasn't happened. (And I've been waiting for the revolution since reading Ted Sizer, Alfie Kohn and Seymour Papert in the early 90's. ) I want to explore them here. Hype aside, the ed-tech revolution offers/ed much that could help. But it will never take root if we don't consider what has gotten in the way. 

Like Sir Ken, I don't think our remarkably resilient traditional model best prepares kids for the world they will inherit. Jobs are going to disappear. We are teaching material that kids find boring and many skills that are irrelevant. But our best students buy into a system that works for them and most teachers successfully navigated the current system as well. In this post, I will explore other reasons why the ballyhooed ed-tech revolution never launched.

For starters, the preachiness pushes people away. There is an unmistakable sarcasm in the Robinson video. It's funny. I agree with it. But it insults hard-working people who think they are doing the right thing. It won't win converts. 

The best ideas don't seem scalable. There are some amazing programs out there. A few weeks ago I saw an amazing teacher, Marie Graham, who has a VR lab, give a talk at a conference. Truly she and her students do amazing things. She freely admits that the "wow factor" of VR, and it  has a wow factor, fades away. What is so great about what she does is that she networks with hospitals and museums and uses VR to solve problems these institutions face. Her class uses VR and design thinking to solve real problems. It is PBL of the best sort. And it's awesome. But one can only have a few schools like this per metropolitan area.  NUVU at Beaver Country Day School is also awesome. So is the Workshop School in West Philadelphia. But how many schools can  partner with an MIT or have their own auto shops? Very few. The exemplars often offered by education reformers and ed-tech revolutionaries are hard to duplicate.

Fear of not being expert and the failure of the academy. 
The transmission model is still central. I'm the expert. I talk. Kids listen. And if I am not talking, I am facilitating a conversation that still runs through me. Indeed, some teachers I know who have more student-led, student centered learning receive complaints that "they don't teach anything." 

The gap between the theory taught in education programs and common practice in school has long been vast. Do you know how many lectures I attended in which the professor told us that lecture was a poor method of teaching? Theory is too divorced from practice. What good are Dweck and Dewey if teacher training doesn't teach me how to lead a good class discussion ?  Discrete skills need teaching and outside of my training for teaching reading, I did not get them in my education classes. But I am not going to let teachers off the hook either.  I've also spoken to many teachers who are simply dismissive of the ideas coming out of schools of education. I know of no other field in which practitioners are so dismissive of new ideas.

Political and cultural pushback. We've been doubling down on basics since Sputnik in the 1950s. A Nation at Risk in 1983 and No Child Left Behind in 2002 emphasized traditional methodologies. This zeitgeist has permeated our culture. At root, it's one of fear. The response to this fear is always more content and more testing.

The edtech/digital promise was oversold. By way of example, I'll talk about Maker Spaces. Maker Spaces are really cool. I like - I mean I really like -  the soft skills they promote, the design thinking they teach, and the collaboration they foster. Maker Spaces were (and perhaps still are) the next big thing. I know that all of the schools around me raced to get such spaces starting around 5 years ago. The problem I've discovered with Maker Space projects and many projects in general is that much of  the learning ends far before the project is over. A maker project I am offering my students in the coming weeks contains an option to build a metaphor machine on an historical revolution. But I know that the last week of the project will not promote an understanding of history or any sort of higher order thinking. Kids will be trying to simply finish a project so that it works. I can understand why teachers are hesitant about embracing this particular next big thing, especially within the constraints of a typical school schedule. For me, the trade offs are worth it. The biggest trade-off is that I give up content. 

Which brings me to the main reason Ken Robinson's vision remains just a vision...

Content is King.  Cover content, give tests, and sort students. Wash, rinse, repeat.  Our existing system does this effectively, year after year, As a recipient and participant in this education system, it is amazing to me how tenaciously we hold on to this model.  The Cover Test Sort education model that Horace Mann and his successors brought to the United States in the 19th century remains in the ascendancy. It really is remarkable.

1943. School in 2019 in USA looks much the same.