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“I love to evaluate everyday procedures
and find ways of making us more productive.”
Second, he said, is efficiency. “I’ve always
been a systems guy,” Thompson said. “I love to
evaluate everyday procedures and find ways of
making us more productive. For instance, we
have built so many great tech resources here,
but they are hard to find. I like to build technological
tools that streamline age-old procedures
and bring resources together.”
The information system that Taft inaugurated
16 years ago “is a beast of a homemade
application, that requires a lot of manual intervention,
even for simple tasks,” he said. “Over
the years, they’ve been patching and bandaging
it instead of zooming out and searching for
something off the shelf that might have features
we’ve never even imagined. That way we benefit
from what other schools do.”
Finally, and most critically for Thompson,
is getting classroom teachers to buy in to new
ways of instruction by harnessing the technology
tools available. Increasingly, he says, “the
sage on the stage” method of teaching is becoming
obsolete, in many ways a victim of a wired
generation that does not have the attention span
of its predecessors. Acknowledging that today’s
students are wedded to technology means understanding
that the process of scholarship is
vastly different today.
“Kids are learning very differently now,”
says Thompson, who says he is in many ways
an old school teacher who happens to be agile
with new school tools. “For better or for worse,
because of the introduction of technology into
kids’ lives, they’ve become more dependent on
it,” he says. “It shrinks their attention spans, so if
things aren’t as zippy, or more interactive, they
are not as engaged.”
That means getting classroom teachers to
embrace technology in a way that gets students
to think critically, question the technology on
which they have been weaned and come up
with innovative conclusions.
The current generation has grown up in a
time when, Thompson says, “all information is
at your fingertips and searchable.” Consequently,
he believes teachers must help students navigate
through the technology to help them acquire
information, question authority and pinpoint
the most reliable sources. “We need to teach
kids how to utilize the internet for intellectual
pursuits,” says Thompson. “Our task as educators
is now to ask kids the right questions, and
tell them to ‘Have at it.’ Then the students collaborate
to find, evaluate and scrutinize sources,
understanding that Wikipedia isn’t always fact,
as they work to create or publish their answer.
Our goal is to enable kids to be better critical
thinkers.” But even as Thompson promotes
critical thinking skills, he hedges. He says that
as much as he embraces technology, he is a fundamentalist
learner at heart. He worries that an
overreliance on critical thinking may encourage
analytical and imaginative ideas, but it also may
leave students without the foundational principles
upon which those ideas take flight.
Countries that encourage a disciplined, rote
pedagogy may lack the creative impulse or ingenuity
to create new avenues of growth. But their
reliance on fundamentals allows them the concrete
knowledge to get the job done. “As much
as I’m a fan of using technology to have kids
find solutions, I worry about creating a society
of only abstract thinkers. I think they miss a lot
of important information that comes from the
fundamentals. Kids aren’t taught to pay as close
attention to detail as in past generations.
“There must be a happy middle ground. I’m
appalled, for instance, at students’ lack of attention
to grammar. Oh, it just kills me.” he says.
Dubious of the idea of ditching the memorization
of multiplication tables when any number
of computational tools will more expeditiously
provide answers, he is a steadfast believer in a
firm grounding in the basics.
In part, that comes from Thompson’s own
background, spending long avenues of time
alone, teaching himself the fundamentals of
learning. A single child, raised by a single mother
who worked as a registered nurse, Thompson
says he was a ‘latchkey kid,’ returning dutifully
34 Taft Bulletin Winter 2012