Goals, 10 Years Later

Published: 2023-06-08 8:45 AM | Updated: 2023-06-12 7:50 AM

Category: Reflection | Tags: graduate, maet, learning, academics, growth

I took the long-tail approach to my master's degree - ten years later, this is a look back at my initial goals and a reflection on my professional path and how my thinking has changed along the way.

The original goals

Here is the verbatim goal statement I used in my first MAET course:

I’ve learned a lot about edtech in the last five years and it’s shifted my thinking about how education should look both today and in the future. I’m hoping that “formal” learning on edtech will help me refine and solidify some of my opinions and practices. I’m hoping to be more effective in the classroom with technology as well as teach other teachers on things they can do to improve teaching and learning practices.

10 years later

Oh, the optimism! I was confident in thinking I knew what I wanted when I started. After all, I had been teaching for five years in schools where tech was available (this was the early 2010's when edtech was starting to show up more and more in schools). At the time of writing these goals, I wasn't teaching - I had moved into consulting with a software firm - so I was looking for a way to augment what I already knew rather than to challenge what I thought I knew.

I didn't have enough experience to know what I wanted out of edtech or how it actually should influence instruction, curriculum, and pedagogy. If I were to re-write these goals, I would do several things differently:

• I want to deconstruct the idea of "best practice" and explore my own biases about instruction. I think I missed a lot of nuance in how "best practice" is interpreted. There isn't a single best practice, but a collection of practices we can use in combination as skilled teachers to help students find success.

• I want to explore how our use of technology gives insight to our biases. I started the program after having been ushered along by some edtech "names" along the way. The unspoken belief in this group was that technology can be a solution to most problems when, in my experience, technology can more readily exacerbate existing inequalities. Today, I'm more interested in how our biases are exposed and enacted through our use of technology. Once we recognize our own habits, we can counteract those biases in targeted ways.

• I want to help teachers build skills, knowledge, and dispositions about technology which drive learning. Focusing on technology as a skill to be learned is too narrow. Learning how to use technology more efficiently is not - in and of itself - a good way to engage students in learning (ie, giving a test through the LMS rather than on paper because it is more "engaging"). What we need is strong pedagogy centered on the dignity of our students. Technology - when we understand how it influences our behaviors - can facilitate those experiences between teachers and students.

From then to now

I started my learning as a teacher in a supportive environment right on the forward edge of the technology boom in schools. The early days of my writing and and speaking to others set me on the path to becoming an instructional coach and then into my leadership position with our coaching team.

My views have evolved over the last eight years as a coach. Our initial work was to get staff up and running on new platforms and systems, which meant we could go in and teach tech with flourish and style. We got people hyped and exicted to try new things and built skill quickly. I was able to connect those skills to practices, but only at a surface level as a generalist. Over the last four years, particulalry leading into and through the COVID-19 adjustments and mentors with more wisdom and experience, I have finally learned that skill alone is not enough to change the way teachers and students interact with one another.

What I've experienced as a result of my early mindset is a shift to more isolated, independent work. Drill and kill and skill assessment have become the norm over creative, collaborative work. As a coaching leader, I'm trying to undo that by guiding my team - and our teachers - into thinking differently about how we engage and interact with students from the very beginning. How are we encouraging holistic growth through the use of technology? What chances for expression do they have? How are we fostering collaborative, creative work with peers? And ultimately, how do our worldviews of teaching and learning need to change in light of how technology enables us to find information immediately?

These are the hard questions - but they're the questions worth exploring. Academic research can provide clues, but what we need is clear communicators who can help put the pieces together into functional methods of instruction which enrich and enable our students to become members of communities of learning along with us.