Innovation
Teacher Education Can’t
Ignore Technology
Newly minted teachers have consistently
complained that their teacher education pro-
grams don’t prepare them for the real world of
teaching. Courses in the history, philosophy,
MONICA MARTINEZ and psychology of education plus a few meth-
ods courses culminating with a semester or
maybe a year of teaching under a mentor teacher
— this is essentially the standard teacher prepa-
ration program. Then, they enter a classroom,
and people wonder why they’re not prepared
for reality.
Teacher Reimagining how teacher education might
candidates must look requires that we first imagine how learn-
learn differently if ing might look different — and already does
they’re going to look different for some students in K-12. I’m
not confident this is foremost in the minds of
create classrooms
those thinking about how to provide a more
that meet the needs experiential teacher preparation program.
of a new generation Consider a few examples, some drawn from
of learners. real schools and some from scenario planning.
They depict the way that schools can adapt to
the different ways that children learn and want
to learn. Ask yourself if the teacher education
programs you know are preparing teachers
who can create and provide this kind of instruc-
tion for children.
Ninth graders at Green Tech, which is part
of Eastside High School in Austin, Texas, a tra-
ditionally low-performing school, complete 30
minutes of silent reading twice a week and then
log on to a web site to join a teacher-created
group that’s essentially a Facebook for book
lovers that includes a discussion board. The
teacher posts a discussion topic, and students
write about what they’ve just read. On Friday,
the teacher leads a face-to-face discussion in class
with students who are reading the same book.
After reading, these same students “work to-
gether in teams, writing and designing a chil-
dren’s book.” To do this, “they have a choice
of either illustrating by hand or using Comic
Life, which is a program that they have just
learned in another class on computer applica-
tions” (Handel and Heaps 2010). When the
children’s books are completed, the teacher
MONICA MARTINEZ is president of New Tech Network,
Napa, Calif.
74 Kappan October 2010 kappanmagazine.org
shares them with students at a nearby elemen-
tary school. Green Tech is a school in the New
Tech Network.
In a scenario depicting schools of the future,
Christensen and Horn describe students learn-
ing Mandarin Chinese grammar by using lap-
tops and wearing noise-canceling headphones
(www.edutopia.org/student-centric-education-
technology). One student directs the work of a
brick mason on his computer screen by having
him assemble a sentence in the same way that
he would construct a wall — block by block.
Stacks of blocks with words on them are in the
background of the screen; each is colored for
its potential role in the sentence. The student
directs the mason to pick blocks out of the ap-
propriate stacks and put them in the correct or-
der of a Mandarin sentence. When all the re-
quired blocks have been assembled in the
proper sequence, the Mandarin word replaces
the English on each block, and the student joins
the brick mason in reading the sentence (which
is written phonetically in the Roman alphabet).
Another student in the same classroom is learn-
ing the same material from the same software
program by rote memorization — listening to
a native Mandarin speaker and then repeating
the sentences, in a mode of learning familiar to
her parents’ generation. Providing customized
and individualized learning is the outcome for
this school.
Quest to Learn School, a public school in
New York City, uses the video game as its
model for how to teach. Students use and de-
sign video games as part of their classes. For
instance, math students “travel around the
world” as a citizen of Creepytown — an imag-
inary city where students learn math and Eng-
lish. Students play travel agent, convert cur-
rencies, keep blogs about their travel experi-
ences, and budget trips. At one point in the
school year, Creepytown went broke because
an economic crisis is built into the game. Stu-
dents had to figure out why Creepytown’s
economy collapsed and how to bring in rev-
enue to rebuild the economy. In response, stu-
dents proposed designing a theme park as a way
to generate revenue.
 Through Creepytown and other games,
Katie Salen, a game designer who is executive
director of Quest to Learn, believes “students
learn to adapt and improvise.” More impor-
tant, Salen believes that computer games pro-
vide a complex dynamic system from which
students will develop systems thinking. “Be-
cause of the complexity of problems, if you’re
not able to look at them as a system, you’re just
going to look at a blur. You will just be over-
whelmed by the complexity,” Salen said.
We have to recognize that learning is most
often taking place anywhere but “in school.”
Being in a traditional school has become the
“In the digital age, the learning environment is turned on its head — it’s no longer
just the dynamic of the student, the teacher and the curriculum. Today, kids learn
and interact with others — even from around the world — every time they go
online, or play a video game, or engage through a social networking site.”
— Connie Yowell, director of education, MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org)
equivalent of a simulated experience from the
20th or 19th century. In our current form of
school, students are reduced to executing dis-
creet tasks in isolation from other classes and
peers, and most often out of context of other
courses as well as their lives and experiences.
But in the schools identified in this column,
teachers are mentors and individual learning
coaches who enable students to become en-
gaged and motivated, partaking in interactive
learning with computers and other technology
devices across content areas.
Such schools and classrooms will not be-
come widespread until incoming teachers and
current teachers learn technology skills and ap-
plications along with new pedagogical methods
of incorporating that technology into class-
rooms. They must have opportunities to have
fieldwork in a teaching environment that’s con-
sistent with what they have learned in their
teacher preparation programs. For instance, the
University of Texas at Austin started UTeach in
1997 and certifies students to teach math, sci-
ence, and computer science at the secondary
level. UTEACH prepares teacher candidates
to use student-centered, rigorous, applied, and
engaging pedagogy, but it also immediately
immerses students in the classroom through
internships and fieldwork. UTEACH students
don’t wait for a single culminating experience,
such as a practicum or student teaching. The
program works hard to place students in
schools consistent with their preparation and
teaching methods. In the Austin area, and for-
merly in the Denver metroplex, UTEACH
students were automatically placed into a New
Tech school for their long-term teaching ex-
perience specifically so that they could prac-
tice project-based teaching.
The most common immersion experience Being in a traditional
is a clinical program or a teacher residency pro- school has become
gram, such as the Urban Residency Program. the equivalent of a
But many of these programs don’t help candi- simulated experience
dates develop new pedagogical methods to in-
from the 20th or 19th
corporate technology into the classroom.
They may want to learn how to do this from century.
the University of South Dakota, which trains
all secondary majors in project-based learning
methods. Funded by a Bush Grant, this work
occurs through a partnership with the Project-
Based Learning High School in Sioux Falls,
supported by the New Tech Network.
Increasingly, the onus is on teacher prepa-
ration to reimagine how to most effectively
prepare future teachers to teach students to be
successful in the kinds of classroom described
here — and how to create more classrooms that
comprehend how today’s young people learn,
play, socialize, and participate in civic life.
Harvard University education professor
Chris Dede was talking about higher educa-
tion faculty when he said this, but his com-
ments are just as relevant to K-12 teachers: “If
you were going to see a doctor and the doctor
said, ‘I’ve been really busy since I got out of
medical school, and so I’m going to treat you
with the techniques I learned back then,’ you’d
be rightly incensed. . . . Yet there are a lot of
faculty who say with a straight face, ‘I don’t
need to change my teaching,’ as if nothing has
been learned about teaching since they had
been prepared to do it — if they’ve ever been
prepared to.” K
REFERENCE
Handel, Stephen J., and Alan Heaps. Teachers Are the
Center of Education: Profiles of Eight Teachers. New
York: College Board and Phi Delta Kappa International,
2010.
kappanmagazine.org V92 N2 Kappan 75
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