Over the past few days, as time permits, I’ve begun reading Michael Schmoker’s Focus. I decided to see what Schmoker and ASCD have been promoting the last few years. Of course, I still remember my first impression of Mike Schmoker from when he visited the San Antonio ISD. At that time, I served as a Director of Instructional Technology and Library Services (ITLS as it was known in those days), and I was shocked at what he was suggesting.

My photo of a Lego construction created by Nathan Sawaya

It was a simple message that boiled down to, “Technology is not essential, necessary, or relevant in today’s classrooms. We need to be focused on what DOES matter, get rid of the unnecessary.” His message about what DID matter excluded technology. In one keynote presentation to the assembled principals, assistant principals, and curriculum directors, their bosses, he destroyed much of the momentum instructional technology had tried to achieve.

The Power of Relationships

I am grateful that the Technology Integration Lead Teacher (TILT) program (old website), as I called it, a new program modeled after my work in Northside ISD as the Pathways to Advance Virtual Education (PAVE) Coordinator/Director, was firmly in place. If it had not been, no doubt, that innovative initiative to promote blending technology into teaching, learning and leading would have died stillborn. Through TILT, I am happy to report that nine cohorts of educators (principals, teachers, curriculum specialists) had the opportunity to see how technology could improve teaching and learning.

Source: My photo of the panel accompanying the lego recreation by Nathan Sawaya shown above

However, those large cohort initiatives are in my past, as well as the past of the many educators. A rising tide of anti-edtech has washed ashore, slipping over our feet, eroding the sand on which we stood. In reading Michael Schmoker’s book, Focus, I am impressed again with the idea of a voice crying in the wilderness.

Listening to the Wilderness

“They should have started using their portfolios the first week and begun teaching math, too,” a grade school teacher said to me the other day. The consensus was that if children didn’t start learning the first week of school, following specific practices, then they had lost time. In fact, when walkthroughs are done in this particular teacher’s school, that is what was noticed and stated.

Schmoker highlights several points. I suppose that the biggest challenge we face as educators is that teaching has strayed away from solid tenets into uncertain strategies. These strategies lack the research support that prove them effective. Without the use of effective instructional strategies on a consistent basis, the argument goes, our children don’t learn.

Technology IS a distraction.

Shocking as it may be, technology is a distraction in Schmoker’s conception of what should be present in the classroom. Time and again, he drives home the points:

• On page 60, he cites Dylan Williams (2007) research. “Research demonstrates the folly of our current prioritieis, such as investing heavily in technology when it has had, so far, such limited impact on student learning.”
• “Advocates of 21st Century education are not urging us to rashly reinvent curriculum around technology or group projects. They are not proposing that student spend less time learning content and more time making movie previews, video skits, wikis, silent movies or clay animation figures. We need to say ‘No, thank you’ to such faddish, time-gobbling activities” – Mike Schmoker on Pg 26, Focus

NO RIGHT

“We have no right to teach in a way that leads to students gaining less than d=.40 within a year,” says John Hattie. That is, no right to waste children’s critical time using instructional strategies that fall short of accelerating student learning in a year’s time.

Schmoker then spends some time focusing on what we should be doing in the classroom. Future blog entries will explore that.