The Drill vs. The Hole: The Importance of Being a Relevant Educator

In the earlier 20th century, educators had very few tools to use to accomplish their goal of educating students. Pens, pencils, markers, blackboards, notebooks, and construction paper were staples in every classroom. Eventually, technology evolved and better teaching tools emerged: overhead projectors, record players, filmstrips, movies, VCRs, tape recorders, Xerox printers, and four-function calculators. Each educator made a personal decision as to how much, or how little, they would use the aforementioned tools. Those were the same tools, although very primitive by today’s standards, that society used for curation, calculation, communication, collaboration, and, the ultimate goal of education.

Since all of the tools were commonplace and easy to use, teachers did not need to adjust to a changing educational landscape or gain professional development to use the new tools. Educational tools stayed the same for many years. There was no attack on anyone’s comfort zone. There were no time-consuming classes to update methodologies. Change was slow.Technology’s influence had very little effect on education until the 1980s. Even then, teachers had a choice of whether or not to employ technology in their methodology. Where the rub came in was that our culture and society in general had no such restraints on technology. Technology began to move at a rapid pace, essentially wiping out brands that could not keep up . Examples of this wipeout include: Kodak, Blockbuster, recording industries, as well as many other major corporations. Even with the consequences of the failure to maintain relevance, many educators have yet to effectively incorporate technology into their methodology.

I was reminded recently of a story often used at sales conferences about buying an electric drill. The audience was asked if anyone had ever bought an electric drill. Almost every hand in the room went up. That was when the speaker explained what it was the audience had really bought. It was a HOLE. It was a hole that they needed, and not a drill and that was the goal. To attain that goal, that needed hole, in the most effective and efficient way, the proper tool was needed. There are many ways to get that hole. Other, more primitive tools could easily be employed, but the alternatives would not be as easy, as efficient or as effective.

If the goal of education is to teach kids the skills that will enable them to survive and thrive in the world, a world even more technology-driven than today, then we need to change our methodology, as well as how we measure learning to meet that goal. If the skills of curation, calculation, communication, collaboration and creation are to be stressed, then educators need to be brought up to speed on the tools and methods necessary to accomplish that goal. Educators need to be innovative and relevant.

Maintaining relevancy as an educator requires some amount of computer literacy. Without such literacy, an educator will not only be irrelevant, but also illiterate. Neither trait makes for an effective teacher. Yes, one can be a good teacher without technology, but if technology can make a good teacher a better teacher, why struggle against that? Where is the advantage of a teacher not learning more in order to teach better? It doesn’t work that way.

Technology opens the door to many obstacles for educators to overcome, as well as many new things to learn, but it also provides an opportunity to find new solutions and teaching methods applicable in an ever-evolving education industry. Technology through social media, for instance, enables educators to control and direct their own learning in a way that was not possible before. Our biggest problem moving forward is that we do not know what it is that we do not yet know. This path has the potential to make teaching more efficient, effective and relevant. Achieving that goal depends on the teacher’s skill, as much as getting that hole in the wall depends on a carpenter’s drill. How we get to the goal can be made easier by the tools we employ and model for our kids. To better educate our kids, we need to first better educate their educators.

THOMAS WHITBY is the co-author of The Relevant Educator: How Connectedness Empowers Learning. He is retired from Public Education after serving 34 years as a secondary English teacher, and spent an additional six years as an adjunct Professor at St Joseph’s College in New York. He is a Co-Creator of #Edchat<, an award winning education discussion group on Twitter. He is an education Blogger, My Island View: Educational, Disconnected Utterances, as well as a blogger for Edutopia. Connect with him on Twitter @tomwhitby.