Bass Ackwards Technology Planning
Ed. Leadership, Ed. Policy, Ed. Tech., Sports February 11th, 2008
Thanks to Will Richardson for alerting us to an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that’s disturbing to the core (IMHO). Clearly, there are details of the “technology initiative” (odd language, seems more like they just built a new school with cool stuff in it) that we’re not getting. But, I wonder, did, as the author suggests, the administration just buy a whole bunch of stuff without considering the curriculum and/or the teaching needs? I doubt that’s entirely the case, but it did remind me…
There have been many great sports coaches who were successful based on a “system” they installed. Bill Walsh and the so-called “West Coast Offense” is one example. Pete Carrill’s “Princeton Offense” is another. Numerous proteges of those coaches have left the nest to coach their own teams using the system they learned. These coaches struggle at first because certain types of players thrive within their system and those players are not necessarily the ones they inherit on the new team. In other words, they inherit a team of players not necessarily suited to thrive in the system to be implemented. Thus, it takes the coaches a couple of years to get appropriate players in place for their system to succeed. Urban Meyer, the head football coach at the University of Florida brought his “Spread Offense” from the University of Utah to Florida. He inherited a quarterback who was pretty good (although U of F fans tend to disagree on that), but who did not possess the skill set to thrive in Meyers’ offense. Once Meyers got a quarterback who could operate his system well, he was more successful. Now, we see Rich Rodriguez bringing his version of the Spread Offense from WVU to the University of Michigan; the rising sophomore quarterback who would’ve been the starter had a coaching change not happened has transferred because he’s not at all the type of QB who can run the new “system.”
Some professional coaches have a harder time implementing systems because they can’t as easily recruit the right kinds of players. Long-term contracts and salary caps often force professional coaches to think differently. Therefore, a successful pro coach is often one who is able to adjust his system to the personnel. Bill Parcells is a great example. He won the Super Bowl as the coach of the New York Giants with his system (ball control/rushing attack on offense; tough D). When he took over as coach of the Patriots, he had a team more suited to the passing game. So, he adjusted and was quite successful. He made similar adjustments when he took over the Dallas Cowboys.
So, what does this all mean for education? Well, I think educational leaders/policymakers are guilty of installing systems without regard to the personnel. Much more so than in professional sports, school leaders inherit a team; absent retirements or mass exoduses, teaching staffs often remain fairly stable. Yet, the ed. tech. policy agenda has been dominated by a focus on infrastructure development supported by a bit of professional development. In other words, the “systems” have been installed and the leaders are then forced to try to fit the personnel into the system. “Hey, we’ve got all these great technologies, now figure out how to use them!” (and that may or may not have been the case in the high school referenced in the op-ed piece; we don’t know)
Technology planning needs to be done with curriculum and teaching at the forefront. In other words, the technology should be mapped to the curriculum (NOT the other way around) and the infrastructure should be shaped around the strengths/weaknesses of the team members (the teachers). From there, as new teachers are added, they can be purposefully selected (i.e. they should be hired because they “fit” within the system that’s been implemented). That means including curriculum specialists in the technology planning process and, more importantly, involving teachers.
Make the system fit the team, not vice versa.
Tags: coaching, curriculum, education, leadership, teaching, technology, technology planning
Jon,
It’s been a “Field of Dreams” since we started putting computers in the classroom. If we build it they will come, right? To mix sports and to follow along with your analogy, Coach Wooden said (with one modification on my part) “For an [educator] to function properly, he must be intent. There has to be a definite purpose and goal if you are to progress. If you are not intent about what you are doing, you aren’t able to resist the temptation to do something else that might be more fun at the moment.” Perhaps we haven’t been quite as intentional as we think. Our goals get mixed up with the stuff. We buy the technological chicken and egg paradox that we can’t use the stuff until we have it, but until we have it we can’t use it. Rather, technology should be the position from which we operate. It should be the underlying foundation to accomplish our educational goals.
PS Welcome to the blogging community. I recently started one as well at http://ricktanski.wordpress.com/.
As a technology administrator, this is a very difficult conversation for me everytime I have it.
The sports analogy works in some ways for me, but does not in others. Teaching is a little more individual then most team sports. In football, we wouldn’t let the offensive tackle make a lot of individual choices on how to perform his job, and if he isn’t following a very prescribed set of instructions, he probably gets to sit on the bench. In teaching, this is quite a bit different in my opinion as there may be very different approaches based upon the teacher and each individual learner. So, I cannot quite use the sports analogy in my discussions.
But, I agree with Jon and Rick that we absolutely aim at the wrong target sometimes; the “stuff”. It is the same mistake we make when we examine teaching instead of looking at learning as a focus (Ok… we teach in hopes that learning will take place, but there are no guarantees and no one-to-one relationships between the two; each can move independently of the other).
Learning and technology are similar in my mind, each can occur independently of each other. We can have oodles of technology, and very poorly designed learning environments, and the opposite is true as well, in my opinion. Some of the most powerful learning happens absent of technology.
With that foundation in mind, it seems incredibly ill advised to take a top down model to technology implementations. The “build it and they will come” mentality really means:
“Build it and some might use it and there is no guarantee that it will be used effectively, and we will all be too busy to measure whether or not it is being used effectively, because we never bought it with a teaching or learning outcome in mind in the first place, so we have no idea how to measure what we see, because we don’t know what to look for, but we get to say we have it so we are doing better than our neighbor next door, and we can say we are meeting the needs of the natives (I hate that term, by the way) but what we don’t know is that they don’t need the exposure to technology anyway, but they need to be better thinkers in the first place, which by the way, has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do very human processes which are internal to us as thinking and cognitive beings.” How is that for a run-on sentence?
Maybe I am getting a little cynical in my not-so-old-yet age.
Kudos on the length of that run-on sentence. Impressive.
The sports analogy is admittedly not perfect, and I don’t want to drag it out. But, maybe the University of Hawaii’s run-n-shoot offense is the best comparison. There, the receivers have lots of options and with the QB, they read the defense and make the best decisions. So, like teachers, there is the overall team goal (AYP? Learning?), but there is some flexibility in how to get there.
Regardless, I agree entirely that the horserace mentality has been highly problematic.
Thanks Rick and Joel for contributing to my own personal learning network!
Jon
I find the sports metaphor interesting, but I wonder where exactly students fit. It seems to me that we might be better served by fitting the technology tools to the strengths and needs of the students, rather than the teachers. Maybe Bill Parcells is the classroom teacher, with a new team each year. Maybe teachers are the ones who should be adapting their strategies to take advantage of team-members strengths, while also imparting their knowledge of the “game”.
Interesting and nuanced point, Molly. I’m mostly thinking out loud here, but if we accept that students learn differently (a fairly safe assumption?), then fitting the technology to the students becomes a complex task for teachers (although not much more difficult than what they already try to do by way of differentiating instruction). So, then maybe the leaders as coaches need to implement a system that’s flexible enough for teachers to apply it as needed?
I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I’ll keep pondering. Thanks for making me think!