Thinking about teaching and learning

I've been reading Claire Amos's most recent blog post about doing something different this year. It got me thinking about a few things about how risky it feels to try new stuff.

We like certainty, don't you think? As educators, it's good to feel in control and knowing what we're doing. I can truly feel for initial teacher education students, for they don't have any of that certainty about pedagogical practice - they are starting at zero in that regard. They are in the scariest place, for they don't know what they don't know, and often don't know that they don't know. I'm not suggesting they know nothing - for they know an awful lot - about their subject/field passion (which is why, I'm guessing, they want to teach, particularly in secondary schools - to tell others). What they tend to be unaware of, is that knowing a subject isn't the same as know about and understanding pedagogical design, and how to leverage a range of strategies in the service of developing students' knowledge.

One thing I say each year to the new cohort, is that the question you ask when you sit yourself down to plan any learning, is crucial.   If your question is "what am I going to teach today?" then your focus is likely to be on yourself as the teacher and what you do. If your question is something like "What do my students need to learn today?" then that is likely to engage quite different pedagogical thinking. You are more likely to take into account what you know are sticking points in your students' learning, and think deeply about how to try something else to change what you had observed from previous experiences with learners. And the 'today' bit has to be seen in your wider context of the skills and abilities and concepts you want your students to be capable of by the time the year ends.

An orientation centred on what your learners NEED, is I hope, a much more profound way of thinking about learning and teaching. It implies that you know what students have trouble with, what needs building, altering, or starting in terms of skills, knowledge, conceptual thinking and what needs more practise. For example, if your classes have been notorious in their reluctance to read or write stuff, do you avoid those difficulties, or see them as necessary skills of and for learning? Do you re-interpret difficult text so they don't have to, or spend time on strategies that help learners overcome that reluctance and make sense of difficult texts? Do you find ways of engaging them in writing and reading anyway (perhaps using digital technologies instead of paper and pen)? When students experience learning success, they consider that to be 'fun'. They feel pride. So should you when you know you have done the right kind of pedagogical facilitation. Your students will be keen to repeat learning success.

That means educators must continually strive to try out different approaches with different resources, in order to come at difficult ideas/concepts in lots of different ways so that over time, students 'get it'. We strive for those 'ah ha' moments for our learners - these sustain our drive as educators; we need  lots of these moments.

The down side, is that we too must continually experiment with what goes on in our classrooms. We too have to feel the fear and do it anyway, but by doing something out of our comfort zone, we must be alert to what it might teach us. We must use the Teaching as Inquiry process to document what went on and what our students learned and experienced. This documentation means we can reflect on it and make meaning about what we should strive for next.

We can do this within individual lessons, with specific classes - it doesn't mean we do it every day with every class - we would drown under the weight of it. Pick the class, the topic, the resource or tool or strategy you want to do differently, and only concentrate on that one thing to gather data about. You might try, for example, one digital technology at a time, but with different classes. The learning purpose might be different or similar in purpose, but either way, you will get to understand possible effects on learners' engagement and consequent outcomes of their learning across specific classes. Over time, these single interventions build a body of knowledge about your practice that enriches both this practice and pedagogical content knowledge. This makes it far easier for you to assert your expertise to others because you have evidence beyond an anecdote to go with your knowledge.

A key mission for every educator - and I'm referring here to Claire Amos's clarion call -  should be something like: what will I do differently this year, how will I predict it will help my students learn, and why should I do it? These can then feed into your "What do my students need to learn today?" question and your longer-term learning goals for your class.

Summer Reading & Intellectual Character

At a recent session for our Teaching Advocacy Network (TAN), tertiary colleagues were invited to select and review a text about teaching that resonated with them. Over wine and cheese, a few of us got together late last year to talk teaching and recommend good reads on teaching issues.  A reference list of recommendations follows this piece.

As we talked, common themes related to what we think about when we approach our teaching: How we reflect, big questions and provocations around philosophy and very human concerns about purpose, values, beliefs, goals, soul and identity. The digital made an appearance with digital literacy and protocols for online learning. Dispositions like curiosity and wonder were centre stage, along with creativity and critical thinking.

I chose to follow up a few of the texts recommended by my learned colleagues, and thought I might blog briefly in relation to each, starting with Ritchhart (2002). 

Ron Ritchhart tackles the notion of ‘Intellectual character: What it is, why it matters, and how to get it’. A colleague of Howard Gardner’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education & Project Zero, Ritchhart wrote this text more than a decade ago (2002), yet the insights are pertinent still as educators and students continue to wrestle with the tensions between deep and surface learning, personalized learning and test scores, cultivating curiosity for lifelong learning and acquiring skills and knowledge.

Ritchhart writes about productive patterns of thinking, dispositions and habits of mind, including curiosity, skepticism and open-mindedness. Importantly, he queries the messages that teachers send about the types of thinking that are valued and expected. For Ritchhart, education is not about compliance and outcomes. Rather, the aim is to generate a culture of thinking. In this vein, I was particularly drawn to chapter 5 of the text, looking at ‘Thinking Routines: Creating the spaces and structures for thinking’.

As someone who values structure and routine, but often as a foundation from which to branch out flexibly, I was intrigued to learn more about Ritchhart’s ideas on thinking routines, and to consider whether and how these might inform my own thinking and influence on students’ thinking. I have a hunch that routines are a bit like habits, and that these formations, along with the other structures and spaces we build, can be enabling or disabling. After all, we can usually recognise a bad habit when we see one, or work to replace our bad habits with good ones. It is possible to become locked into unproductive ways of thinking and behaving, just as it is possible to learn (unlearn and relearn) new and more positive approaches to learning and life. With these thoughts in mind, I settled in for a closer read of chapter 5.

Ritchhart  quickly modified my assumption that habits and routines are similar, by asserting that habits emerge over time through preference and familiarity, whereas routines are more explicit, deliberate and goal-driven. The way routines are conceptualized in this text is quite specific and associated with particular forms, functions, and criteria. In a nutshell, routines are instrumental and simplified to just a few steps for ease of recall, teaching/learning, application and repetition. Despite the simplicity however, the power of thinking routines is not to be underestimated.

A key idea here is that thinking routines are used to promote discussion and exploration of ideas, to probe for evidence, to expose reasoning, and to enable evaluation. The thinking routines discussed in the chapter include the use of journals as a means of documenting thinking so as to free up mental space, to promote connections and elaboration of ideas.

Two parts of this chapter resonated with me:

1.  How being told the answers, or lectured on content, detracts from thinking and

     “affords students little opportunity to develop their skills in thinking. Furthermore, when this routine dominates the life of a classroom, students’ inclination to think is not only neglected but also suppressed. When all one needs to do is to wait for the teacher to deliver the goods, thinking seems to have little payoff” (p.107).

2.  This is about how students come to know, and is followed by a good example of the use of writing as a routine for coming to know: where learners write before and after reading literature. Pre-writing enables formulation of questions and wonderings. Follow-up writing reflects on developing understanding. In each case, writing involves organization of thoughts and preparation for discussion. In contrast to ‘teaching as telling’, the thinking routine and use of class discussion conveys the idea that “in this class questions aren’t so much answered as they are investigated” (p.108).

Overall, Ritchhart’s chapter on thinking routines makes a case for the enculturation of a disposition to think, and suggests ways in which teachers can promote a thinking space through questioning, discussion, exploration of ideas, evidence, reasoning, and cognitively active learning, in contrast to waiting for the teacher to deliver.

The takeaway message here is to ask ourselves: 'how are we promoting thinking?'

I recommend Ritchhart’s book to teachers in all sectors.  I’m grateful to my colleague, Bill Ussher, for bringing it to the TAN summer reading group. I hope Bill and others will respond with their thoughts and with further text recommendations.

TAN Summer Reading List follows. Have you read any of these? Which should I tackle next?

Artzt, A. F., & Armour-Thomas, E. (1999). A cognitive model for examining teachers' instructional practice in mathematics: A guide for facilitating teacher reflection. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 40(3), 211-235. [recommended by Brenda Bicknell]

Artzt, A. F., Armour-Thomas, E., & Curcio, F. R. (2007). Becoming a reflective mathematics teacher: A guide for observations and self-assessment. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [recommended by Brenda Bicknell]

Claxton, G., & Carr, M. (2004). A framework for teaching learning: the dynamics of dispositions. Early Years, 24(1), pp. 87-97. [recommended by Jeanette Clarkin-Phillips]

Dahlberg, G & Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and politics in Early childhood education. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Farmer. [recommended by Simon Archard]

Doyle, C., & Hoben, J. (2011). No room for wonder. In J.L. Kincheloe and R. Hewitt (eds.), Regenerating  the philosophy  of education: what happened to soul? (pp. 115-127). New York: Peter Lang. [recommended by Pip Hunter]

Gilster, P. (1998). Digital Literacy. New York, NY: Wiley. [recommended by Tracey Morgan]

Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons: Learning from academic dishonesty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [recommended by Mel Chivers]

McDonald, J.P., Mohr, N., Dicter, A., & McDonald, E.C. (2013). The power of protocols: An eductor’s guide to better practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. [recommended by Dianne Forbes]

McDonald, J.P., Zydney, J.M., Dichter, A., & McDonald, E.C. (2012). Going online with protocols: New tools for teaching and learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.[recommended by Dianne Forbes]

Pink, D. (2005). A whole new mind - moving from the information age to the conceptual age. Crows Nest, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin. [recommended  by Maria Persson]

Ritchhart, R. (2002). Intellectual character: What it is, Why it matters and How to get it. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. [recommended by Bill Ussher]

I've been thinking about...

It's a new year, and the sun is shining. For many people, this is unremarkable.

For those of us living in this long, thin, cloudy and shaky set of islands at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (Aotearoa/New Zealand), the weather is a frequent topic of conversation. I remark on this because even discussing the weather (or not) is a cultural practice. During last year, we had two guests staying with us (at separate times, from Thailand and China). Both of them commented on how changeable the weather was from day to day, and even during a day (sometimes four seasons in one day). To them, this was a strange experience. In Thailand, the weather is hot: hot and sunny, or hot and rainy. There is little to talk about - there's a rainy/monsoon season and then there's the rest of the time. In Beijing where our guest was from, the weather is similar - hot, or hot and wet.

Our experiences thus cloud how we understand our known world - sorry about the weather pun. I introduce this week's post with this because it directly links to a conversation before class with a few Masters of Teaching and Learning students as we discussed learning mathematics. One said that she loved the way you could find patterns in maths - that once she knew this was possible, it opened up an exciting world for her. Another observed that the way the subject was now taught in primary schools was light-years away from her own experiences. Together we talked about how these examples identified different ways of coming to the learning. I commented that it was a pity my experience of learning mathematics at secondary school was so alienating. I couldn't remember my primary school mathematics learning - I guess it was too long ago last century!

At secondary school, mathematics was an almost complete mystery to me. As a words person, I kept getting hung up on them. I could never understand why I would ever need to know how long it took men to dig a hole, and I certainly never understood how you could turn people into numbers and find an answer to such a question. And I always wanted to know what the words meant in trigonometry and geometry: how did they get there? Why these words and not others? These questions were meaningful to me. However, I never asked them - instinctively, I knew they would never be answered because this class was about numbers, not words, and, because I was in one of the 'clever' classes, I was already supposed to know. Words were never addressed in mathematics, except to name things.

These are all an introduction to my wondering: In a digitally 'on' world, in what ways do secondary school mathematics teachers regularly explore the words of mathematics to help introduce concepts as a means of better connecting with learners whose orientation and world experience is not numbers-based, but words or even images-based? Which mathematics teachers think about the words of mathematics and focus on helping kids understand them? How do these teachers go about this?

Take this pattern from Maori as an example, taken from THIS site:

Other examples could easily be accessible from Islam and the Pacific Island countries. For example, I used Google to find 'mathematical patterns+Islam'  images, and easily found THIS site. Changing it to Pacific Islands and click on an image took me HERE to an exploration of Lapita patterns. Getting into mathematics from real world applications would more likely have hooked me into how the numbers worked as patterns. This may be a fascinating entree to the mathematical world and a great problem-solving task. What do mathematics teacher do to use digital tools (beyond computational tools) in the service of mathematics?

This brings me back to the beginning of this post. In what ways could all teachers, regardless of subject, context or education sector, better use digital means to use culture, prior knowledge and experience to bring learners closer to the kinds of conceptual understanding that matters to those passionate about their subject?

I'm looking forward to your thoughts.

2014: Retrospective

This blog started six months ago, arising from a staffroom conversation where we decided we would establish a blog. Why? To write about matters in education that matter to us. To write critically, creatively, systematically and intuitively, and in my case – just to write. Blogging is my attempt to increase fluency and the ease with which I put words on a page in the hope that this will translate into confident and increasingly prolific writing for publication.

From these beginnings, we have attempted to write weekly posts, alternating responsibility between us. This approach is intended to help us to sustain our blogging commitment, while making it more manageable rather than a burden among the list of other chores compelling projects. A blogging partnership also enables us to review each other’s posts and to tackle different angles on educational issues.

For the most part, our first six months has been successful – at least if success is to be judged by the achievement of limited and modest goals like:

•  posting regularly and sustaining momentum
• writing to reflect on matters of education importance
•  experiencing a degree of satisfaction and enjoyment

In terms of audience, we sense that there are a few people reading our blog. Possibly tweeting the links to new posts helps with this. A number of supportive and encouraging colleagues have commented on posts, sometimes here online but also sometimes at the lunch table. We attracted a mention during connected educators month (Oct, 2014), and a couple of international citations from interested colleagues. A few of our students have read our blog, which is wonderful and we might dare to hope that some will do so willingly rather than out of a feeling of duty. In any case, we appreciate the interest shown.

As 2015 dawns it is time for us to look at where we have come from, to take stock of our emerging identity as bloggers and to look ahead to our future focus.

Revisiting the blog posts from our first six months, I can identify a few salient themes that have preoccupied our attention and kept us writing.

Among these,

1.     Practical approaches to online teaching: assessment, formative feedback, eportfolios, social media in tertiary education (Becoming a Connected Educator; Connected Educators, Connected Students). I have discussed a few of my approaches to teaching online, and in particular, some of the experimentation I carried out last year. I am interested in ideas for moving my teaching forward and for enhancing student learning, particularly in online classes.

2.     Response to media coverage (Schools policing uniforms and hair lengths;  Beyond the Bandwagon)  and to various reports (e.g., Digital technologies in NZ Schools) and guidelines related to digital technologies and education: critique, questioning assumptions, seeking evidence, digging beneath the surface, debunking myths such as the emphasis on devices, drill and low-level skills, and the digital native/immigrant dichotomy. These are the kinds of posts that are Noeline’s speciality as she reads and reviews with a critical eye for rhetoric and unsupported hype.

3.     Problematizing discourses: education vs training
 

4.     In relation to learning, what matters? Thinking, inquiry learning, digital literacy, and higher-order thinking involving a range of technologies and sharing with authentic audiences; depth, discernment, ethics and creativity. 

5.     Human rights and social justice - power struggles, control, regulation, resistance, inclusion.  
In whose interest?  

6.     Open access – TEC-Variety, Networking, Digital Smarts
 

7.     Student perspectives: agency, impact - Schools policing uniforms and hair lengths; Connected Educators, Connected Students; Continuance theory
 

8.     Implications for teachers - active professional learning, teaching as inquiry

While our thinking may have moved on, we continue to welcome responses to any of our posts. Let us know that you are reading, how you might apply some of our ideas, or how your own thinking differs.

As we enter 2015, we will continue to respond to media and government reports, and to relate practice and research. We’ll also keep you up-to-date with the progress of our Digital Smarts work. I am keen to share some summer reading, my ongoing adventures with teaching and social media, and my own learning along the way. 2015 is shaping up as another good year of conferences and professional learning events, starting with WCELFest in February, where I intend to talk about peer review of online teaching, and will certainly craft a blog post in association with this.

Happy new year to all, and please let us know that you are reading!

Our final 2014 post: Looking ahead - the year of Digital Smarts, 2015

Digital Smarts: a new book heading your way

Dianne and I are co-editing a book tentatively called Digital Smarts: Examining digital agency in New Zealand educational settings. This will be an electronic, Creative Commons Licensed, freely available e-book, also downloadable in pdf format by April 2015.
        This book arose from our realisation that colleagues were engaged in fine work in the digital educational space but without an outlet for these research endeavours that would reach those who might find the work useful in their own settings. Quite often, research is disseminated through academic journals that are not readily accessed by educators in the compulsory schooling sectors. So, we took the plunge, inviting co-workers to contribute chapters, interpreting 'digital smarts' to their chapter's focus.
         This has been a two-year gestation process of collaboration in as much as authors shared drafts in progress at regular monthly meetings, leading to an open peer review of others' chapter drafts. This open review phase had a twofold purpose: to share and develop emerging ideas into something cohesive; and for newer research colleagues to learn the reviewing process, a key quality assurance aspect of academic writing.
        Through this access to each others' work, authors could better see how their own chapter fitted the wider scheme of things and assisted in refining their chapters, thus contributing to a greater cohesion of the book as a whole. 
         A final step in the revision process was drawing on our international academic networks to provide external, blind peer-reviews before the chapters were finalised. We are now readying chapters for formatting and final proofing before handing to other colleagues who can turn the text into a range of digital formats for open sharing.
Partnership, trust and integrity are implicit in a book development since this one is growing out of a unified and shared context. We hope it provides readers with an opportunity to compare their own educational contexts with those described in the book. The book is a partnership on many levels - it's a partnership between Dianne and me as editors, with and among our chapter authors, and the eventually the book's readership. Our colleagues have also had to trust us in the mentoring and leadership of this project, and that it would see the light of day. We also hope that the work is trusted in the sense of having a quality assurance process that stands up as rigorous and befitting an academic text. Our integrity as editors is on the line!

Where did it come from?

The book's inception was heavily influenced by international colleagues' books in both distance and teacher education where they too have collaborated with academic colleagues within their own institutions. This kind of collaboration provides multiple perspectives on a given topic of inquiry that brings a distinct, shared, institutional understanding to the scope of the book. This process, while using rigorous quality assurance processes, means we have control over the book rather than a traditional publishing house. 
Digital texts, and the social networks developing for academics (eg ResearchGate, Academia.edu) can mitigate some effects of distance, population and price, but this also means digital texts need to be freely accessible. Current publishing arrangements through traditional academic publishers, as noted above, can be obstacles for teachers, with access prevented unless a library subscribes to the text/journal, or a reader is willing to pay for an article. 

These constraints have led us to choose a digital format for the book, with a Creative Commons Licence. As academic workers, we are expected to publish but seldom benefit from royalties for this work. Instead, we sometimes even have to buy the book our work is published in. Through an open source format and making the text as available as possible, we hope to share the text widely, contributing to debate about the value of digital technologies in educational contexts.

We have been influenced by the spirit of the simplicity and generosity of examples where book editors gift the work to readers anywhere through open access publication formats. These formats support equitable access and the wide dissemination of research ideas, contributing to the field, discussion and critique. To that end, we cannot thank WMIER enough for providing us with the means to pay for the major costs involved, that of professional proof-reading, graphic design and digitising.

Why 'digital smarts'?

The concept of  ‘digital smarts’ arose when Dianne and I were brainstorming a working title. The term ‘smart’ has stayed with Dianne in particular for some time and links to an early statement by the New Zealand Ministry of Education in 2002 with talked about the ‘smart use of ICT’ in educational contexts. Over time, that sense of agency that the word ‘smart’ has for both learners and teachers has disappeared, with more recent MOE statements about e-learning focusing more instead on describing the potential influence of the technologies on the learning, not the learning on the technologies and how they are used. (see Pachler et al for their exploration of agency, culture, appropriation, and the idea of the 'mobile complex'). 
We want to reclaim the word ‘smart’; it has multiple meanings, making it easy for our chapter contributors to interpret the term for themselves. For example, ‘smart’ can refer to ‘smarting’ - in the sense of being hurt, either physically or emotionally; it can also refer to creativity in the products that can be made through digital means; it can also refer to the degree of agency one exercises, such as in working smarter, not harder; a further interpretation refers to ‘smart’ as an acronym for something that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. 
These chapters are the products of some SMART thinking by the authors. What we are producing is specific (for it traverses individual education sectors, and is interpreted for the specifics of the chapter), measurable and attainable (in that the research has produced findings that have been collected, analysed - in a sense ‘measured’ - and attainable, in that the themes and ideas the data generate are arrived at through a rigorous process of investigation), relevant (in that they focus on digital technologies in education when we are on the cusp of all New Zealand schools accessing unlimited, uncapped and robust connectivity), and timely - for now is a good time to explore and share what we know is happening and suggest possible inferences for pedagogical practices across education sectors. In other words, ‘digital smarts’ represents intelligent, pedagogically-oriented and strategic uses of digital technologies to benefit learners of all kinds.

We would be really thrilled to know who's reading our blog and what you think. Please feel free to add comments and/or email us your thoughts.

Our best wishes for a cheerful, safe and refreshing Christmas/New Year break. See you in 2015.

In the face of obstacles, why would teachers persist in using digital technologies in classrooms?

Dianne and I will shortly be having a break from this blog for a number of reasons - first, it's almost our holiday time; second, our university shuts for a couple of weeks, and three, our heads need time to reboot. We intend, as a result, to create a shared blog post as our 2014 finale.

In the meantime, I thought I would talk about an article that has just been published in Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice. I have to fess up though - it's one of mine. I'd like to be able to share the actual article with everyone, in order to generate debate about the ideas, but copyright with the publisher makes that difficult.

However, the basic premise is that There are a number of models that focus on technology uptake in various contexts - such as The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which is used in industry and sometimes in education to explain uptake of technology by individuals. Then there's the continuance theory model that hinges on TAM as a foundation. It focuses on satisfaction and ease of use as determinants of continued use, and also began life as a focus on commercial uptake to get the job done. Then there's the SAMR model which is also a kind of continuum but sees this in relation to whether or not the user appears to appropriate it for their own uses, or just adopt it as is. I may be taking liberties in my summary of them, but you can be the judge of that.

These got me wondering, and asking - so are these the reasons teachers will keep going, even in the face of wonky wifi, school policies that obstruct rather than enable, or in contexts where no-else seems to experiment with thee things? My argument is that ease of use, satisfaction with the tool or even whether a teacher adopted or integrated use are not enough for persistent use. Teachers care about whether their students are keen to learn and achieve learning success. When they tell the teacher "this is cool" or that  "this doesn't feel like learning", then teachers will do it again and build on that success, whatever the tool or pedagogical approach. When the two align and students dig into a task, concentrate for long periods and want to produce fine work, then learning is magic.

Extending continuance theory to education therefore, must be predicated on what happens with students. It isn't enough to talk about tools or the teachers themselves - great teachers will make decisions based on the impact on their learners. All power to them, I say!

Are digital technologies really transforming classroom practice?

I've heard a lot (and often) about the idea that digital technologies transform practice in classrooms. It can be trotted out as a truism, when in fact these technologies are still relatively new, and we're still getting used to how we might use them to help learning. I want to have a look a quick look at this notion of transforming practice. It is many-layered, as Wong, Li, Choi and Lee (2008) suggest:

Those schools which have realized changes in classroom practices are characterised by ICT-pedagogical innovations. To make this happen, pedagogical innovations must be rooted in teachers’ experiences of moving away from a teacher-centred approach to one that is more student-centred. Leadership and the climate for collaboration and experimentation are fundamental to the integration of technology into pedagogical innovations

Their comment indicates that change is a complex undertaking with multiple, simultaneous levels at work. For a start, those used to the sage-on-a-stage didactic style of teaching may be deeply challenged by a student-centred model of teaching and learning when they design lessons where students take control of the technology. These teachers might feel a lack of control, causing some levels of anxiety. Others might balk at the idea of having other adults in their classrooms while they teach, yet collaboration and reflection with peers is important, suggesting some kind of in-school buddying system of experimentation and inquiry. It means they will sit down with you later to pick through what happened and why in order to evaluate the experience. And here, I'm talking about f2f (face-to-face) classrooms; online classrooms are a whole other matter, for the physical cues of interpersonal relations have to be accounted for differently, and digital tools are the basis of such learning contexts.  There is a greater open-endedness when what constitutes a classroom is no long bounded by physical walls, and the notion of audience has expanded.

A school culture, if those leading it want staff to continually develop their pedagogy, will need to embrace trial and error and be able to deal with things going wrong as they inevitably will when staff try new learning things. This suggests that leadership will embrace and support change and uncertainty from the bottom up - no easy feat. Another factor is the willingness of staff to use their classrooms as 'change labs'. Experimenting with resources, pedagogical approaches and digital technologies can be difficult when imperatives focus on students passing exams. This push is about content reproduction, while experimentation in the classroom is about uncertainty,  a focus on learning and process. So, transformation? It's a big ask.

One site argues that 'training is key'. It begins by asking the following questions:

What do we know about successful pedagogical strategies utilizing ICTs for teaching and learning. What is known about effective teacher professional development? What do we know about the impact of ICTs on teacher performance? What do we know about the impact of ICTs on teacher motivation?

So how would 'training' solve those? Dianne and I have already argued that 'training' is entirely the wrong concept for education. And it can turn those who would otherwise be entirely competent, into dependent learners, always waiting to be 'trained' before trying anything. We surely want independent, adaptive help-seekers in education, don't we? One way to answer the question What is known about effective teacher professional development? is to go to the New Zealand BES report on teachers' professional learning. That synthesis indicates that professional development which takes place as close to the classroom as possible, but with the support of someone else, has the most traction and likelihood of 'sticking'. The other person can observe, ask questions, feedback ideas and help the buddy evaluate their practices and experiments with pedagogies and digital technologies.

The World Bank, remarkably, also questions the hype about digital technologies transforming pedagogical practice:

It is generally believed that ICTs can empower teachers and learners, making significant contributions to learning and achievement. However, current research on the impacts of ICTs on student achievement yields few conclusive statements, pro or con, about the use of ICTs in education. Studies have shown that even in the most advanced schools in industrialized countries, ICTs are generally not considered central to the teaching and learning process. Moreover, there appears to be a mismatch between methods used to measure effects and the type of learning promoted. Standardized testing, for example, tends to measure the results of traditional teaching practices, rather than new knowledge and skills related to the use of ICTs. It is clear that more research needs to be conducted to understand the complex links between ICTs, learning, and achievement.

This statement suggests that the World Bank is hardly endorsing the idea that transformation has happened. Perhaps we can find answers when we can refer to, for example, a blog post that cites Orlando's (2014) 5 year study in Australia, highlighting that changing pedagogy with or through digital technologies results from a long-term and complex process, often initiated by a problem or puzzle of practice. A key factor in this shift is teachers' reflective practices - their ability to critique their own performances in the light of evidence from others, particularly their students and colleagues. Finally, using digital technologies can be highly individual, since their use is based on specific  classroom contexts. Mishra and Koehler's TPACK framework argues, for example, that the closer to practice the digital technology is explored, the more likely it is to become part of the teacher's professional knowledge and practice. Perhaps that's also why the New Zealand Curriculum exhorts Teaching as Inquiry as a process for teachers to develop an evidence-informed reflective practice. It keeps the new learning close to the place in which it needs to develop, and makes it easier for teachers to contextualise new thinking. A ZPD moment perhaps?

The length of time it takes for pedagogical change to happen is also emphasised by Hennessy, Ruthven and Brindley. The idea of 'transformation' is therefore a long bow to draw as hinted at at the start of this piece: instead, change is often incremental. Voogt and Pelgrum, for example, outline how the changes to an 'information society' might affect curriculum content and classroom practices as the orientation shifts from the teacher to the learner. They suggest that "The design and implementation of curricula that are aimed at contributing to students’ lifelong learning competencies is one of the major challenges of curriculum change and improvement efforts nowadays" (p. 158). In other words, they imply that it is curriculum knowledge that might need the greatest overhaul, yet that is seldom mentioned in the hype about practice.  This contrasts with a BECTA report on a review of the literature about ICT and pedagogy, saying that there is a "pedagogy of ICT" (p. 7).  Pardon?

But it also begs the following questions:

• What if a teacher already has exemplary practice (characterised by openness to ideas, creativity and practices) when they start using digital technologies? 
• Will their pedagogy alter if they already practice co-constructive learning, and design student-centred approaches? 
• If a teacher already deliberately includes metacognitive tasks in the work they design for students, will that teacher's practices alter much? 
• Where do issues of copyright, ethics, privacy and digital safety now feature?

I am keen to hear others' views on this.