Tag Archives: cognitive dissonance

Living With Cognitive Dissonance

Right now, the following items are open in side by side tabs in my browser:

The webpage for educon21, described as more of a conversation than a conference, committed to discussing the future of schools.   According to the page, there are five axioms underlying the conference that are guiding principals:

  1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
  2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
  3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
  4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
  5. Learning can — and must — be networked.

It will be held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia from January 23 to 25.  The conversations very much meet these axioms, concerned with reforming schools in ways that focus on creating networked, collaborative learning spaces.  The conference itself focuses on facilitating discussions rather than providing presentations.  It sounds like a wonderful place to do some visioning with like-minded people, many of whom are at least in my extended professional learning network.

In the next two tabs are two stories related to using technology to teach math.  eSchool News describes how colleges are meeting the challenge of math remediation by providing access to self-paced online math instruction.  Basically, schools subscribe to an online tutoring program that takes students through learning module and saves lots of money by not having to provide access to full-time faculty.  (An interesting aside about this article.  The data related to the cost of remediation comes from a study by Pearson.  And, guess what, Pearson has an online math tutorial subscription site!)

In an article from Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey speculates about why it is that, despite saving lots of money using technology, college tuition is going up.  He features Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium, a 700-computer-lab that run math tutorial modules complete with quizzes and tests.  Students progress at their own pace: “Instead of marking progress by timethe number of hours spent in proximity to a lecturer—Emporium courses measure advancement by evidence of learning.”  And while that seems like a worthwhile reform, it was implemented mostly due to budget and space problems rather than a concern for the learner.  Tech is an engineering bastion and all those engineers have to take linear algebra.  There just wasn’t enough class space or money for full-time professors so setting up 700 computers in a local mall and hiring grad students was the cheapest alternative.

I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance.  It’s like there are two parallel conversations about education and technology going on right now, and I’m involved in both of them.  One is about how technology can support changing the way we do education and the other is about how technology can offer solutions to current problems without making any real change in education.  The latter conversation offers efficiency as its goal and does put the student at the center of learning but not quite in the way that the educon21 folks have in mind.  It’s more about delivering content than it is about student learning.  And, in a world of high-stakes tests, content and product seem to trump pedagogy and process every time.

Both conversations can and will continue to go on at the same time for at least the foreseeable future.  I worry that if we spend too much time figuring out how to use technology to solve budget and space problems and deliver content efficiently then we’re distracted from considering how technology can be part of the transformation.  But then I interview teachers faced with mile-wide, inch-deep standardized curriculum that has to be covered before the test, and I’m not sure if the system is ready for the kind of transformation that is being discussed at educon21.

And, I find myself struggling to identify what my responsibility is to my pre-service teachers.  I’m trying to model a more student-centered collaborative learning experience that includes an emphasis on tapping into the network.  But I’m preparing them for a very different kind of classroom where they will face often overwhelming demands on their time, energy and passion.  How do I lessen the cognitive dissonance for them and help them find some middle ground?  Or is is that there isn’t middle ground?  Is it time to break the cycle of tinkering toward utopia as Tyack and Cuban suggest has happened throughout the long history of education by making a clean break and giving up everything the way Mike Bogle suggests we should do in his eloquent rant against the establishment:

We must forget everything we think we know; and approach learning as though we’ve never done it before; never been taught, and never taught others.

Certainly in an environment where “the test” is overshadowing everything else, such a break would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?