Terry thinking, by Terry Freedman
I’ve been worried that people might think that by publishing old copies of my newsletter I’m showing that I have nothing new to say. After all, news that is twenty years old isn’t exactly news.
Except when it is.
In issue #2, which you can read here: The State Of Information And Communications Technology In The Year 2000, I wrote about teacher training in ICT. I quoted from teachers in the UK and the USA, and also from an Ofsted subject report published in that year.
Here are a few quotes from that newsletter:
“x y, of abc, identifies lack of training as one of the factors that make teachers reluctant to use ICT. A similar point is made by x y, of abcd Primary School, who points out there is too little time to sit down with the hardware and get to know it.”
“This problem is not confined to the UK. A teacher who identifies herself as “z”, in the USA, says that there is not enough time for learning, practising and networking with other teachers or other professionals, and a lack of effective training.”
“In ICT, teachers’ expectations of pupils are too low in about a quarter of primary schools. The report implies that this is at least partly due to a lack of subject expertise on the teachers’ part, by stating that primary teachers must have better access to high-quality training designed to deepen their own knowledge of the subject.”
“The in-service training available for teachers has not kept pace with developments in the subject, and this needs to be addressed if pupils are to benefit from the expansion of ICT in schools.”
A nice historical curiosity one might think. If only! This morning, thanks to a comment by Professor Bob Harrison in Linkedin, I got wind of an article in TES quoting a research paper from the NFER.
That paper cites a number of interesting international statistics linking the degree of teacher familiarity with technology, and the availability of technology, with schools’ preparedness for remote learning (for want of a better term). One of the most damning of those statistics in my opinion is this one:
“ ...as schools closed, 82 per cent of pupils in England lacked teachers who had received professional development in integrating technology. These pupils may therefore have been at higher risk of experiencing learning loss and a lack of engagement in remote learning.”
It would be easy to get quite depressed about this, and decide that I may as well hang up my boots and spend the rest of my life reading, writing and doing crosswords. However, I think there are still reasons to be optimistic:
As I said in an article for Bee Digital, Reflections on Technology in Schools in the time of Covid: Part 1:
“It’s a testament to the commitment and flexibility of companies and educational institutions that the educational system didn’t simply collapse. On the contrary, teaching and learning have moved online to a greater or lesser extent, with varying degrees of success.”
What I glean from this is that when it became absolutely necessary, schools, teachers and students responded as well as they were able to. It also makes me think even more strongly that I was absolutely correct when I wrote, many years ago, that proficiency on technology use should be a prerequisite for become or remaining a teacher, and that a key question in Ofsted inspections should be “Has the headteacher devoted enough money and time to investment in technology and the training of teachers in its use?”
However, for these ideas to be viable, government has to show leadership. Until March 2019, governments had shown no interest in technology in schools since 2010. As Bill Gibbon said on Twitter,
10 years ago we were leading the world .. I wonder what has happened since? … https://t.co/O1toNC0boK
— Bill Gibbon (@billgibbon) December 11, 2020
Unless, of course, you think that scrapping a subject (ICT) which might have needed a bit of polishing it up, and replacing it with a subject (Computing) that even fewer teachers could teach, even fewer students wanted, and that was completely off the mark as far as most companies were concerned could be termed “showing an interest”.
It will be interesting to see what the research shows next year in terms of schools’ embracing of technology (the NFER report was based on research carried out in 2019, ie before the pandemic). In the meantime, it would be great if the DfE could organise laptop schemes that work properly, and identify the schools and teachers who have managed to achieve great things in online learning and disseminate information about how they did it.
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