Schools should have the ability to personalize learning through technology. Scripts may make a bad teacher palatable, but they make a good teacher (and her students) miserable. Filling out a worksheet is not learning. Students need interactions with teachers and with each other, not with a piece of paper.
I’m reminded of an autistic child in Austria on one of our projects who became fully communicative the first time he was allowed to video himself, unleashing his ability to contribute. That’s not to say it’s just about technology, though. Putting computers in the hands of kids doesn’t make them any smarter than if they rubbed Einstein’s head. It is how the technology is used—by interacting—that improves learning. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other, and yet most schools close the book on social learning.
In my own experience, managing the Flat Classroom Projects, the hardest schools to collaborate with are those in China and most U.S. public schools: They both block everything and have inflexible systems that don’t allow innovation. Many U.S. teachers don’t even have the authority to upgrade their web browser or fix a printer. And these schools that have very little technology often still ban bringing devices from home that could mitigate the situation.
As Mike Soskil, a fifth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania says, the main charge for educators should be to “just teach well, and let the chips fall where they may”—whether that’s getting creative about using technology or having the autonomy to customize lesson plans.
Every day teachers across this country are asked to act in ways that cause students to lose their love of learning, and drop-out rates are skyrocketing. Doctors take an oath to “do no harm”; and yet with education, we’ve created a scenario where we’re asking teachers to do harm because we’re missing the big picture as a nation.
When empowered in my own classroom to follow research-based best practices in lieu of testing, I have fallen in love with teaching again. This is what I want for every student and teacher in the country I love: freedom. Freedom to teach, and freedom to make learning come alive for a generation that I am afraid will one day accuse us of educational malpractice.
Vicki Davis is a full-time teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is also a leading educational blogger, with a focus on improving learning for all students—starting with the teacher in the classroom. She tweets @coolcatteacher and is coauthor of Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds (January 2012) with Julie Lindsay from Beijing, China.
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