TECHNOS

July 20, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 2002 Vol. 11 No. 1

Colloquium:
Serendipity and the Teachable Moment

By Sarah Irvine Belson

After reading my American University colleague Frank Connolly's article, “I'm Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Serendipity, Unintended Consequences, and I.T.,” I began to think about the consequences of email and other technologically based communication tools in my own field of education. I've put forth some ideas about how collaborative technologies have impacted my own teaching of future teachers and how they perhaps have determined the types of relationships I have with my education students. On the one hand, I may be so new to the profession of professing that I don't know what it was like before all this started. On the other hand, I think that I might be preparing a new generation of teachers to interact with their students through technologically enhanced lives. As we move toward more and more teachers taking advantage of online courses and using technology as their main means of communication with their professors, we need to be even more conscious about getting to know our students during the valuable face-to-face time we share with them.

Technology in Teacher Education

For the most part, educators believe that technology is a good thing for children in K-12 classrooms. The need to prepare teachers who are technically savvy and can make good decisions about how and why to use technology is a prominent goal in the current education agenda. Preparing tomorrow's teachers to use technology is an ongoing initiative from the U.S. Department of Education (known as PT3, www.pt3.org). One main method of preparing these future classroom teachers to learn about technology's role is through modeling our own use of the Internet, discussion boards, email, and educational software. Modeling the use of technology to pre-service has been proven to be an important role for faculty in various research studies (Albion 1996; Becker 1994; Downes 1993). As we choose to use devices such as discussion boards and email as tools to model the use of technology as a communication medium, we need to be cognizant of two things: first, what the impact of this choice will be, and second, the realities of the students adopting our methods.

My students tend to agree that using a discussion board in their college classes is a good way for them to think about the issues we might not have time to discuss in class. But they believe that their own K-12 students won't be using the same tools. For example, during an online discussion, one student wrote:

I don't think there's a risk of a K-12 classroom being totally replaced by computer programs, but I don't think we should totally discount the idea of a virtual classroom, which is basically what we're doing here using Blackboard for these discussions. There are online degree programs now linked to reputable graduate programs like Syracuse University, and at the collegiate level I think that resources like this can be really useful. In K-12, kids are going through all sorts of developmental stages that really rely on having social interaction with both their peers and adult role models, so the classroom is usually the best place for them to be. It's nice to think that in unusual cases where a kid couldn't get to school, they might still be able to interact with teachers and learn material through technology.

Professor Connolly talks about “serendipity” — we might call these “surprises” opportunities for learning, or “teachable moments” in the education field.

Nevertheless, students do feel that they miss connecting with their professors and peers when they use email and discussion boards exclusively. A student in an online teacher certification program told me that when she told the professor (via email) about a personal problem she was having (her father had just had a stroke) and that she needed extra time, the professor's response was perfunctory — she didn't think he really “cared” about her as a person. She conceded that she didn't really know the professor, so she didn't know how to interpret his email response.

Students in my courses agree that getting to know the professor is important. Here's what one had to say about the topic on our discussion board:

I feel that taking online courses in college would be more beneficial than in middle school and high school, … [where] children are learning how to be social with their peers on a one-on-one basis. These online classes would be more convenient for college-age students, especially if they have children, and want to spend time at home with them instead of running out to classes, but even then you still don't have that special relationship with your peers. You don't get to know the other people in your classes because you don't get to see their facial expressions. I know that when I'm teaching, I won't have a lot of time to take my re-certification courses, but that I won't take them in an online environment. I need to see my professor (in person; I don't like those Web cams) to know what they really mean. I also need to see other people when I talk or do a practice lesson. I don't know how you get real feedback online.

It seems that students still have a need to connect with their peers and the professor in person. The challenge is how to do this during the short amounts of time we spend with students in class. Do we give over class time to community building and interaction? When and how do we present the content of the course if class time is used so differently? These are questions all faculty need to consider, and in education, especially, we need to be sure that our students are good at face-to-face interactions — one way to help them decide if teaching is really the right profession for them.

Answering to a Higher Authority

Teacher education faculty, like our colleagues in K-12 classrooms, have embraced the use of discussion board and email-based listservs. We find these valuable tools to talk with others in our field who might be far away or otherwise hard to meet with on a regular basis. A well-known issue in education (both in K-12 teaching and in higher education) is that faculty don't have the opportunity to collaborate and interact like professionals in other fields might. Our professional associations were early adopters of the use of email to share news and ideas when we couldn't leave the classroom during normal working hours. Teachers have longed for ways to communicate with others — we are perhaps the only profession where we don't have phones on our desks. The invention of email helps teachers talk to one another about the issues and problems that we face on a day-to-day basis in our classrooms. In teacher education classrooms, faculty often have students participate in these established communities, where practicing teachers and other experts are already discussing the current trends and issues in the field. This gives our students the chance not only to find out what's on the minds of practicing teachers, but also to contribute their own ideas and learn the opinion of experts. For example, faculty in the field of reading have their students interact in existing discussion groups sponsored by the International Reading Association.

This practice also gives our students an opportunity to learn about something else of great importance in the field of teacher education, professionalism. Part of preparing future teachers is to give them a sense of our profession, in addition to the skills and behaviors they will need to become true professionals.

Having influences outside the school building is becoming a more common practice for K-12 students as well. At Napa New Technology High School in Napa, California, students' writing and art projects are reviewed by external experts via the school's Web site (http://www.newtechhigh.org). At the Florida Virtual High School (http://www.flvs.net/), students take courses and submit projects to experts throughout the country. It's likely that most future K-12 classrooms will have some element of distance learning to them, whether it be collaborative projects with faraway schools or students doing some coursework via online educational programs. Future teachers need to have the technical skills and savvy to understand the ins and outs of online communication. Not only do they have to be able to understand the shorthand “language” of chat rooms and discussion boards, they also need to select sound and relevant activities for their students. Having experiences in college that help them learn these skills may be valuable, but they also have to be able to engage their students in discussions related to these online experiences. They need to be able to think critically about the information and communications that they have online. This should be done in college as well.

Teachable Moments

Professor Connolly talks about “serendipity” — we might call these “surprises” opportunities for learning, or “teachable moments” in the education field. Students might bring up topics that were not necessarily part of the focus of a class discussion. For example, my students in an educational technology course started a side discussion about the use of educational toys like the LeapPad (produced by LeapFrog Learning Systems, http://www.leapfrog.com/). Talking about the role of toy companies in the education of young children might not have been something I had planned to do in my class, but I find more and more that my students want the issues they are interested in addressed in class. It then becomes my job to take those topics and place them within the larger context of the content of the course. My role as teacher becomes one of a guide, helping my students figure out what issues are important in the field and how those issues relate to the theoretical and practical elements of the education profession. For example, my students might want to discuss the impact of “zero-tolerance policies” in high schools (policies that expel students for any infraction of the rules) in my educational psychology course. My role as their professor is to guide them to good information about the topic, and then help them make connections to developmental theories and research on adolescence.

As future teachers, they will need to have these skills as well. They will need to be able to take the mass amounts of information that students already have and frame them within the context of the lesson they are responsible for teaching. They will need to be able to teach their students to be good consumers of information at the earliest ages. They also need to have the ability to look at their students and determine if the student understands the connections being made. Learning to assess whether or not a child understands a concept just by looking at him or her is something that is hard to teach. They need to be good listeners, and this is something they have to learn to do in “real time,” during face-to-face interactions with their peers.

Coming the Distance

My students (as Frank Connolly's) seem to prefer to interact via email or chat rooms, so much so that I worry about their abilities to work with real students when they are in front of them in their real classrooms. Beyond the fact that my students can be caught “I.M.ing” (Instant Messaging) during class time — often to other people in the same room with them, the equivalent of passing notes in class — I (like Frank) also have fairly lonely office hours. My students are more likely to send me an email message rather than stop by my office. I have never known the pleasures (and pitfalls) of having my office hours filled with unscheduled visits from my students. One concern I have is, how will my students learn the fine art of person-to-person communication? Especially as teachers. How will they learn the fine art of talking to a parent when they hardly ever speak?

We do have in place some built-in elements to teacher education that help us learn about how our students interact. Early on in our program, students give classroom presentations, and all students engage in practicum experiences in which they observe in classrooms and tutor students. We also have the capstone to every program, student teaching. But as education faculty, one of our roles is to help students develop the skills and abilities they need to stand up and teach. Quite honestly, not everyone can do so. We all have known teachers that just weren't good at their chosen profession. To have one of our students go through an entire program and make it to student teaching before getting the feedback that they “aren't doing it right” — this is a shame to say the least. We need to be able to either remediate or redirect students early on. We need to watch them interact with their peers, note how they react to feedback, and give them information about how they should conduct themselves.

We need to think about our roles as models of good teaching and facilitators of learning.

In online teacher preparation programs, students tell me that the faculty seem to overcompensate for the fact that they don't meet in person. The number of activities that the student is required to do before engaging in an online lesson seem to be much more than in a traditional course. Students in exclusively online programs report that they spend time tutoring and observing right away. This may seem a good strategy. But without the professor there to see how they interact with children, how can we be sure that this is in everyone's best interest — the future teacher's as well as the child's? In our job of preparing future teachers, we need to be conscious of the fact that just because a person spends time in a classroom, does not mean that person will be good at teaching. And we need to give our education students the time and space to experiment with teaching and developing lessons before we let them loose with our children. We need to have them “come the distance” and see for ourselves who they are.

Putting on Our Research Hats

As faculty of teacher education, we often look to our own classrooms to conduct research. As students of the teaching and learning process, we often examine the techniques that work (and those that don't) in our own classes, and this is the stuff of our research. Looking at the impact of technology in teacher preparation is one well-defined realm of research. Specifically, the use of email, discussion boards, listservs, and other collaborative technologies has been a recent stream of research. In my own research with another American University colleague, Teresa Hein, we found that students could use email to ask questions about science that shined light on misconceptions about science. We also are looking at how students' learning styles might impact how these students use collaborative technologies such as email, discussion boards, and chat rooms to learn. Researchers such as Dutt-Doner and Powers (2001) found that discussion boards enabled new teachers to ask current teachers good questions about teaching practice. Ragan, Lacey, and Korithoski (2001) found that online components to teacher education classes could be a good alternative to how content is presented. However, both these sets of researchers indicated that faculty need support not only for the technical components of online teaching but also for the subtle art of facilitating discussions and communicating ideas to virtual students. We need to do more investigating to figure out how to balance the use of online learning with the in-class interactions that are so valuable to teacher preparation.

Carry On …

The U.S. Department of Education estimates that we will need an additional 2.4 million new teachers in the next 10 years (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). It is clear that teacher education programs, either in brick-and-mortar buildings or on the Web, will continue to grow. As we continue to use more collaborative technologies to prepare future teachers, we need to give serious thought to how these impact our students' learning in the short run, and how they will impact their interactions with their future students in the long run. Seriously considering all the serendipitous and unintended consequences of our decisions is necessary to ensure that future teachers have the skills and abilities necessary to teach tomorrow's children. We need to think about our roles as models of good teaching and facilitators of learning, and share these thoughts with our students. We also need to share with one another how these consequences might impact the profession of education in the future.

“Alone in the Forest” computer illustration by Frank W. Morris for TECHNOS.

Sarah Irvine Belson is an associate professor of education at American University in Washington, D.C., specializing in technology integration. In addition to extensive use of computer-mediated instruction in her teacher preparation courses, she directs several school-based projects examining the implementation of high-end technology, telecommunications, and international networking in the classroom. Professor Irvine Belson would like to encourage this ongoing discussion by inviting TQ readers to share your experiences and ideas about using technology in teacher education programs with her. Send them to: Sarah Irvine Belson, American University, Washington, D.C. 20016-8030 - or email her (of course) at sirvine@american.edu.