The Tempered Radical: Technology Just Makes Good Teaching Eas...

Good teaching is good teaching. Technology just makes good teaching easier. 

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Good teaching is good teaching.  Technology just makes good teaching easier. 

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I believe there are three fundamental pillars that support good teaching in a middle grades classroom. The first is frequent opportunities for students to engage in collaborative conversations.  Collaborative conversations teach students to recognize and respect multiple viewpoints---an increasingly important skill in a world where argument has replaced dialogue as the primary form of human interaction.

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Collaborative conversations also provide students with opportunities to have their thinking challenged---and challenged thinking leads to new learning as individuals work to resolve the mental tension that naturally exists between preexisting notions of "what is true" and new, contradictory evid

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Finally, as a language arts teacher, I believe the third pillar of a solid middle grades education is the opportunity to practice the process of articulation through writing. You probably couldn't get more traditional than that, could you? I mean, we've been teaching students to write, revise and polish their thinking for generations---and there's probably no skill that is more important for success in today's world.

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1.  Our classroom blog has had literally hundreds of posts in the past two years.  In fact, I got an email just yesterday from a student that included four different entries he'd like me to add to "The Blurb."  One is a book review, one is a poem, and two are reflections on world events. 

Even more interesting: We're a year-round school and my kids are on a three-week vacation right now. So this kid has been sitting at home on holiday willingly churning out the written word.   

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all of our digital work is ungraded and done beyond the school day. The only time kids can work on digital projects in my room is during recess---where I usually see 10-15 students a day.     

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the digital learning that happens in my classroom ain't about technology at all.  Instead, it's about finding ways to facilitate the kinds of experiences that support the intellectual, social and emotional growth of middle school students. 

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my fundamental beliefs about the nature of high quality instruction really haven't changed all that much in the past 15 years. My kids are still creating, collaborating and communicating.They're wrestling with critical ideas, they're investigating challenging questions, and they're identifying and testing solutions together.

Digital tools simply allow my students to do those things more often---and have proven to be more effective at engaging every learner who rolls through my classroom door each fall. 

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And interestingly enough, my fundamental beliefs about the nature of high quality instruction really haven't changed all that much in the past fifteen years. My kids are still creating, collaborating and communicating. They're wrestling with critical ideas, they're investigating challenging questions, and they're identifying and testing solutions together.

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Across the country school districts are buying interactive white boards and student responders to "engage" students in learing. Unfortunately, a lot of the engagement that happens in these classrooms tends to be more about teacher as performer for engagement and less about students working through engaging activities designed by a teacher. I think this is where some of the frustration about technology exists because it takes a lot to create these "engaging" lessons, but the learning is still very teacher centered and students are not being asked to do the things that you define in your post. Schlechty would define the engagement that you describe as authentic engagement, and I would agree that this the type of engagement that we need in classrooms. My question is, how do we help other teachers understand your position and start to shift their teaching to be more student centered?

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