Are We Teaching the Future? Or the Past?

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This post is inspired by Alice Keeler’s May 1, 2017, keynote speech at the #ITIP2017 Ohio Google Summit: “In The Future, Cars Drive Themselves”

I saved this image about a year ago. Don’t know why, didn’t know if I was going to use it, wasn’t sure how I was going to use it, but I knew that while it specifically speaks to the revolutionary work done by both Steve Jobs and by Apple, it generally speaks to the evolutionary work we need to be doing in education.  

If you follow me or my blog, you know I’ll evangelize until I’m hoarse (or until someone throat punches me just to shut me up) about the shift that needs to occur from depositing knowledge into our learners’ heads to allowing them to acquire knowledge for themselves.

And yet…

We’re still asking questions that can be answered with a simple Google search. We’re still feeding factoids that can be found online. We’re still assessing kiddos based on their ability to memorize those factoids. 

“We need to teach,” says Google guru Alice Keeler, “like Google exists.” 

A-freakin’-men.

We need students to create. Not to memorize. 

(By the way, do you know that the synonym for “memorize” is “recollect?” Re-collect. As in collect again.)

Why are we asking students to memorize the dates of the Norman Invasion? Is that learning? We’re fooling ourselves if we think our searchable questions are original. Don’t believe me? Well, Buttercup, check out this video about PhotoMath, an app that uses your students’ smartphone camera to snap a pic of a mathematical equation worksheet--and then solves the problem and gives them the answer. If we want answers that aren’t searchable, we need to design questions that preclude that.

So, instead of treating Google like a red-headed stepchild, banning search bars from our classrooms, let’s make friends with it. Let’s keep the end-user in mind when designing instruction. I don’t care how afraid we are of the technology, we have to remember for whom we work--and that’s the kiddos. 

If Google’s in the process of design self-driving cars, how about we design self-driving learners?  If we hire a personal trainers, we don’t expect them to do the work for us (though I wish they did!). So why do we do the work--vocabulary lists, study guides, packaged lecture notes--for the students?

​Are we teaching the future?

Or are we teaching the past?

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