This is an excerpt from my book Efficacious Educational Technology which is available under a Creative Commons (CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0) license. You can find an editable version under the link in “Get Gary’s Books” menu above. This section chapter begins the chapter Concepts of Schools in which I suggest that schools are familiar places for adults, including those who seek to work as IT professionals, but that familiarity may be incorrect.
Imagine a classroom. Look at the physical arrangement of the space. Look at the people and imagine what they are doing. It is very likely you imagined many more students than teachers (or other adults). The adults were standing, while the students were sitting in rows of desks that were arranged in rows; in recent years, the desks may have been replaced with tables. If you imagined someone talking, it was probably an adult, and if a student was talking, they were probably answering a question that was posed by an adult.
Look at the materials that are being studied. There were probably books or pieces of paper on students’ desks, a chalkboard or a whiteboard (or today a large computer display) at the front of the room where students’ attention was supposed to be directed. In many classrooms there would also be maps, charts, posters, and other paper on the walls to communicate the curriculum and motivate students, as well as to give them emergency procedures.
If you imagined a classroom setting in which the teacher was trying to find out what the students had learned, it is very likely you pictured the students taking a test—answering questions on paper, with no other resources other than what is in their brains. Later, teachers will check to see which answers had the correct answers. Those who got the most questions marked “correct” will be judged to have learned more than those who had fewer marked “correct” are judged to have learned less.
This is the type of classroom I attended as a youngster and sometimes as an adult (as a graduate student, classroom settings were often different). It is the classroom that sometimes characterized the classrooms in which I taught (as I learned more about learning my classroom changed), and it is the type of classroom in which my children were students. It is very common in popular media.
In this chapter, I challenge the standard model of education so common in media, including the ideas that teachers always deliver instruction and students’ scores on tests are associated with their ability to use that knowledge in other settings. I describe the variety of activities we classify as learning, and I describe alternatives to the standard model that I expect you imagined and that have been used to teach generations of students.
My goal in writing this chapter is to broaden your understanding of what constitutes appropriate education. This chapter describes some of the reasons educators may approach you as an IT professional with some crazy ideas about what to do with computers. The craziness arises from the fact they may have a very different concept of what their students need than you do, but it is your job to make it reality. I will be successful if you understand the many and changing factors that determine what educators want to do with the computers you manage.