Group items tagged

These two reasons, technocentrism and pedagogical dogmatism, Harris argues, explain why for decades, enthusiastic policymakers, researchers, and practitioners have confused technology integration (involving  the perennial conflict of content vs. skills) with technology as an instrument for pedagogical reform (moving from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction).

Since most technology designers do not understand effective teaching (or are not designing something for teaching purposes), they often focus on making content more appealing or easier to access instead of creating a technology that causes students to more deeply engage mentally with content.

When I did my doctoral research, I found that just bringing in technology and showing teachers how it worked did not change pedagogy. I believe that if you want to change pedagogy to a more constructivist approach, you need to tackle this head on and not make it part of some technology project.

Data on Teachers Uneven

use their data to help struggling teachers and to reward successful ones

but the information is used in principals' evaluations of their teachers

While it's useful to have that kind of longitudinal data [for policy purposes]," he says, "one should not impute conclusions about the true depth of a child's intellectual development in terms of math, science, or whatever."

results on statewide tests aren't as useful as many policymakers think.

Students take the tests at the start of every quarter in every subject, and the results are available the same day. The data are broken down by the racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups used in NCLB accountability reports.