136 – A Role of Technology in Education

[00:00:00] Santiago: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m Santiago Borio, currently a collaborator with IDEMS and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi David. 

[00:00:19] David: Hi Santiago, great to have you and this is one of the last episodes probably we’ll do in a while because you’re going back to the classroom.

[00:00:27] Santiago: Yes, I am going back to the classroom in five days time. I’m enjoying the last few days of my school holiday, and this is probably going to be published well after I start at school again. 

[00:00:45] David: Absolutely and I’m particularly interested in this episode to dig into something which I know is close to your heart and is something I’ve felt very strongly about for a long time. And this is the fact that good technology, and this is what we aim for, should be making teachers’ lives easier and better, and improving the interactions they have with their students. But not all technology is serving that role at the moment. 

I’d really love to have a discussion with you as you re enter the classroom about the fact that teachers play such an important role, which gets distracted sometimes by the tasks they need to do, be they administrative or others. 

[00:01:33] Santiago: Funnily enough, one of my key mentors when I was training to become a teacher, who also mentored me informally as I started my teaching career told me something really interesting which stuck to my mind, and I tried to live by it in many ways during my teaching career which is anything I have to do, I need to ask myself the question, how will this serve my students? What benefit are my students going to get from me doing this? 

Unfortunately, I can’t say that all the meetings that we have and all the admin that we do I think benefits my students directly. I can’t use it as a sort of strict rule, but it’s helped me guide decision making and prioritisation in many situations.

[00:02:28] David: Yeah, and I think this is what’s so interesting to me, as a lot of people think about the role that technology might play in replacing teachers. And to me, the hope is that good technology doesn’t replace teachers. On the contrary, it frees teachers to be teachers, as opposed to markers or graders or other roles, which can sometimes be really useful because when you grade, you gain insights into what your students know and what they don’t know.

But you also just spend a lot of time on it, which is not enhancing that relationship with the students and the interactions with them. 

[00:03:12] Santiago: Giving feedback as well. You know, if you have an assignment that you mark, it could be formative, summative, whatever it is, and your students have a very wide range of outcomes in the assessment, how do you give feedback? Do you give personalised feedback? Do you do small group feedback? How do you group your students in order to not waste students time that they could be otherwise spending doing something stimulating or helping them in their process of learning. 

[00:03:53] David: And growth. I remember this from when I was, of course it was a university classroom, so it’s a bit different, but it stayed with me and it’s one of the reasons I think we’re both so fixated on these automated feedback systems. Because it’s something where I recognise that when I got busy, when I got stressed, when I didn’t have time, the first thing to go was often that time spent thinking hard about the individual personalised feedback I was giving.

Now, how much this is used, how students engage with this, how timely it is, all these things matter. And I always recognise that it took me too long to get feedback to students for it to actually be useful. They need it, they’re thinking about it, when they’ve done it. That process of getting feedback a few weeks later, yes, you’re getting them to think about it again, but are they really engaging then? That’s not so clear. 

[00:04:58] Santiago: I try at schools to, whenever I give an assignment that I’m going to mark, to give feedback the lesson after they hand it in, which is really not always easy because of other time constraints. 

[00:05:16] David: Absolutely. And of course in the context of the universities where I was working, where you have hundreds of students in a class, that’s just not possible, even if it’s desirable.

[00:05:27] Santiago: Yes, and another thing related to this marking and feedback, in one school that I worked at, there was a policy that you had to give for every single piece of work you had to give an answer to the question: what was good, what could you do to improve? Some of my assignments, three quarters of the class go pretty much everything spot on and having to put those answers in writing was extremely time consuming and very ineffective.

What were those students benefiting from me having to do that? And that sort of blanket policy as well is not always to the benefit of the student. 

[00:06:12] David: Absolutely. And there’s this element where I remember this from when I was grading as well, that there’s certain students where, as you say, if they’ve got everything right, they don’t need feedback, they don’t need to waste time on it. Whereas there’s other students where you can see they’re trying and they do need feedback of a certain type. 

So that judgment of who you spend your time on giving feedback and what sort of feedback you give, these are subjective questions and they can be very important. And it’s so important, I believe, that teachers have the time to make some of those subjective calls. 

That doesn’t mean they’ll always get it right, but it does mean that they do get that personal connection with students in a way which is really one of the greatest values of teaching. 

[00:07:06] Santiago: Yes, and making that time to give that personalised feedback, it can be not just difficult, but in the classroom, giving feedback to a group of students, it’s not always the most engaging thing to do. You have to be very creative about how to do it. I experimented a lot with things like other students providing the feedback after analysing their work. Those who did well paired them up. Students give feedback to each other. 

[00:07:39] David: Yeah, peer feedback it’s well documented as being potentially very valuable. A lot depends on the implementation. 

[00:07:48] Santiago: But a heck of a lot depends on the implementation. You don’t know what exact feedback those students are giving, so are they giving the right feedback or the feedback that I would want the students who are perhaps struggling a bit more to receive? But if I give that feedback then, doing it in an engaging way that is purposeful and beneficial is challenging. It’s not an easy task. 

[00:08:15] David: Absolutely. And I still remember when I was at university, I had a role where I would be listening very hard in the classes, understanding the material, while some of my colleagues would take good notes, and then we would iterate together, there was feedback loops. And I didn’t mean that I understood perfectly, but it meant that we had that role and that peer role. 

And that informal peer role, it’s so much more valuable in certain cases than a formalised peer learning process where it doesn’t necessarily come organically and it doesn’t serve the same purpose. So sometimes you’ve got to let these things evolve and emerge. And if you don’t have the right environment, they don’t emerge.

It’s just hard. It’s complicated. 

[00:09:04] Santiago: It is indeed. It is indeed. I remember once I did all my marking for one assessment on my tablet and while I was doing the grading and marking I was recording myself giving comments for the students to then watch the feedback individually, independently, so they would get the feedback they need at that point in time.

That took me a long time to do. It’s physically impossible to do that for every assignment. You have to pick and choose when you’re going to spend that sort of time and when you’re going to go to more traditional chalk and talk feedback, which is hard to get the engagement from. 

So many different constraints and variables to consider, as you say, it’s difficult, it’s challenging. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so keen to test STACK in schools. 

[00:10:07] David: STACK’s just one route to getting automated feedback, which we both believe in quite deeply. But I think the thing which is so important about it, and there are other systems that do this, is the effort to get the right personalised immediate feedback to students so that it can improve their learning. And really the term which comes up a lot on this is this idea of mastery.

And I believe that if there is a good electronic mastery assessment process, then the role of the teacher to facilitate that mastery can really transform, and you can really get to the idea that well for the students who don’t need help with the mastery, you can push them, you can engage them, the feedback, the time, you can spend with them is pushing them further. Whereas for those who need help with the mastery, then you’ve got something with the data of actually what they’re struggling on to be able to assist with that.

And so this, to me, is an instance of done right, a type of electronic tool, which should enhance the student teacher relationship. 

[00:11:30] Santiago: But as you say, getting that technology ready and deployed to the students, and delivered in a way that adds value, the time investment that you have to put in is huge. It’s all part of that huge balancing act. As a teacher, I’m overstretched by, all the activities and tasks and responsibilities that I have. And finding the time to create good resources, yes, there are good resources out there, but you also have to curate them and select them, and that is also time consuming. 

[00:12:11] David: And the point is that it’s not just that it’s good to curate and select them. As a teacher, that process of curating and selecting for a given class, it could be that from one year to the next you need a different set of resources. That hyper customisation, which good teachers do inherently as they get to know their classes, where they adapt to the needs of the class, the dynamics of a given class, that’s something which is what good teachers do. So we don’t want a blanket system, which is the same for everyone. 

[00:12:43] Santiago: No, certainly not. A blanket system, I think it’s never good. As you say, the needs of the different classes we get year on year are hugely different and what worked for one group might not work for the next.

[00:13:00] David: And just being able to adapt and bring something topical in, and integrate that in as something which is creating that engagement sometimes is something which is so valuable. That human element is what good teaching is all about. 

[00:13:16] Santiago: Yes I suppose as a maths teacher, getting current things or topical aspects that happen in the world in general is also a challenge, finding the right things to link into what I’m doing on a timely manner that fits what I need to teach. 

[00:13:40] David: But it doesn’t need to be something that happens in the world. I’ve seen teachers just bring in things that they happen to have found, or things that they are currently interested in. Puzzles that they’ve engaged with, or whatever it may be. Things where they have a personal reason to be interested at this point in time in it. And it creates an engagement. 

[00:13:59] Santiago: Yes, there was a teacher that published a resource that is really nice. For the whole of February, they wrote one algebra puzzle per day. I follow an Instagram account of a chap who’s currently at university, in Oxford I believe, who’s solving each one of the puzzles as a video. And it’s really good fun. And encouraging students to look at those sort of things could be very interesting. 

But then some of the puzzles are appropriate for, say, year 12. Some of the puzzles are appropriate for year 10. Again, yes, the set of puzzles is great, and it’s huge fun for me to do the puzzles every day, but it’s not something that I can just give to a class and say, okay, every day try one of these puzzles, because it’s not going to be suitable for a particular particular class.

[00:15:02] David: But where you get one, which is appropriate and suitable, saying, you know, this is a set of puzzles I’ve been doing, and this one is appropriate for you, is a way to, again, create that engagement in your life. And this is what I mean by the fact that that student teacher interaction, however it’s created, is the glue that actually makes good teaching good education happen.

And I guess the point which I’m wanting to come back to is the idea that technology done right should give teachers more time to have those interactions and those engagement moments with their class, with individuals within the class. 

[00:15:48] Santiago: Well, we spoke multiple times about changing the role of the teacher. We discussed it in particular in the context of flipping the classroom and how with the right set of resources and the right planning and selection of materials, teachers can actually create an environment where they become facilitators of learning rather than instructors. And that distinction is hugely important, particularly in a context like Argentina, where students are sometimes resistant because that’s the culture.

And being able to establish, through good use of technology and good use of resources, a relationship with your students so that they see you as an ally in their learning rather than someone that they have to almost fight against would be hugely valuable.

And at the same time we discuss this for the Kenyan context where perhaps the subject knowledge from teachers is not necessarily quite as strong as in other places, and how with these technologies and resources, that problem of not having a deep understanding can be reduced. 

[00:17:11] David: The real context for that that I’m aware of is, of course, Tanzania, where there is a huge shortage of science teachers in general. And this is something which is recognised at the national level, and there’s no easy solution in the next generation.

When I was with a group that was tasked with actually investigating what could be done about this, the solution we put forward was to use arts teachers as facilitators of science, including maths content. And that is something where I’m still, you know, I’m really disappointed that this wasn’t picked up at scale, because I’m still convinced that not only could that have resolved some of the challenges that were systemic, just the imbalance of numbers of teachers, the teacher’s workload and so on. But I think it could actually have led to some really interesting cultural shifts around science within contexts where it is potentially being undervalued at the moment.

And so there was a whole set of opportunities there, which I was really excited to pursue, which unfortunately didn’t gain the traction, although this was the advice that we as a group of experts were providing. It didn’t gain traction. And I can understand why, it’s a challenging concept, and it’s only possible because of the technological advances, which not everybody is able to see the subtleties of how these should and shouldn’t be used. 

[00:18:49] Santiago: Yes. And there’s another technological advance, which is great in many ways and it’s not necessarily a modern and a current advance, that is emails and messaging. And it facilitates so much contact with students, but so often it just creates more work.

So how do you establish a balance between, okay, what do I respond? When do I respond? How many emails am I going to be responding to every day? And of course you cannot have a blanket rule for that because things happen. 

And yes, technology is great and it’s facilitated so many different things from feedback to delivery to communication and so on, but finding that balance on what do I do, how do I make the most of this for the benefit of my students? 

[00:19:52] David: And this comes back to, I think, a good place for us to wrap it up, which is where you began. That fundamentally, that golden rule that your mentor set out of how is this benefiting your students? Is this something where this is really benefiting the students is a wonderful golden rule to have as an educator. That’s what it should all be about. 

[00:20:16] Santiago: It has created a bit of tension sometimes when I brought it up in a couple of meetings in a maybe not so positive way. 

[00:20:28] David: I can absolutely see how you could bring that up in ways where it would be creating tension. But as a golden rule to think of as an educator, it is a powerful one. 

[00:20:38] Santiago: It is. It is indeed. And I’m ever so thankful for my mentor, Andrew Rogers, who’s a fantastic teacher and a fantastic educator, a great mathematician as well. But anyway yeah, as I come back to the classroom, trying to find that balance and implement new technologies, it’s going to be a challenge and hopefully I can report on this in a few months when I come back to IDEMS. 

[00:21:05] David: Absolutely. We’re looking forward to having you, we’re missing you, of course, but also delighted that you have this opportunity to ground yourself and to get back to the important role of teaching. 

[00:21:18] Santiago: Thank you. 

[00:21:19] David: Thank you. And enjoy the semester. 

[00:21:22] Santiago: Cheers.