Tools, Part II
Dear Friends,
In my last newsletter, I looked at the way we think about tools and practices at various levels in education: for students, for teachers, and in our work as leaders. We saw Roy Bahat suggest we become more thoughtful about the tools we choose and use, as we look to the future of work and education.
Choose your own tools?
The idea that people should be free to choose their own tools might be a little confusing. What if some teachers decide to use Microsoft Word while others are on Google Docs? And the one lone holdout insists on WordPerfect? Wouldn’t that mean chaos for a school trying to work together in a cohesive way?
I think this objection ignores that the tools we use are always bound by constraints. If you’re working alone, you have relative freedom to choose widely among whatever tool feels most comfortable, either because it fits your work style best, or because it asks the least of you in terms of learning or changing. But when you join a faculty, you have a new constraint: you’re part of a community of learners and teachers. It is natural that the community will make some choices about some tools it will use: for communication, for sharing and collaborating on documents, for assessing student learning, and so on.
Even so, individual students and teachers should feel individual ownership over at least some of their tools. Why is that?
Because teachers are professionals, growing in expertise over time. Professionals grow in their craft, over the course of their careers. (They should, in any case! There’s a famous quote about the immense difference between a teacher who has twenty years of experience versus the one who has just had one year of experience twenty times.) Teacher expertise grows not only in content knowledge, but in pedagogical knowledge, and that hidden, generative area Lee Shulman called pedagogical content knowledge.
As a thought experiment, what if teachers knew they could get a tax write off for their own technology tools? Instead of a $250 US federal tax credit per year, what if this amount were ten times as big? What would it mean for all teachers to know they could have up-to-date tools to carry with them as they moved among schools, between districts, or even across state lines?
“But technology is just a tool”
As my friend and professor of education at Kobe Shinwa Women’s University Masataka Nakaue recently said, we do ourselves a great disservice when we say that “technology is just a tool.” Masataka asks us to think about why it is that among top performers, among people at the top of their craft in any field, their tools are not “just tools:”
“In recent years, Ichiro Suzuki used a bat that was custom-made by a Japanese bat-maker and he never let anyone else touch it. [Formula One racers] Ayrton Senna and Prost… won 15 of 16 races together, not only because of their outstanding abilities, but also because of the meticulous analysis of McLaren-Honda's telemetry system with their staff.”
Shouldn’t it be the same with teachers, as they grow in expertise? And with us as education leaders — what tools and practices are supporting you as you grow as leader? As you lead a complex learning organization in a chaotic time? (Check out this great interview, as Range.co CEO Dan Pupius talks about building “sensing systems” in an organization here, starting at the 1:15 mark.)
Tool shout-outs:
I couldn’t work without a set of key tools. For writing this newsletter—and for any personal writing I do—I lean on the wonderful app Ulysses. Among other things, it allows me to brainstorm, write, and edit seamlessly from my computer and phone, wherever I am.
And for this issue, I started to play with DeepL for translating, which at least for Japanese does a better job than Google Translate (and far far better than other tools).
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