Building
Learners
Project

Eons ago when I was an English department head in a high school, the central office produced a new, detailed K-12 curriculum for Language Arts and English. The curriculum had won awards and been highly touted before it was disseminated to the schools and became the law of the land.

When I read through the 9th-12th grade sections, I was impressed with how comprehensive and inclusive it was. Then as I dug deeper and began to count the goals and objectives, I became dismayed with how comprehensive and inclusive it was. There were literally more defined bits to teach, make meaningful to students, and test than days in the school year.

I don’t know how it started or caught on to be so prevalent and powerful, but somehow the assumption took hold that more is better. If only teachers worked harder and taught more content, education would be better - and so we found ourselves very much like hamsters on exercise wheels that the powers-that-be were making spin faster and faster. Somehow the educational mantra became more with less, more with less.

Years later I found myself developing programs that connected schools to the rich world beyond the schoolyard, to museums, universities, and wonderful cultural events. Such opportunities conflicted teachers. The value was clear, but how could they fit them into a school year that was already stuffed with obligations and deadlines, and in which they chronically felt behind and struggling to catch up? What should I take out of my schedule that is less important than what you want me to add?

Now, more years later, after the arrival of high-stakes testing, technology faces a similar conundrum. Teaching and learning are seen as a zero-sum game, in which any new addition is perceived as triggering a loss somewhere else. The pie is only so big. When one piece gets bigger, another has to get smaller. That’s the perception.

I’ve come to believe that less is often more in teaching - that it is better to cover less content but to have students more deeply engaged and more in control of their learning. Technology projects, done either by individuals or groups, can promote this deeper engagement. Unfortunately less is more often runs counter to the rules under which we work as teachers.

For sure we can make a powerful case for why technology is as (or more) important in educating and preparing children for the future than X, Y, or Z. However, a more productive leap might be right out of the mindset of competition and the zero-sum thinking.

What if we think of technology as a means rather than an end, a set of tools that can enrich and empower all kinds of teaching and learning. Instead of the nay-sayers thinking, those students could be improving their reading skills rather than sitting in a computer lab, think, how can technology help create a community of readers, who reflect on their reading and share those reflections. Reading and technology could be the best of buddies rather than competitors.

This is just a simple, first-step answer, but what if students kept online reading logs, a kind of accumulative class encyclopedia of independent reading, in which they reflected on some grade-level-appropriate aspects of what they had read, perhaps rated the story, the illustrations, and/or other components for their peers. Every student becomes a book critic, and students can read each other’s comments online to help select their next book.

Done well, one can image that such online reading logs could help create a community of readers and make younger students in particular very proud of having a web presence for their ideas and reading accomplishments. Here’s a sample log page for younger students.

In the workBench, it’s possible to create a screen and copy and paste it repeatedly into the same or other projects. It can act like a template, with all the major pieces in place, so that young students could be given a page that was already made. The teacher might change the book cover and title, perhaps some of the colors, and then all the student would have to do is add the text reflections and ratings.

This example is a small sliver of a bigger idea: how to have technology leverage powerful pedagogical advantages rather than be perceived as Cinderella in the ashes before the magic wand arrived.

Please share any ideas you might have along these lines about technology’s powerful ability to engage and support rather than compete. It would be rewarding to figure out together the best ways such projects could be done.