ALPHA DELTA KAPPA DECEMBER 2010 - Gedung Kuning

Are We Doing the Smart
Thing in Teacher Education?
Technology has been idolized as the BEST of the best practices, and teachers are now
routinely evaluated on their ability to use technology in the classroom. In fact, many
districts expect daily, consistent use of high tech features such as Smart© or Promethean©
boards. Is this engaging or enabling? Has “high tech” shoved “high touch” teaching into
the background?
As educators charged with preparing teachers for the 21st century classroom, have we
narrowed our focus too much?
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By Linda Karges-Bone
South Carolina alpha tau Chapter
of instruction, I log plenty of
hours in public schools. Like
most of my colleagues in teach-
Note: The author is not er education and indeed K-12
affiliated with any company or programs, I chanted the sacred
organization that promotes or mantra of “technology as a best
rejects the use of technology practice,” but I never thought it
in any form.
would become the only prac-
The glue. The sweet, tice. Like kudzu in a Carolina
minty scent of glue. That’s lake, the Smart Board© prolif-
what I missed in this first erated with such ferocity and
grade classroom. That and velocity that most of us who
the pungency of warm, sticky helped to usher in its reign
crayons mixed with the shhhh were caught with our professo-
shhh crunch crunch of school rial pants down. We just didn’t
scissors struggling through see it coming. Now I wonder:
construction paper. All of it Are we doing the smart thing in
was gone, replaced by the ef- teacher education?
ficient, multi-media magic of Please don’t misunder-
the Smart Board© or in other stand. I applaud the technol-
settings, its kin Promethean© . ogy. I respect the skill of these
I hadn’t seen a messy, cumber- young teachers and of their
some, “hands-on” lesson in veteran colleagues who tap
months or . . . wait a minute . . . and point and summon hyper-
years now. Instead, every classlinks, swivel game boards for
room observation features a drill and practice, and provide
stellar performance, by the all manner of colorful, even
technology, not the teacher. interactive lessons with seem-
Every lesson is dominated by ingly careless abandon. How-
the Smart Board©.
ever, in the past few months,
As a college professor I have begun to feel that the
who visits teaching interns to technology that was meant to
evaluate their progress, and be engaging is now enabling
as a consultant whose work the teacher to rely solely on
includes classroom evaluations a laptop, an Internet link, and
Action in Educational Excellence
that big white board to make
every lesson happen.
And, I’m not quite sure
that what’s happening is all
good. Of course, surely in the
beginning the children were
mesmerized. It was all so glitzy,
so fancy, so engaging. Don’t
we all want engagement? It is
the stuff of neural connections
(Karges-Bone, 2009). It’s the
holy grail of pedagogy.
Yet, in recent days it
seems more engaging for my
20-something-year-old intern
teacher than for the 20 8-yearolds
who are in her class.
Teachers are under enormous
pressure to produce technologically
perfect lessons, with
so many bells and whistles,
that it can be difficult to
separate the technology from
the teaching. One colleague
in the trenches, a National
Board Certified master teacher
with three decades of experience,
told of a recent evaluation
of her lesson. “It went
beautifully,” she recounted. “I
thought I had knocked it out
of the ballpark, and of course
it was a positive assessment,
but the evaluator actually
noted that I took too long Ø