iPads in schools - are we missing the point?

27 July 2011

The debate about what it takes to truly engage students in learning indicates an inherent lack of trust in our schooling system, and the professionals who lead it. It focuses on short term costs, rather than the long-term value of children’s learning and its on-going returns to our economy and society.

The community’s reaction to Orewa College’s notice about e-learning tools exploded on the same day the NZ Institute launched their report recommending that e-learning in schools “be scaled rapidly and systematically”. Why are there such contradictory views in the community about how schooling should happen?

Decisions about which tools to use – from school camps and calculators to iPads - become a lot easier to make when you understand the purpose and value of education, and the cost of not doing it well.

What this underlines is the inherent gap between educational research and practice on one hand and community conservatism on the other.

The New Zealand Curriculum says the purpose of schooling is to create learners for life who can return society’s investment in them by being healthy, having and changing jobs, and getting on with neighbours and fellow citizens.

Evidence shows – and children tell us – that to achieve this they need to be engaged in learning that is relevant to them, to see progress in their learning and understand what they need next to be ready for the world they will inhabit. In the case of today’s children, that means for the next seventy or eighty years, or even longer.

The extensive research available shows that what is needed to achieve this success is quality teachers, quality teaching and quality leadership to create the most effective environment for these teachers.

Simply put, we need to attract the best people to become teachers, teach them to be effective teachers, and then provide them with an environment and the resources to do the best job possible to engage our children in learning for life. Without them, flash technologies will not be enough create the successful learners we need for New Zealand’s future workforce.

The value of this, as the NZ Institute argued in More Ladders, Fewer Snakes can be seen by looking at the cost when young people are unsuccessful: 45 percent of our unemployed are youth, 25 percent of those in prisons are youth, and our young people are dying or killing themselves at higher rates than nearly all other OECD countries.

So when our teaching profession, working from the best research available and their intimate knowledge of the students they work with, asks what is needed to make sure all our learners can be successful, why is there such an emotional reaction against their advice? Do we not trust our teaching profession to know what is best for students’ learning?

The OECD has confidence that New Zealand teachers consistently produce students with the highest levels of achievement in the world. It’s one of the few areas where we out-perform the Aussies. What our teachers are trying to do next is to make sure that all our students, not just some, can achieve to these same levels.

So those in the “iPad” debate ought to be asking whether the devices assist our goal of ensuring children are successful for the rest of their lives. Would these tools engage more students and enable them to see the relevance of their learning? Would they contribute to the best teaching and learning environment we can offer them? Or would we rather fund the much greater costs of unemployment or imprisonment?

If the answer includes iPads or netbooks, then we should applaud a school that is clear about what it will take for their students to succeed. The logistics of making this happen is its own separate conversation between a school and parents, if the tools are to be privately funded, and with our politicians if they are to be publicly funded. Rather than seeing these technologies as an additional cost, should we ask what we can stop funding, at personal or national level, if they help children’s success?

Together, the Orewa debate and the NZ Institute paper highlight the disconnection between communities and the way schools implement New Zealand’s education policy.

Parents might think that iPads are expensive gadgets when a pen and paper worked fine in their day. They might not instantly see the link between an iPad and their child’s ability to become a scientist, a builder, an entrepreneur, an employee.

Air New Zealand, Ports of Auckland, the University of Auckland and other leading corporate organisations funding the New Zealand Institute are convinced that the wasteful expenditure and human costs of unsuccessful children is too great for our country to bear. Urgent and radical remedies are required. It is not enough, they say, to remedy youth issues; they can and should be prevented.

Teachers’ daily work is delivering what it takes to create lifelong learners and contributing members of society. Teachers think about what is needed to assist each child with the skill set to identify goals in their lives, devise strategies to achieve these goals and then follow through. They think of tools as ways to engage students to see the value of learning for them.

Imagine if the energy spent on this debate over the last week were instead focused on what would it take to stop our young people going to prison, or suffering mental illness, or being unemployed? We might see that even one fewer inmate in our prisons can fund over 100 iPads, or 200 netbooks, for students – every year!

If the community and the teaching profession were on the same page and had a common understanding and valuation of education, then the conversation would not focus on whether an exercise book or an iPad should be on next year’s stationery list at one school.

ENDS

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