Installing new ed tech? Implementing new policies or procedures? I wish with all my heart that the People In Charge would ask a simple set of questions.
Who is helped by this? Which job does this make easier?
This has always been an issue, because it is easy to sit in an administration office and come up with procedures and paperwork that would make your life easier. And that's a perfectly human impulse-- to look at the work you're slogging through and think, "Man, this would be so much easier if I had my subordinates do X."
In education, it's often something data related. "I would love to have data on how many left-handed students bring their own pencils," muses some admin. "I wonder who could collect that data for me?" (Spoiler alert: it will be the teachers).
You don't have to look any further than the Big Standardized Test, which is the result of a whole bunch of policymakers saying, "Well, we could impose some of our favorite policies if only we had some data to excuse them."
The astonishing thing about applying the "Whose job does this make easier" lens to education is how truly rare it is that the answer is "teachers."
It's not always huge stuff. When my old school switched from a paper attendance system run out of the main office over to a computerized system run by teachers, it created one more nuisance. Now every period had to have a built in moment within the first five minutes of class that allowed me to go to my desktop computer and record attendance, rather than doing it on paper to be checked later against the master attendance list.
Was this a massive inconvenience? Of course not. But what generally grinds classroom teachers down is not the massive weight of large policy ideas, but death by a thousand small paper cuts.
And this was a case where the central office was very proud of how this saved labor and made their job easier. But many labor-saving programs are actually labor-moving programs, and in school, the labor is most commonly moved to teachers. A thousand paper cuts.
Imagine a district where the administration said, "Yes, this would make my job easier, but it would put more burden on the teachers, so let's not do it." If you don't have to imagine that district, God bless you.
I am not arguing that the goal should be to make teaching the easiest walk-in-the-park job ever envisioned; that is neither possible nor desirable. But the basic function of a school administration is to make it possible for every teacher in the building to do the best job they can, and every administrative decision should be examined through that lens. Every decision should be centered on the question, "Will this support teaching in classrooms?"
A whole family of ed tech products are based on the proposition "If teachers put their work into these tech platforms, it will be easier for administration to monitor them." Digital lesson plans don't make it any easier for teachers to plan, and in fact can add time to the whole process, but they do make it easier for admins to monitor those plans (and in extreme cases, admins may have visions of an entire digitized program, so that the teacher can be more easily replaced).
The newest tech wave of AI products should face the same question. What job does this AI-powered whizbang actually make easier? Is it, for instance, easier to have an AI extrude lesson plans which the teacher must then edit and check for errors? Who does this actually help? Does it help a teacher to automate the brainwork of teaching (hint: does it help athletes to have a robot lift weights for them).
Teachers aren't the only stakeholders who need to be considered. Yes, it may make communication easier for the school, but does it really help parents and students to have to download one more app in order to get important information from the school?
Even worse is the tech that is adopted simply because it's cool, with no idea that it will help anyone at all. It's just cool, you know, and we've heard other schools are getting it. Surely you'll figure out some use for it.
The thing is, every new tech a teacher adopts (willingly or not) is either helping or hurting. Even if it's not actively making the job harder, a non-helping piece of tech represents opportunity cost, money that could have been spent on something that was actually useful.
So administrations, I beg you-- before you adopt, ask yourself who would be helped by this new technowidget, and if the answer is not "The people who do the actual work of teaching students," maybe ask yourself if it's really worth purchasing.
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