I’ve been a Social Sciences and English teacher for a long time now. Recently, I’ve taken the step into academia, and I’ve begun working with pre-service social science teachers as they prepare for careers in the classroom. This has been a powerful experience for me, because it has allowed me to examine my own practices and philosophies, as well as providing me with the opportunity to engage with the latest educational theory and research.
I’m pleased to see that, in the course that I’m teaching, technology plays an important role in teacher learning. In particular, something that I am very excited about is the idea of High Possibility Classrooms (Hunter, 2015). Let me explain why this excites me: traditionally, I think that students in Geography and History classrooms have learnt about the subjects for the most part. They’ve learnt about the Ancient Greeks or the Egyptians or about the features of a rainforest, or what the HDIs mean and how they’re calculated. There is usually an element of skills – students might learn to consider evidence or calculate grid references – but they’re usually divorced from any actual data; instead, they’re limited to artificial examples – make believe scenarios. Of course, I’m speaking in generalities here – there have always been exceptional teachers of history and geography who have made the learning real for students.
When technology is meaningfully introduced (more on that later), then suddenly students have the opportunity to not just learn about history and geography, but to learn to be historians and geographers. That is, they can actually become involved in local community based real world projects. How much more powerful is it for studnets to know that the data they analyse, the material they are learning about, is actually related to real projects? Instead of learning about something from a textbook, they are involved in real world, authentic research. Just like historians and geographers, students have to consider what they have found, what it means, decide what it importnat about it, and then choose different ways to communicate it to different audiences. These are critically important decisions, and they are the decisions that historians and geographers – not to mention many other professions – have to make every single day. Think about it: when was the last time you saw a geographer who wasn’t using a computer? Why are they so absent in today’s geography classrooms?
This idea rests upon the idea of High Possibility Classrooms. Building on the work of TPACK and SAMR, Jane Hunter (2015) developed this model of design-based learning for technology integration. This is a classroom based model – Hunter examined 4 exemplary teachers and how they both understood their use of technology and how those understanding were deployed in the classroom in order to determine what was fresh about those approaches. In addition, Hunter also spoke to students about wht being a learner in those spaces meant.
Hunter identified five conceptions that framed teachers successful use of technology.
1. Theory – teachers consciously applied their knowledge of educational theories to their use of technology in the classroom.
2. Creativity – teachers looked for activities that gave students more opportunities to be inventive.
3. Public Learning – teachers looked for ways that students could display learning to an audience beyond the teacher.
4. Life Preparation – students were encouraged to think about how their learning was related to the world beyond the school.
5. Contextual Accommodations – In order for technology to be used at its most effective, sometimes changes were necessary in the way that the school or classroom was run.