Redefining Best Practice in the Age of EdTech

Best Practice:

When I first published the piece below, I was surprised to find that my students (Graduate Education/EdTech Leadership courses) weren’t as familiar with the basic concept of ‘Best Practice’ as I had expected. Accordingly, here’s my definition of this term as the appropriate, re-targeted starting point for this reflective exercise.
 
Best Practices arrive at this status by virtue of agreement and consensus by master practitioners, often through and under the aegis of prominent professional organizations and by virtue of appearing in popular professional literature over a period of time. 

Best Practice is an essential, guiding concept in the field of Teaching. It is indicative of, and achieves the following:

1. Embraces and embodies the philosophies and values of a consensus of practitioners in the field, often facilitated by prominent professional organizations.
2. Provides examples of practices for which a significant number of theorists and master practitioners in the field agree can serve as such and of which colleagues can have confidence in when selecting practices to implement with students.
3. Provides models on which other practices may be based. These may function as a touch stone and guide and inspiration for spin-offs or new practices that embody the same concepts applied to other instructional goals.

copyrighted material/Mark Gura/2018
Often I find that the perfect article for a concept I want to present doesn't exist... and so I write one of my own. I wrote the following piece with my Touro College students (EDIN 653 Technology Integration for School Leaders) in mind. My students are invited to respond by using the comments section below but are not required to! All readers of this blog are welcome to add their own thoughts on this topic, as well.
Redefining Best Practice in the Age of EdTech

Educators use the concept of Best Practice for several crucial purposes. For, one, teachers (among others) often seek out additional practices to add to their repertoire of practices and selecting one that is deemed a best practice is reassuring. In other words the label Best Practice is something of a stamp of approval or verification that the approach or activity is of high quality.
 
Educators also feel that Best Practices can serve as models for developing additional practices; that by applying the elements and characteristics of a best practice in creating a new one, they are securely on firm ground.
 
Similarly, by aggregating a body of best practices we may begin to define the state of Teaching and Learning.
 
When we deconstruct best practices, that is, when we look at their elements or facets we may gain insight not only into what works, but why it works. For instance Project Based Learning requires students to create a product (or performance) but that alone isn’t what defines it as a best practice. PBL also involves student investigation; something it has in common with inquiry-based learning, Problem Based Learning, Challenge Based Learning, and other progressive approaches to instruction.  Thus, it is the element of Inquiry (among others) that makes PBL work, giving meaning to the creation of the product.

But what about Technology?  Does the presence of technology in a learning activity do more than give the sense that the learning is happening in a modern, digital age setting and context, or does it redefine the learning experience and by extension contemporary best practice?

Alas, in the rush to appear to be in compliance with state or district mandates to have a technology program in implementation in a school, administrators sometimes set guidelines that technology must be included in lessons and learning activities. However, including technology for the sake of doing so doesn’t accomplish much, other than perhaps to make the use of technology something teachers are familiar with, even if it tends to demonstrate that its inclusion carries no particular meaning other than something else required of them.

On the other hand, it is very often the case, currently, that true instructional best practices include technology. If we discount the idea that it is simply the presence of the technology itself that makes a best practice, then it is a useful exercise to deconstruct technology-supported best practices to understand what it is about their technology dimensions that contributes the high quality of the instructional experience.

From among a great many examples, let’s take a look at a few “Killer Applications” of Technology to the Improvement of Teaching and Learning that will shed light on this.

Research – Knowing what others have discovered and done on a given theme is an essential element of study and learning. A couple of decades ago doing research meant students had to go to a library to access hard copy books and materials. This required scheduling and travel and once there, a complex set of skills in how to locate hoped for materials. All that has changed with the Web. And one of the more startling changes is that student research has transformed from a formal activity to a very casual one in which teachers and students, sensitized to teachable moments, can deepen their knowledge about something casually by following a suggestion that comes up spontaneously.

Virtual Math Manipulatives obviate many of the problems that come along with the advantages of encouraging students to explore numbers and geometric figures and their relationships by moving and combining easy to comprehend visual representations.  The use of manipulatives has been popular and effective for many decades and is a perennial favorite approach for teaching math. The digital, virtual equivalent eliminates getting bogged down, though, in sharing, losing, finding storage space for, or expending time setting up and putting away little colored pieces. Further, students may use them at home or elsewhere beyond the classroom.

Simulations – Real world examples are often the very best way to have students see, visualize, and understand things. However, field trips to accomplish that, for instance, can be highly impractical, dangerous, expensive or impossible. Through the use of animated simulations though student can not only visit places like an erupting volcano, the bottom of an ocean, the inside of an atom, etc. But they can experiment with the dynamics of such environments and scenarios. Thus performing actions like dissecting a frog, raising or lower segments of a roller coaster to adjust car velocity, testing the way a ship may float or take a wave, etc. are made not only possible, but easy, fun, and highly engaging.

Writing Process/Drafting – We’ve long had the Writing Process, a series of steps that students can follow as a support for their writing. The process guides students through finding a theme, gathering material, organizing it, writing an initial draft and then refining that draft through editing and revising until their written work is ready for an audience.  The process is very well thought out and works very well. However, the physical mechanics of handwriting or typing a version or two of an outline and then several drafts that include revisions of language and placement of verbiage can be so labor intensive as to be discouraging to the young writer. Word processing though, with its ability to save an infinite number of trial drafts and retrieve them easily; with the ease of copying or cutting and pasting to move words and phrases around at whim, to instantly check spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and other features, eliminates the drudge work aspect and affords students an ease of making important changes on their way to a finished piece.

Student Publishing/Sharing of Work/Peer Feedback – The final step in the Writing Process, by the way, is generally considered Publishing, which of course makes sense as that would be true for a professional writer, too. Before the advent of classroom technology, though, the step of Publishing generally meant that the student would produce a best handwritten copy which, if his or her work was of high quality, would be hung on the classroom or school hallway bulletin board or perhaps sent home to mom to be affixed to the refrigerator door with a magnet. In our media driven world, though, this cannot garner much interest, respect or enthusiasm from today’s students.  With class blogs, school websites, and social media platforms (like Edomodo, for instance, though, it is a very short distance from student publishing to what commercial online content providers make available. With these platforms student work can be shared in school and beyond; can draw the attention of peers and audiences of interested strangers, and can elicit peer feedback and responses in abundance.  Student Publishing is authentic publishing.


Quick reflection or perhaps, Googling up an example or two of the above practices should easily illustrate that what’s best about how these best practices are accomplished currently has a great deal to do with what technology can do to make them more effective, meaningful, relevant, and engaging…  and not simply because they have a new set of flashy bells and whistles and are in some undefined way, distant cousins of video games.  It is not that technology is some sort of digital icing on an otherwise unpalatable, dry  cake, but rather, technology adds functionality to make a richer,  more nourishing , better cake: best practice because of the ease and efficacy, and the richness it brings to the learning experience.
.....................................................................................................................

After reviewing my students' responses to the above reading assignment (sorry, their responses are posted privately in our class BlackBoard area) I concluded that it is important that I address the issue of Technology Supported BEST PRACTICE vs. (simply) Meaningful Technology Use.

My conclusion is that we (both my students, who are EdTech Specialist certification candidates in NYS) and The Field in general,  have moved beyond the simple conceptual duality of Meaningful Tech Use vs. (seemingly meaningless) Tech Use for the Sake of Tech Use!  (see illustration, above.)

My (next to) last words and thoughts on this issue (see below for last)… Below is a sampling of some of the instructional approaches and frameworks currently considered most highly important for, and indicative of, teaching and learning that is appropriate for 21st Century Students. These represent the foundations on which today’s best practices sit!

I believe that while we might stretch a point and formulate ways to implement the following without technology, for these to be practically and most meaningfully implemented, technology is an essential resource set:

- Project Based Learning (+Problem Based,Challenge Based, etc.)
- Student Voice and Choice
- Maker Based Learning (hands on, active learning, etc.)
- Authentic Learning Experiences (rooted in Real World Experience)
- Personalized Learning
- Flipped Classroom / Flipped Instruction
- Global Education

Care to add to the above list? Use the comments section, belowOK, here's the Last Word on the issue: "Why is it important to see that Technology Use goes far beyond Good Practice and now defines BEST Practice?"... Because technology, seen this way is very clearly essential for learning environments... and it is clear that those who establish and shape learning environments without this understanding, and acting on it by making technology a very prominent part of that environment, are missing a crucially important fact of contemporary learning!
copyrighted material/Mark Gura/2018
..............................................
Please share your reflections on the above OR your own examples of how technology makes for Best Practices in the comments box, below....