Changing My Mind About PD

OISE's Senior Computer Tech AQ

I'm about to head into the senior part of my computer technology AQ with the University of Toronto.  My instructor is an outstanding fellow, we're in a new school with a fantastic lab and if it's anything like last year I'll expand my knowledge in a subject I really enjoy both professionally and personally.

I've found myself at times falling in to the negativity that many teachers feel around PD, but it's easy to get excited about this course.  I could get all long in the face about how much it's costing me, how many weeks of my summer I've got to spend doing it, why I have to take an AQ in this subject when I see so many other teachers with no background or qualifications in the subjects they teach not doing it.  I could wallow in the negativity, but I won't because I don't want it to spoil the learning opportunity.  Learning dynamics are so closely tied to the emotional approach of the student that I'm making a conscious choice not to.  This has left me wondering at all those teachers who hate on PD.

I work with a number of teachers who don't do the AQ thing.  They think it's a waste of time and money, they think it's just a money grab with no real value.  These teachers often end up teaching subjects they have no background in.  Over time they learn how to teach the subject because they are smart, capable people who want to do the job well, but they consider teacher training to be beneath them.

I first came across this attitude in educators in teacher's college and I found it demoralizing and unhelpful.  I didn't sign up for teacher's college to go through the motions just to get an empty qualification.  As I began teaching I found that cynical negativity surrounding professional development.  PD was treated by a surprising number of teachers as a waste of their time, something beneath them.

Teaching is one of those jobs that demands a degree of arrogance in order to survive.  If you're timid or unsure you'll get eaten up by a difficult class.  Confidence, even over-confidence, is an important survival tool.  The spill-over into our own learning is distressing though.  Teaching is a challenging discipline, if anyone thinks they've got it all figured out they are kidding themselves.  By turning that self-defensive cockiness on our own learning we effectively limit our ability to perform our work well.

I'm not a fan of mindless optimism.  An accurate assessment of what is going on is more important than mindless positivity.  I see a lot of management types who do this and it drives me nuts.  The easiest way to lose me as a team member is to ignore facts in favor blind positivity, but that doesn't mean blind cynicism is any better, in fact it's worse.

A teacher who won't be taught is about as useful as a mechanic who can't drive or a doctor who ignores health; in both cases these are people are can't make use of what they claim to be experts in.  A negative approach to learning affects a teacher's ability to teach.  Beyond the professional problems, teachers who are bad students are hypocrites; they berate a student in class for doing what they themselves do at PD.  Unless you're able to model productive learning you aren't showing your students what you'd like them to do, and you probably don't have a good grasp on what it is you're supposed to be doing in a classroom.

Those teachers who don't make productive use of professional development, including taking AQs, do themselves and their profession a disservice.  Those administrators that trivialize teaching by ignoring qualifications aren't the kind of educators I enjoy working with.  There is something to be said for objectively taught professional designations.  They certainly have more credence than someone simply giving a teacher a class because they like them or think them capable.

So, tomorrow I begin a two hour daily commute and eight hours a day in class for three weeks to study a subject I worked  in professionally for years before I became a teacher.  I could turn my nose up at it, trivialize the experience, make it less than it could be, or I could approach it the way I'd like a student to approach my own class, with curiosity, humility, positivity and integrity.

Next time you find yourself dismissing professional development, consider how changing your mind might make you a better learner and teacher.  And if you're avoiding an AQ because you think it beneath you, perhaps you shouldn't be teaching that subject in the first place.  It's hard to argue for teaching as a profession if it doesn't have credible, valuable training that is a requirement for the job.  It's even harder to understand a teacher who refuses to be taught anything.

Forming an ECOO Presentation

There were three key books I read in the past year that have clarified for me a direction we could head in educational technology.  Ideas from each of those books, which at first appear to be in direct odds with each other, helped form the content of my ECOO presentation this year.

After reading The Shallows, Nick Carr's carefully constructed argument held a lot of weight - the internet and how it is being adopted by the general public is actually making people less effective as both thinkers and doers.  As educators, we should all be concerned about this result.  At a conference this year a frustrated, thirty-something CEO said of the twenty-somethings she's tried hiring recently, "I just wish they could finish a thought!  I can't even get them to close a sale because they are checking Facebook!"  This problem goes well beyond education (where any teacher can tell you it's an epidemic).  Everyone involved in education should read this book, especially if they are trying to implement technology in the classroom.

From The Shallows I took a serious concern about technological illiteracy and habitual use of computers actually injuring people's ability to think.

I read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularlity is Near as a counterpoint to Carr's very accurate, and very depressing Shallows.  Kurzweil's giddy optimism in our engineering skills verges on evangelism.  He is a wonderfully interesting and eccentric character.  His belief goes well beyond merely living in a time of transformative change.  The singularity he refers to is a moment in the near future where we are able to develop a greater intelligence than a single human brain, or even a group of them.  He goes into mathletic detail about exponential growth and how this is occurring in computers.  Very soon we'll understand things in finer and more complete detail than we've ever been able to before and our management of the world will take on omniscient proportions.  Technologically enhanced humans exist beyond the technological singularity - living in a world that looks as alien to us now as ours would to someone from the middle ages.

From Kurzweil I recognized how technology is evolving in increasingly personalized ways.  This is an argument Carr makes from the other side too.  From external machines, we are on a journey to technological integration.  This integration is going to well beyond smartphones, that's just the latest step in an inevitable trend.  If education does everything it can to present technology as generic and impersonal, it is failing to notice a key direction in technology, it's failing to produce students who will be useful in their own futures.  This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of my BYOD/differentiated technology argument, but I believe it's a fundamental part of our technological evolution.  Computers want to become a part of us.  We're not going to develop a Skynet or Matrix that will take over.  Our technology IS us, and it wants a more perfect union.  This probably scares the shit out of most people.  My argument to that is: if you're going to amalgamate with other systems, make sure you the one directing them effectively.

Matt Crawford's wonderful philosophical treatise on the value of skilled labour goes well beyond simply being handy.  He argues that skilled labour psychically protects you from consumerism and makes management doublespeak and creative economies an obvious joke.  The value he places on objective, quantifiable skills development often savages the feel-good ethos of a lot of educational theory which then sounds like management double-speak nonsense.  I read the book after taking my AQ in computer engineering, and it made me re-evaluate (and recognize) the value of my skilled labour history - something I'd walked away from in becoming a teacher.  I'm loving being a tech teacher this year and working with my hands again.

From Shop Class For Soul Craft I took a recognition of the importance of hands on, skill based learning.  It brings real rigor to learning, and should be a vital part of developing past the poor digital literacy I see around me.  One other experience kicked this up a notch.  In the summer we visited the Durnin farm and Heather talked about how her husband teaches people to use the farm equipment.  He gives them the tools, and expects them to figure it out and get it done.  It's a high expectation, immediate result environment that puts a great deal of expectation on the student; Crawford would approve.  I tell my students, "no one ever learned how to ride a bike by watching someone else riding a bike" - it's an experiential thing that offers real (often painful) immediate feedback... what effective learning should be.

Into that mix of big ideas of warning, optimism and rigor I also mixed in the standard PLN secret sauce.  Concerns over BYOD abound with teachers online.  The idea that BYOD should just be thrown into curriculum struck me as simply wrong.  As Andrew Campbell suggests, it's more about stretching a divide (or Carr would argue intellectually crippling idiots) than it is about increasing digital fluencies.

Teaching competency, flexibility and self awareness on digital tools should be a primary goal of current educational practice.  We're graduating students who are dangerously useless to employers.  The idea of a continuum of digital mastery based on objectively developed skills linked to a gradual loosening of restrictions and access to increasingly diverse tools and online content was the result.

I present on Thursday, and I'm more interested in the discussion that ensues than I am in telling anyone anything.  ECOO is a wonderful braintrust, and usually super-charges my educational technology awareness.  I'm looking forward to the brain soup we create out of this!

Diversifying Edtech: the key to a digital skills continuum

Master/Journeyman/Apprentice

I'm once again in the additional qualification classroom in order to gain another teachable.  This one was a bit tricky.  I'd been working in information technology since I graduated with an honours BA in English in the mid '90s.  When I went into teaching, I looked into getting my technical qualifications (I'd spent a fair amount of money on getting IT qualified and wanted to keep a finger in the pie, so to speak).  It didn't happen.  The Byzantine rules around what I needed and how I qualified were taking so long to get through, it was easier to just plug in my degree (to a very degree friendly teacher qualification system) and start there.


I did computer clubs and delved into #edtech relentlessly, but didn't get my computer engineering qualification until now because I needed it for a headship, and they'd recently made changes that cleared up some of the labyrinthine rules around getting the qualification.


So here I am, a qualified IT technician in a computer engineering class.  If we're doing networking, or computer repair, I'm aces, but soldering?  Circuit boards?  Not so much.  The funny thing is we have electrical engineers that don't know what a registry is or how to reset an IP address, but they are brilliant on a circuit board.  I'm starting to realize that computer engineering is another one of those subjects that collects expertise from various disciplines and files it all under the same heading.  I'm also beginning to see why some comp-eng teachers' courses look so different from other comp-eng teachers' courses.

Other than cutting networking cables, running them and installing hardware, I'm not really a nuts and bolts of electronics kind of guy, but after taking this AQ, I will be.  When I was a kid I got into cars and stereos and did some wiring then, it's nice to get hands on with components again.  My experience has all be around making it (IT) work for business, after taking this AQ, I get the sense that I'm going to end up delving more deeply into maker culture, something I've wanted to do for too long.


Getting my head back into wiring diagrams felt impossible in the first few days.  I'm finding the tools available, especially Arduino and Fritzing to be invaluable in bridging gaps in knowledge.  I know I won't be a Jedi knight at circuitry by the end of the course, but the 1-2-3 system our instructor has been using has recognized the varieties of skills in the room and allowed people to focus on what they want to improve in, and improve I have.


I'm looking forward to hitting my tech-class in the fall and getting my hands dirty.  In the meantime, I just started Shop Class As Soulcraft, suggested by our instructor on the last day of class.  Some mechanic's philosophy will help fill in the gap I'm feeling between my academic background, and my urge to work with my hands again.

Learning On A Knife's Edge

I'm still struggling with my Mum's recent, sudden death.  While that is going on, I'm dealing with a previously signed up for teaching qualification in computer engineering, and a series of slanderous attacks on my profession.  I can't help but be self-reflexive about how I'm dealing with the role of student; I fear I'm not doing it very well.

Culturally, I think I'm on the Ridge

I've felt thin since that phone call on June 1st.  The North American manly thing to do is dismiss anything to do with it and proceed with a steady course of denial.  I suppose the stiff upper-lip English thing is to do something similar.  Since being dumped somewhere in the mid-Atlantic as a child, I'm having trouble adopting a social convention to follow.

The thinness I'm feeling has made for some awkward moments with time management.  On the first weekend, when I should have been plugging away on our first big assignment, instead I ended up going to the cottage and passing out on the couch.  It made for a stressful Monday when I returned, but one of the things about being thin is that there isn't enough butter to evenly cover the toast.

I feel like we're over the hump in the course now.  I'm finding old habits returning around hard focusing on specific tasks instead of just directionlessly wandering through the material we're covering.  I'm a good student, even when I'm incomplete.  The deadlines have been difficult to handle, but perhaps their imminence helped me get my mind off subjects it wouldn't let go of otherwise. The fact that the emotionally turbulent month of June is slowly receding might be helping too.

I've had students who have gone through emotional crisis, some of which make mine look like a walk in the park, yet we still come at them with curriculum expectations and demands.  I've always tried to step lightly in those cases, out of a sense of compassion.  It's a difficult thing for a teacher to deal with.  In some cases a student who has gone through trauma is best left with space, but in others, giving them something else to focus on might help move them on emotionally.

No clear answer to this one, I fear.  Some days I'd be driving down to the course with tears rolling down my cheeks because of a song on the radio, right now I'm feeling pretty solid.  It comes and goes.  I guess the one take-away from all this is that you can't make an algorithm or develop a system for dealing with emotional crisis; each person experiences it differently, and coming at it in a curriculum orientated, systemic manner is a recipe for disaster.

A good teacher will remember their own ups and downs and differentiate not just in terms of what a student is capable of intellectually, but also in terms what emotional focus they can  bring to bear.

In my own case, I've been trying to change my mind, but when it runs deep, it's not always a matter of conscious choice.  In the end, if I can remember where I am now with my students in the future, I'll be in a better place to respond to their needs.