ICTs at the beginning of a Teaching as Inquiry cycle

One of the biggest challenges in teaching is deciding how to best use our time. We are barraged with a large number of decisions each day and the effectiveness of our responses to these often aren’t immediately (or sometime ever) particularly clear. While not all the outcomes of these decisions have a big impact on student learning or our limited time and energy reserves, others do. In particular, how we go about identifying student learning needs and any subsequent decisions we make about our professional learning, planning and assessment in response to this are an important factor in student learning.

At the beginning of ‘a’ teaching as inquiry, developing a focus based on what’s going on for students’ learning can be a complex task. Our own priorities need to be lined up with the students’ learning outcomes despite all the pressures which might misalign these. We also need to be able to accurately identify the multiple factors that make up each student’s response to our efforts to make learning happen, develop some explanations for why this might be occurring and then choose which explanations are the most adequate to describe what we’re seeing and therefore the most useful to focus on. If that sounds like an overly complicated abstraction of the focussing inquiry, check out what can happen (school-wide in this particular example) when we incorrectly identify the learning need(s) behind what we’re observing. Good focussing inquiries can can take time and effort and this is all before we even get to figuring out what our response could be. We can over-generalise about what the contributing factors are, sometimes putting student needs all in one group when their contexts may actually be quite different. It can also be frustrating to see feedback or data that suggests that our best planned attempts at making learning happen haven’t yet hit the mark for some students.

A focussing inquiry can be a excellent time to use ICTs (and lowtek ways) to get an accurate picture of what is going on and developing some explanations or theories on why this might be happening. Developing our understanding of both what’s happening and why is important in a focussing inquiry as we want to use our time and energy as wisely as possible. Interpreting data and observations accurately when developing our focussing inquiry will ensure our efforts in a teaching inquiry are also as useful as possible.

Finding out from students what’s happening for them can be done in a conversation or interview, recorded on a smartphone or computer and analysed later for anything we might miss at the time. Google forms can be used to collect specific information and we can use colleagues to look over our questions beforehand to see they’re going to elicit the information we need. If we want a quicker way of collecting feedback on our reading of a situation we might use mentimeter, twitter or another micro-blogging client to collect data from students during a lesson. We might also set up a google doc to record our observations of whatever learning is or isn’t happening and add our ideas to explain what might be behind this. We could then invite a number of colleagues to give feedback on the document if face to face contact is a bit harder to organise. It’s also really easy (although perhaps slightly irresponsible) to spam a large number of people with a google doc invites so we can get as much input as possible into our explanations for what we’re seeing.

All of these methods can lead to more adequate, more effective focussing of inquires which, in turn, can lead to more useful and productive teaching inquiries. Hopefully, other outcomes from these two steps will be effective teaching and learning in response to our analysis and research and then some sustained change in practice or an effective response in the future a similar context that we develop in the learning inquiry. Obviously using all these ICTs to collect data are viable and perhaps more common in a learning inquiry but  if we can more effectively tune our focusing inquiries using similar collaboration and data collection, the learning gains at the back end can be even more effective for our students and their learning.

ICTs - More than just a content disseminator?

What types of functions do we expect to hear about when we hear someone mention a great ICT they’ve used in their practice? I imagine we want some really good teaching and learning gains for it to be compelling enough to put time into investigating. Do we expect to hear about more creativity in resource design to support learning or maybe some new ways to communicate concepts beyond the usual verbal delivery and written resource communication? Is it something that helps students reflect on their learning and consider what they might do next? Or perhaps make it more efficient for us to give students feedback and enable us to do it more regularly? How about an ICT that allows teachers and students to collaborate more effectively and across geographical boundaries? These are just a few of the opportunities I’ve seen offered by various ICTs in recent years.

With some sadness however, I often see discussion around ICTs relegated primarily to the dissemination of teaching and learning resources. Flipped classroom resources, online instructional videos, stringing together various electronic resources with some form of annotation, intranet course resource repositories - not that these aren’t valid uses for ICTs but perhaps if we rely on them too much we’re missing our main call as teachers. If, as recent thinking would have us believe, our main chance to help students learn is through feedback, feedforward and tailored discussions about a student’s individual learning then we should perhaps be cautious of thinking that suggests we can accomplish all that much just by connecting students with content and letting them go to it. I actually quite like the idea of helping students to work on things in their own time that they might not need us for but still have difficulty accepting the premise that much or any of what we’re tasked to help students learn is really all that worthwhile if they can do it easily enough without us to help. It’s obviously not that they can’t learn anything without us but just that our assistance within a particular learning area should allow them to really excel significantly more than they could without us.

If looking at ICTs as more than just resource disseminators is something you’ve done in the past, you may have also noticed that some of the more complex tools out there also take more of our time to learn. While getting one’s head around how to string a lesson together in Edmodo may take less than half an hour I’d suggest if it’s an ICT we can learn relatively quickly it may not always give us as much teaching and learning functionality as something more complex. I recently read a blog that listed a number of things that teachers want in tech tools. There was some great stuff in there but when I came across the following I was a little disappointed. “If a new tool is not something I can figure out a little within a half an hour then I doubt it will find a permanent home in my classroom.” Is this what ICTs like facebook and tumblr have done to us? Are we now in a place where if we can’t figure out an ICT straight away we relegate it to the useless bin? I can understand how this thinking works if we look at ICTs primarily as something that gets resources to students (hardly an ambitious aim) but if we’re open to ICTs that may have much more exciting and far-reaching teaching and learning potential perhaps we’d be more open to spending longer developing expertise in their use. Just because social medias and other browser-based technologies value ease of use doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be all that use-ful in a teaching and learning context.

Of course we need to have a pretty good idea of what an ICT might be able to do for us if we’re willing to put a significant time commitment into its use. And this is where the sharing of best practice, in some amount of detail becomes essential. Instead of just saying to each other, “Oh hey, I used XXXX ICT, website etc and it was great!” Perhaps we might spend a bit more time explaining the actual way we used it and ways to describe the teaching and learning gains so we can articulate these to other teachers before we blog, email or post about it. If I’m given some more detail on a more complex ICT and why it’s useful in a teaching and learning context, I know I’m much more willing to consider putting time into it than wasting ten minutes of my life raging at facebook because I can’t figure out how to add a new album and put photos in it.

So I guess it’s all about the size of the potential gains. If we can get better at sharing these, then perhaps we’ll also be able to get better at convincing each other to put the time into learning about an ICT and using it in our teaching and learning. And if it’s about getting resources to students, that’s fine too. Just as long as that’s not the only thing we’re thinking about when we’re communicating with each other on the what, why and how ICTs with teaching and learning potential.