As the new school year began, I found myself in Montreal, Canada, on a panel with colleagues from both sides of the border discussing education technology. In the audience were leaders of the two dozen or so state and regional associations that serve independent schools in the United States as well as Canada. As I sat on the auditorium stage of Lower Canada College, the esteemed K-12 school that hosted us, I was struck by how universal are the issues that we as independent school educators have with technology - and how often those concerns rest on myths rather than facts.
U.S. independent schools, generally subject to no state control over curriculum and typically forgoing any state financial aid, are a varied lot - from traditional to progressive with many degrees in between. Canadian independent schools must generally follow provincial curricula, and they often receive financial support from provincial governments. Because of this, Canadian independent schools are a bit more traditional. Yet there are great commonalities among independent schools, irrespective of borders. Our schools pride themselves on developing the whole child - socially, emotionally, morally, and academically - and, to that end, offer a high degree of individualized attention through small classes and low student-teacher ratios.
As educators, we increasingly recognize that our institutions are not immune to the technological forces that have influenced almost every other industry that serves us - telecommunications, media, commerce, and many more. Students and families have access to all sorts of opportunities to research, analyze, and learn almost anything online at home - independent of teachers or schools. The Internet does not wait for the assent of schools or state and provincial education authorities to develop more and better educational resources. Innovation happens at breakneck speed because students and families - all over the world - are ready and anxious to try out new sources of information and learning. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen calls this disruptive technology - competitive, threatening, and unstoppable. Disruptive technology has repeatedly brought substantial benefits to consumers and new industrial players nimble enough to take advantage of new technologies.
As educators, we worry that technology may mean the end of our schools and all the characteristics of them that we hold dear. This will likely not be the case, as my fellow panelists, three Canadians and one American, tried to explain.
Online schools will not substantially displace brick-and-mortar schools.
In the latest NAIS Trendbook, Constance Clark, a research analyst for NAIS, and I look at the growth of online schooling in U.S. schools. In the public school sector, about 500,000 students attend full-time online schools. After a period of rapid growth tapping the three-million-student home-school market, enrollment in full-time online schooling has slowed. Most parents do not want to supervise their children’s studies at home every day. Most parents and students want the benefits of athletics, performing arts, clubs, and other social activities that brick-and-mortar schools can provide far more easily than schools that operate fully online.
If the growth in full-time online schooling is slowing, the growth in part-time online schooling is accelerating. More than half of all U.S. states now offer online courses to students in public and private schools. Self-paced, supported by multimedia, and offering teachers as tutors, online courses are working for students who prefer or are more successful learning outside the traditional classroom as well as for those taking courses not available in their brick-and-mortar schools. More than 2.5 million public school students are now taking at least one online course per year. Growth rates have been around 50 percent per year. More than 10 percent of public high school students now take at least one course online, and about 30 percent of all four-year college students take at least one course online.
In independent schools, we have been much slower to embrace online courses, eschewing what is available from public and commercial sources and slowly creating online offerings of our own. About 5 percent of our high school students are taking courses from online providers such as the Online School for Girls, the Online School for Boys, the Global Online Academy, and other ventures that have emerged from independent schools. These numbers will inevitably rise, as the range of offerings in the broader marketplace and in independent schools expands. Online courses and resources will become a mainstay in our schools as in all schools. But full-time online schooling will seldom become a replacement for brick-and-mortar schools.
Teachers will not be replaced by technology.
For all of the growth in online course-taking and full-time online schooling, the most action in education technology is in blended learning. Experience with online education is beginning to indicate that the most successful learning experiences generally involve a mix of technology-supported and teacher-supported instruction. Schools of all types are experimenting with a plethora of models. Student playlists, rotational instruction, and flex education are just a few of the ways technology is providing students with more control over the path of their learning and teachers with new roles in instruction. Models differ with student age, with older students granted increasing independence.
In every blended-learning model, teachers play crucial roles. If students choose online lessons from playlists, teachers work as coaches. If students rotate from online instruction to collaborative projects to small-group instruction, teachers accelerate and remediate students in small groups while challenging students through applied projects that the students often design themselves. If instruction flexes between technology-driven and teacher-led, the teacher not only teaches but also orchestrates the transitions.
To be clear, technology does and will change the traditional roles of the teacher. Teachers will be responsible much less for coverage of core knowledge and skills. Teachers will carry less of the burden of routine student assessment. Students will have more control over their learning, using technology to personalize a path of greatest success. Teachers will be called on to spend more time working with students individually and less time working with whole groups. They will need to differentiate their instruction rather than teach to the middle. They will need to challenge students to think at higher levels and to apply their knowledge to practical problems and in collaboration with other students - all things technology cannot do very well.
In other words, technology will ask that all teachers do what great teachers do already. Technology will not replace teachers, but it will demand that schools employ teachers of ever greater professional quality. With thoughtful use of technology, our current all-star teachers will be even more effective in supporting, guiding, inspiring, and reaching all of their students. Will technology enable schools to utilize fewer teachers than they do today? Perhaps, but not rapidly or dramatically so. Remember that online courses require teachers - high-caliber ones. Brick-and-mortar teachers may be somewhat fewer in number in the coming years, but their status and even their pay will be higher. That is the nature of disruptive technology - replacing routine work with technology and introducing new work by highly skilled professionals.
Technology does not threaten the education of the whole child.
The support that independent schools have traditionally provided the whole child derives from the missions on which our schools are founded. Independent schools generally have not been created to produce impressive “college lists” or high SAT scores. Academics are vital, of course. But more fundamental are matters of character, well-being, and service. Families turn to independent schools to ensure that their children are well educated. They also choose independent schools — and research repeatedly confirms this - to provide their children with moral guidance, individual attention, social and emotional support, and a path to genuine happiness.
Independent schools reach the whole child in many ways. Ceremonies, traditions, celebrations, alumni and parent involvement - the school is literally infused with a culture that derives from and sustains the school’s mission. Great schools of all types do these things. It just happens that independent schools, which get to choose their own missions, are most likely to be driven by these missions. Teaching and learning play a role in the social and emotional development of kids, as do smaller class sizes. But there is nothing in the use of technology that interferes with the role of teachers in the support of student development, nor, more important, is there anything that derails school-wide practices that support caring missions.
Education is ultimately about the whole child. We do not succeed academically if we focus only on the academic mission. Technology will increasingly and relentlessly force schools - and enable them - to educate students for this century, to help them learn new skills and new ways of learning. There is nothing in that disruption that obviates the need for schools, teachers, or the human touch.