In the current issue of Fast Company magazine, there is an article called "Teacher-Replacing Tech: Friend or Foe?" by Gregory Ferenstein. The author explores the research of Sugata Mitra, whose ted.com video you may have seen, in which he leaves a computer kiosk in an impoverished town in India and observes how children use the computer to teach themselves. If you haven't seen it, you should; it's pretty fascinating, and he's a gifted speaker. (Click here if you're interested.)
There are certain teachers -- some of them among my Facebook friends -- who are having violent responses to the ideas put forth by Mitra and Ferenstein. Were I still in the classroom, I might have the same reaction. How dare some egghead anthropologist or business journalist posit their theories on what I do on a day-to-day basis? Before we get defensive, however, I think the teaching profession has to look at this new debate as an opportunity, and that we need to "get out in front of it," as they say on Madison Avenue.
Basically what I'm saying is that those of us who still believe in public education as the democratic right of all Americans need to control this discussion. We need to embrace a line that Ferenstein glosses over very quickly in the article, when he says that "[new technologies] might mean a redefinition of 'teacher' as research assistant or intellectual coach, since subject-matter lecturers are no match for access to the entirety of human knowledge."
To those of us who have been trying to do things in a less traditional way, these are not new ideas. A good teacher is a research assistant and intellectual coach to their students. In fact, if I ever run a school, and I find out my teachers are not doing that, there will be a problem, and a big one at that.
We run into trouble when we start making assumptions about what students want based on who we were as students. Yes, I had teachers who were good lecturers, sure. And yes, there are some kids today who still dig a really good lecture. Listen, I just referenced ted.com, which is a series of lectures, really, isn't it?
"Yet the student-driven classrooms do have serious flaws," Ferenstein concedes. "In the condition without any adult supervision, Mitra found that children only achieve half of what their peers in face-to-face instruction can."
If the bottom-liners who are looking for ways to make profits from the failure of our public school system are allowed to control the discussion, then what Ferenstein alludes to above will, indeed, happen, and it will create a whole new industry, predicated on the remediation of the students who have been failed by robo-teachers.
We, as teachers, can take control of this narrative, but we won't get there by being defensive or dismissive. Technology is here, whether we like it or not, and dismissing the possibility of being replaced will put us on the dole. Instead, we've got to take a good look at what we're doing in the classroom. If you're a "this is what I know" teacher, who feels the need to bestow your knowledge, versus a "this is what I learned" teacher, who wishes to coach your students to learn it too by asking good questions, then be afraid. It's very subtle, but there is a difference.
And it may mean the difference between having jobs for teachers or not, some time in the not-too-distant future.
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