Beth Sanders is a social studies teacher at Tarrant High School in Birmingham and an education technology consultant for the A+ Best Practices Center and the Instructional Partners Pilot project. (Update 03-30-2017: Beth now serves as the Technology Integration Coordinator for Pike Road Schools.) She is one of the most remarkable young teachers we know, and we want to share her valuable ideas about what it means to teach a new generation of students who are “mobile technology natives.” We’d love to read your comments about what Beth has to say.
by Beth Sanders
Today I woke up to a text message from my sister that said “Classrooms of the Future on Today Show! Textbooks to Tablets!” I replied with “Awesome! But it should really be called ‘Classrooms of Today’!” and she replied with an affirming “Yes!”
My sister lives on a farm in Iowa. Her husband works for John Deere and is using technology everyday to help farmers in his area create “smart farms” with mobile technology. It’s amazing. Google it. Their work is completely different than mine but we are able to vibe out on topics related to mobile technology because he gets it and so does she.
Not only that. They are parents to three children under the age of 5 who are mobile natives, meaning they were born in the age of mobile technology. Their oldest, Ben, is going to start kindergarten next year and he can teach himself how to do things on a Kindle Fire that it would take my Dad weeks to learn. (Sorry, Dad…but you know it’s true!)
These kids learn differently because they were born into a different world than my father or their parents or me. This issue matters. Society (teachers and Today Show watchers alike) need to understand that mobile technology and the issue of how to best support mobile (not just Internet) natives in the classroom matters. A lot.
The issues are complex – but vital
Understanding the issues we are facing in education is critical to our society’s progress, but they tend to be so complex that they are difficult to pinpoint and address. More and more, it seems like everyone has an opinion about what is wrong with our education system. But they generally have much less to say about how to effectively (and realistically) fix it.
Regardless of the multitude of expectations and complex circumstances educators are dealing with, we are all being challenged with the task of helping shape and prepare students to thrive in an ever-changing, globally connected world. Furthermore, our young learners are developing a moral code and a learning style that are different from pre-Internet and pre-mobile technology learners. Many teachers are struggling to connect with these developments and how they are already deeply affecting the way we teach, learn, and live.
Researchers speculate that 65% of the careers our students will have do not even exist yet. This phenomenon is one of the truest challenges the field of education has ever had to face. Furthermore, the role of teacher is morphing quickly because, for the first time in human history, our youth can have access to unlimited information, resources, and connections — independent of us.
This access could help them transcend virtually any circumstance, but only if we, as educators, work together to provide this access and to create the space our students need to become lifelong learners capable of adapting. And it will only work if we are open enough to see the real needs of a modern learner and the true expectations and capabilities of the modern educator.
We must partner with our students
This brings me to what I believe is one of the most critical trends—the one that must be addressed and accepted across the board to create real support and solutions for learners of today: Partnerships. As teachers, we are no longer the primary source of information. Even harder to swallow for many educators, a textbook is no longer the principal source of the information necessary to learn, adapt, and succeed.
Teachers are resources. Textbooks are resources. But nothing can compete with the global bank of knowledge and connectivity that the Internet provides. Knowledge learned can be immediately explored, adapted, shared, and re-created. Our students already do this—they already learn this way. They are digital natives, born and raised. But when they come to learn in our classrooms, we pretend that they are not. We ask them to perform an impossible task: we ask them to be someone else.
They are builders. They are content creators. They are native synthesizers. And they are bored. To fix this boredom, this disconnect, the only option for us is to become partners with them. We must partner to explore real goals, ethical behavior, self-assessment, and productive communication. We must partner with them so that they can learn to create, to tinker, and to find their own voices.
We must also allow them to use their tools to create solutions to problems of their world. We must work against homogenization so that they can walk confidently into their next phase of life. Right now, they are leaving us still timid and unsure of their compatibility with the larger world. I teach high school. I see it every day. I hope I won’t be writing this same blog when my nephew Ben is starting high school.
If we walk with our students to learn in their way, then they will not feel alone as they walk away from us. If we work with them to create empathetic connections to all humans, then they will never feel disconnected from our world or even from a world that does not exist yet.
Here’s some of what we need to do:
• We must embed our content into the problems we are solving in the classroom.
• We must use our common core strands to guide projects and to inspire in-depth usage of that core to solve problems of the world, not fill in bubbles.
• We must activate passions and we must side-step who we formerly were as educators. We might even take a step back.
Yes, a step back is what we need, to our own identities as learners. To truly partner, we must consider ourselves learners first. When we all begin to truly utilize the partnership approach in every school and in every classroom, we will see the change needed to support our students at the most critical level. And all of us will be much better off because of it.
Beth Sanders is a social studies teacher at Tarrant High School in Birmingham and an education technology consultant for the A+ Best Practices Center and the Instructional Partners Pilot project. Beth is co-founder and co-director of Youth Converts Culture, a connected coach for Powerful Learning Practice LLC, a digital organizer for IDEA, an Imagining Learning Steward and most recently became an Apple Distinguished Educator. You can find Beth on Twitter at @mssandersths.
A version of this post first appeared at Beth’s blog Be the Change.
