Dive Brief:
- Following up his much-acclaimed Atlantic article on the same topic, English teacher Michael Godsey's new piece for the Los Angeles Times speculates on what digital K-12 trends mean for the future of the teaching profession.
- Godsey zeroes in on AltSchool, a network of brick-and-mortar schools aiming to revolutionize the way elementary and middle schools are run, to highlight what the school of the future might look like.
- While he understands the benefits of computers in learning, especially for storing information, Godsey explains that "teachers have always done more than dispense facts; at their best, they cultivate the ability to use knowledge in the service of reflection and compassion. In other words, they cultivate wisdom."
Dive Insight:
To recap. One of Godsey's major concerns is that educators will be viewed as mediators of the knowledge transmitted from computers, as opposed to sources of knowledge and learning themselves. He also fears that the brick-and-mortar school will fall by the wayside in favor of a model where students can log in from anywhere for "microlessons." The biggest benefit of brick-and-mortar schools is that they have real people — school board members, administrators, teachers, and families — calling the shots and holding the school, ideally, accountable. Online programming is "subservient to private national organizations — corporate interests — applying regional examples as a footnote to the centralized syllabus," writes Godsey.
His biggest issue of all, however, is evidence: Do we know that computers can actually do a better job at teaching?
Godsey points to recent data compiled by Dr. John Hattie, a professor and researcher at the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education, who looked to raw numbers to decide which ed reforms should stay and which should go. Hattie has found that teacher credibility, direct instruction, and quality of teaching are all classroom necessities that are more important than individualized instruction, matching teaching with learning style, and computer-assisted instruction.
