Category Archives: Managing School Change

The Advantages of a Plain English Instructional Model

Recently I have started to promote a Plain English Instructional Model to help promote pedagogical conversations in school and to help contextualize our conversations about education technology around learning.The primary advantage of having a plain English instructional model is that it is often more easily adapted by our staff who are strong “Joe” and “Jane Average” instructors. These are the folks who do a solid job of educating their students, but leave at the end of the school day and don’t tend to get excited by new programs or innovations. If we want these teachers to change (expand their skill set), then we need to introduce programs and approaches

framed in a way that they can relate to and validates the pieces they are already good at. (After all, these typical teachers make up the bulk of the educators in our schools.)

For example, there was a strong focus placed on project-based learning at the beginning of MLTI. I wonder sometimes if PBL didn’t really take off because, although the enthusiastic teachers implemented it, the much larger group of conventional teachers simply didn’t see themselves in PBL (“Oh, project-based learning. Tammy does that, God bless her. Her kids love it and she does a great job. But that’s not what we do…”). Those solid conventional teachers live most of the time in the Foundational Knowledge bucket. PBL lives mostly in the Putting Knowledge to Use bucket. When we simply spoke about PBL, without the larger context of a more comprehensive instructional model, there was no bridge or on-ramp for those typical teachers.

Using the Plain English Instructional Framework, however, provides those bridges and on-ramps. Every time a teacher does a great job helping students learn foundational knowledge, they can point to that bucket and say, “I did that.” They receive validation for what they do. But at the same time they point to something they did, they also see buckets that they do less frequently. It creates the opportunity for them to say, “I wonder how I might help my students develop deeper learning?” And maybe eventually other buckets such as Motivating Students or Putting Knowledge to Use.

Another advantage of a Plain English Instructional Model is that it is in plain English. Many conventional teachers seem to dislike or distrust jargon. Is it because of the long list of innovations that have been introduced in school but never lasted long? Is it because we all wonder why we have to use fancy words for ideas that can be explained plainly? Is it because you have to be “in the know” to understand jargon, but anyone can understand plain English?

Our goal is to help improve the learning for all students in all classrooms. That means the bulk of teachers we want to help expand their teacher practice aren’t the early adopters or the folks who excitedly jump on new ideas. It is the solid, conventional teachers, who will change with good reason, if it makes their life easier in the classroom, or if they quickly see it benefiting students, but who are suspicious of change and “innovation.” This is the group we need to support and the group we must target with our efforts.

The Plain English Instructional Model is one way we are trying to support these educators.

Ed Tech Research is Clear: Owning a Device Does Not Improve Learning

Scanning the media on education technology could easily lead one to believe we are wasting our money when putting devices into the hands of students.

Whether it is districts that have had disturbing problems trying to implement technology for learning (such as here, or here), or folks who tell us why we shouldn’t have devices in school, or schools that have decided that technology is too disruptive and have banned it, or authors who caution about the over-promising with technology (such as here, or here), it is not surprising that we are dubious of investing in education technology, and wonder “why bother?”

Digital LearningOn the other hand, educators in Washington County, PA, find that their devices benefit students, and in Auburn, ME, educators found that when they carefully selected apps aligned to their curriculum or participated in professional learning focused on using apps to build conceptual understanding of mathematics, student learning improved.

So what’s different between these two groups?

From my perspective, each of these instances are really just reflections of either the problems we experience when we focus on the device more than we do the learning, or the benefits of doing the reverse (the notion of “more verbs, fewer nouns”). It is ludicrous to look inside a classroom and decide if technology is a waste of investment or a distraction without also investigating how we are using them for learning. Simply having technology does not improve learning.

And there are plenty of authors and organizations out there who are anxious to help us be successful with education technology:

Here is our advice to your school when considering the value of your education technology:

  • If the goal of your technology initiative is to provide students with technology, then all you will end up with is students with devices (and probably distracted, off-task students at that).
  • Your technology initiative should consider the kinds of learning experiences you want for your students and the supports you put in place to help teachers create those experiences.
  • Keep in mind that student distraction is almost never a device problem. It is almost always a boredom problem. We must stop blaming technology and get better at engaging students with our teaching.
  • Make classroom management in technology rich classrooms a part of your school’s professional learning plan. Support teachers in developing strategies beyond sending kids to the principal and requesting that devices be locked and blocked.
  • When reviewing research on technology in schools, ask yourself if the study simply looks at the presence of technology, or if it looks at how the technology was used. Further, did the study measure student engagement? Don’t put too much value in the incomplete studies – we already know that owning devices doesn’t improve learning.

In short, start with the pedagogy, then think about the devices.