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| Introduction Technology is not the solution to the complex problems that face our schools but it can dramatically increase the community of participants designing solutions. Fundamental change in the next decades will result from participation in education by a larger community of people who the Internet brings together, rather then from access to technology. This is because education is a human enterprise. It is dependent on the relationship between teachers and learners in a specific social, political, and historical context. My paper focuses on this context and way in which changes to the learning environment alters the relationships between teachers and learners, and between school and society. The paper is divided into two parts. The first section examines current theories on learning and their relationship to the educational context of school. I frame my ideas on learning by using four dimensions of the learning environment identified in a book entitled How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School,edited by John Bransford, Ann Brown and Rodney Cocking (NRC, 1999). They describe the learning environments as:
I describe the intersection of these dimensions of effective learning contexts with the opportunities made possible by access to communication technology. Where there is a lag between innovative practices and research evidence, I describe examples of how the Web is affecting student learning in specific settings. These factors define the context of learning for teachers as well as students. The role of teachers change when there are significant shifts in the organization of the learning environments, the orientation of learners, and availability of instructional tools and technology. These changes call for new roles for teachers. In this second section, I focus on the relationship of teaching and research, historically and in the present time, relying on Lagemann new book, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research and Berieter's online book: Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. I also use data from the recent Teaching, Learning And Computing: 1998 A National Survey of Teachers and Schools to describe levels of professional engagement of teachers and its relationship to teacher philosophy and practice. This data suggests that professionally engaged teachers differ significantly from classroom teachers who are isolated in a "private" practice in their classrooms. This data, I argue, should open some serious concerns over a structure that encourages closed classroom doors. We need plans to make teaching a much more collaborative community activity. I close with some new ideas for how to create learning environments for students and teachers that balance the four dimensions of learning. These ideas are offered in the spirit of a collective rethinking of schooling in the context of evolving understandings of learning and our rapid advances in the development of tools that mediate minds. | |||||
| Interactive Learning Environments Educational goals are tied to learning environments, as one changes so must the other. Literacy goals 100 years ago for many students were to be able to read and write names, copy and read texts, and generate lists of merchandise. Literacy goals of today require mastery over many different genres of writing, persuasive, expressive, expository, procedural and expect students to be able to interpret, compare, contrast, and analyze complex texts. These differences in learning goals also hold for mathematics. Students learn the mathematical foundations necessary for careers that did not exist 100 years ago. There has been exponential growth in the amount of recorded knowledge so that memorization of factual information is no longer an effective approach to mastery of a field. Conceptions of learning have also shifted with a century of research on learning and teaching. The developmental, experiential, and philosophical notions of learning described by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead in the early years of the past century gave way to individual, behavioristically oriented conceptions of learning based on the early work of Edward Thorndike and extended by B. F. Skinner. Mid century, theories of knowledge construction by Jean Piaget contrasted sharply with those of Thorndike and Skinner. In the last two decades, beginning with theories of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner in the 80's and followed by advances in cognitive science, educational research, and understandings of the neurological functioning of the brain, our understanding of learning continues to develop. The current conception is of a more constructivist process with a much stronger focus on the interactive processes. These changes over the past few decades are detailed in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, the 1999 report of the Committee on the Development of Learning Sciences to the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences. The entire book is available on the Internet. It describes effective learning environments as the integration of four dimensions. | |||||
| Effective learning environments are...
Learner-centered implies that the learner is actively engaged in the process of knowledge construction. Learning is an active, exciting process that can be difficult, frustrating, and challenging but is not inherently boring. Boredom sets in when learning is reduced to repetitive actions or assignments that are disconnected from larger goals or contexts. Skill development requires some amount of practice but practice is motivated by performance. The player who shoots baskets or blocks shots in practice has visions of how these skills will play out in the next game. The game provides the attitude and motivation to practice hard. In the context of the classroom, performance is often reduced to memory exercises on tests. When students are engaged in projects, teachers often feel constrained to limit student choice to topics which can be well investigated with the resources available in the classroom, or in the school or local libraries. This restricted range means that teachers will be reading repetitive papers each year. Students know that this writing is simply an exercise, their teachers are not reading their writings for content and ideas but rather to evaluate the form of the writing. For many students and teachers, there is a disconnect with students redefining the task as writing "what the teacher wants to read." With the growing informational and human resources on the Internet, a student, with access, can find a wide range of materials on almost any topic. If students have more latitude, in both the topic and resources selected, it is more likely that they will be able to create original knowledge products. More important than choice is an audience that is interested in the outcome of their research, development or insights. Research has demonstrated that authentic tasks with real audiences have resulted in increased learning, stronger writing and longer retention of learning and even increased performance on standardized tests of writing. But more than test score results, students engaged in building knowledge products for others develop a sense of purpose and value. They contribute to their community. Thousands of teachers in classrooms across the country are using the Internet in project-based learning to engage students in authentic tasks. I am going to briefly profile two teachers for the following reasons. First, these examples describe meaningful contributions of students in first and fourth grade. This is offered in contrast to those who argue that young children are harmed by early use of technology. Secondly, in these classrooms, learning has been completely organized around meaningful projects. These are not isolated projects that succeeded. These teachers have shifted the way teaching and learning is organized. Finally, these teachers have themselves demonstrated a remarkable process of learning across many years and their learning has been matched by improvements in students' performance on all measures. These changes did not take place in a single year. Research suggests a 3-5 year period for teacher change to affect student skill. My experiences with teachers suggest that it is closer to the five year time period. Change takes time.
Kristi's and Barry's classroom Web sites are testimony, in themselves, as to how the Internet can reshape education. Their students arrive with little or no experience with technology. Instead of focusing on computer literacy skills, the students use the technology to accomplish important educational goals. They join in a process of making knowledge products. In creating external documents of their work, they are much more engaged. Kristi's first and second grade children gave the Keynote presentation at the IEARN international Conference. This "exhibition" of their skills was very impressive. Barry's students begin creating very simple Web designs, but at the end of the year they are able to incorporate multimedia into their sites. But learning to use the technology is not the goal. Barry knows that the technology will change many times before his students see the workplace. Instead he spends his time teaching them to interview, write, check and recheck sources. But what is most important is the relationships that develop between the students and other adults in their community. The ThinkQuest Internet Challenge offers a different structure for organizing learning that is modeled on group project development common in today's business world. Students tackle the problem of teaching a subject or skill to their peers. Capitalizing on students' personal learning interests, encouraging them to develop their own skills to find, synthesize and use information in creative ways, provides a much richer learning experience for the students as well as the teacher. When students use the Internet to find resources that are new to their teacher, develop original projects, and find other people to help them with their work, they are engaging in an important process of constructing rather then receiving knowledge. Internet resources constantly change. So even if students are pursuing a similar project to that of students a year ago, there may be very different materials available. Helping students to become "knowledge scouts" looking for new materials to extend lessons is a renewable educational resource.
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| Effective learning environments are...
Knowledge-centered learning highlights the important role of the teacher in setting the "course" of learning. Over the past century of curriculum development, discipline-based groups have contributed many effective ways to organize essential skills and knowledge. But knowledge building is not a finished activity in any field. Textbooks reduce multiple perspectives to a simplified consensual viewpoint at a fixed moment in time. These secondary sources present knowledge as non-contested facts with less attention to the community debate, the historical discoveries or analytic reasoning that historians employ to come to their conclusions. In the past, it was not realistic to expect students to find primary sources. The Internet changes the relative value of textbooks. Students, like historians, engage in real research, interviewing people who were involved in historical events, accessing real documents, and using them to understand, draw conclusions, and debate different perspectives. Here are three examples. The first one is a ThinkQuest project and the other two result from a collaboration between South Kingstown High School and Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group. All three of them involve students becoming historians collecting and preserving historical data. Curriculum research and development was the university's solution to poorly trained teachers. Some researchers overtly sought to design curriculum that could be "teacher proof." The knowledge, they hoped, would be learned directly from the materials. But technology has never replaced the teacher for one simple reason. Teaching is an emergent, interactive constructed activity that requires a complex blend of knowledge of the students and knowledge of the curriculum. The Internet, like a textbook, is a valuable source of knowledge that can help in the process of making decisions about what and how to teach discipline knowledge. Our knowledge is contained not only in what we write but also in the way that we preserve and share what we learn. The Internet brings centuries of discoveries (telescopes, microscopes, transmitters, receptors, recorders, light, camera, sound and action) together in the digital context and makes them available for student and teacher use. Some examples:
When the network is viewed as curriculum resources, the issue shifts from finding enough information to understanding how to relate different sources of information. Students, as well as teachers, can compare perspectives from different groups and come to terms with intellectual authority.
When students (as well as teachers) are building knowledge through working with peers and experts, they encounter the same problems. With multiple sources, they must face and participate in the social process of knowledge building. If one source says that killer whales are really dolphins and another lists them as whales, who is right? If one research project shows students writing test scores increasing when they are engaged in authentic projects with real audiences and another shows that grammar drills led to high scores, which program should a teacher implement? How does one find the "right" answer or know when an answer is believable? What are the ground rules of evidence, inference and theory building. In the past, multiple sources of information were collected, analyzed and summarized in textbook treatments of issues. The arguments are settled, the central positions are displayed, and the student's (and sometimes the teacher's) role is to accept the authority of the "correct" account. All knowledge is created and it is in the process of creating knowledge that should be a major focus of our classroom learning. When students and teachers are engaged in creating the "shared" understandings, they are learning to be a part of the knowledge society. The challenge of the knowledge-centered dimension of learning is to balance knowledge construction activities with activities that help students develop the suite of mental tools needed for this task. Basic skill development is an important dimension of knowledge building. When these skills are placed in the larger context of authentic learning tasks, they are acquired more efficiently. | |||||
| Effective learning environments are...
Community-centered is one of the most critical dimensions of the learning environment. A community of learners is distinctly different from a classroom of learners. The differences are described in more detail in an article by Fulton and Riel in Edutopia. A learning community is a group of people who have:
At the beginning of the 20th century, students had access to their teacher, the other students, and if they were lucky, some books, and community plans or "standards" for education. Throughout the century, concerns have been raised about the quality of schooling, the nature of teaching and learning, and the function the school plays in society and the role of society in schools. Early concerns about the quality of teaching focused attention on the need for better teacher preparation. Teacher education was moved from secondary and "normal" schools to education departments in colleges and universities. The curriculum was the focus of reforms in the 20's, 40's, 70's, and most recently following the poor showing of the U.S. students in international testing, in the 90's. The call for national standards is offered as a partial solution for uneven or poor quality teaching. Conceptions of learning also shifted dramatically over the century from philosophical debates over nature and nurture, to psychological focus on control of rewards and punishments to current cognitive and sociological emphasis on knowledge reconstruction within social-cultural-historical contexts. Reform efforts have also extended beyond changes to teaching, learning and the curriculum to address the extreme differences in the differential distribution of educational resources. National strategies for improving equity in educational opportunity have been implemented with partial success over the past 50 years beginning in earnest with desegregation efforts and federal policies and programs. But perhaps one of the shifts that is not so clearly recognized is a change in the function of schools. Schools of the 20th century were designed to serve a sorting function sending forward only those students who had the ability to succeed at intellectual work. School learning was only one of many avenues toward meaningful participation in society. Today the need for intellectual skills has multiplied so rapidly that school success is necessary for entry into most positions in the workforce. So, for the first time on a massive scale, there has been a movement to hold teachers accountable for the learning of all students, not just the students in the college-bound tracks. Educating all children is a fundamentally different enterprise and cannot be done in the same structure that was designed for educating those who have extensive intellectual and financial resources at home. This new equalizing function requires more from citizens than their tax dollars. Public schools need intellectual investments from citizens. The community of learners are important resources and schools differ in their access to human intellectual resources. Equitable access to human intellectual resources is at the heart of the focus on learning communities. Technological advances over the century have made it possible for hundreds of thousands of people to extend their intellectual resources to teachers and students in the classrooms. They participate in classroom learning through their books, posters, films, movies, science kits, math manipulatives, models, photographs, computer programs, and writing technology. Their participation, not the technology, is what is changing schooling. Internet technology makes it feasible to exponentially increase the community of people involved in education. Students can spend time teaching and learning from people who could not visit their class. These first two communities predate the Internet, and have involved students in project based online for nearly two decades. The third example illustrates the intersection of community building Web tools with educational communities focused on professional development of teachers.
Most people do not know how to support learning, either face-to-face or online. Adults are often too eager to share their skill and knowledge without reflecting on the needs of learners. Learners often have access to information, but they lack the knowledge of how to use that information in productive ways. To help students make sense of new information, they need help in connecting it to what they know and then extending their knowledge in new directions. Master teachers could serve a valued role in helping adults learn to work with students, and students learn to work with adults who have a depth of knowledge in many different areas. Since teaching is a needed parental skill and workforce skill, helping adults learn how to participate in classroom teaching and learning could have valued secondary effects. Mentoring projects on the Internet add the interactive presence of many new people in classrooms--authors, scientists, designers, developers, mathematicians, and community leaders. With communication technologies it is now easier to create environments in which students can learn by doing, receive feedback from peers and outside experts, and continually refine their understanding to build new knowledge. And finally, the Internet is making it possible for conferences like this one to be experienced by people who could not travel to Washington. It transforms the verbal context of a conference into a written event that leaves an intellectual footprint that can be followed years after the event. The development of the Department of Education Website is, in itself, a perfect example of the transformation that is taking place as we move from an information sources to community building tools. | |||||
| Effective learning environments are...
At the beginning of the 20th century, IQ tests were celebrated as a fair way to classify and then sort students into educational categories or tracks based on talents that many assumed were genetically determined. When children had learning difficulties, they are referred to a school psychologist who uses a range of IQ and achievement tests to locate the source of the problem. It was assumed from the outset that the child "owns" the problem. He or she is said to be learning disabled, a slow learner, or have an educational handicap. Recent neurocognitive research suggests that the richness of early learning experiences affects the physical development of the brain and may be a major cause of intellectual development. If these new theories linking learning experiences with brain development come to be accepted, the optimal match between characteristics of the learner and the learning environment, rather than parental genetic code, might be seen as responsible for school success. The narrow context that we currently call school is effective for some students, but if the task is to educate all children, it may be necessary to restructure the learning environment. It might be time to replace school psychologists with school sociologists prepared to view learning problems in terms of a fit between the conditions of learning and the needs of learners. The school would share ownership of the problem and the solution would be to find a more optimal learning context. New forms of assessment would be necessary to understand the fit between the learner and the context and the teacher. Students learning in most schools are currently assessed by short-answer, quick-timed, standardized achievement tests. Much less effort has been expended on matching these tests to curriculum standards. Instead they serve to reward schools with children from high socioeconomic backgrounds and threaten schools who face the most challenging social problems. The Internet contributes to assessment in the following ways:
Digital portfolios created by students and teachers can be found on the Web accompanied with a rationale for why this process is so important to learning. Students can also find structured help to prepare for high stakes SAT testing. And the Internet provides instant access to the results of high stake testing at the state, national and international levels. For the most part, however, using the computing power of the Internet to design new forms of student and teachers assessment is in its infancy. The research tools listed on this conference website are each, in their own way, moving us ahead in this process. Another development that is not listed is the use of computing power to assess the quality of writing. Instead of investing our time and resources in high stakes testing that simply ranks schools, we need assessment tools that can be used throughout the school year to monitor both individual and group learning. Not pencil and paper tests, but tasks that require thoughtful work, provide multiple paths to problem solving and promote deep understanding. Participation in these network activities can be analyzed for evidence of student achievement and these records used for student and school report cards. In this way learning and testing are complimentary components of the same process. SRI International is developing some interesting prototypes for new forms of assessment that are described in Developing Assessments for TomorrowÕs Classrooms. | |||||
| Professional Teaching The role of teachers is critical in the human enterprise of education. Teachers serve as bridges connecting students to the curriculum, and the student to the community. They evaluate the relationship between the curriculum and student progress; and, they determine how this progress relates to community needs. In the terms of the dimensions discussed, they create the alignment between learner-, knowledge-, community-, and assessment-centered learning. Technology can support learning and in doing so will require a readjustment of the relationships; but the act of balancing these needs is a complex human activity. It is the essential role of the teacher. The teacher charts and recharts the course of education as the nature of the learner changes, as the knowledge terrain evolves, as community involvement increases, and as learning expectations shift. Teaching is, by its very nature, an improvisational activity that requires complex cognitive processing of many competing factors. Teachers need to be continuous learners and researchers. They need to play active roles in knowledge construction--both as a means of learning and teaching. The development of teaching as a profession and the field of educational research have not been closely aligned. Teachers have little time to contribute their observations and knowledge about how students learn or to document the best teaching methods. Researchers are often driven to answer questions that are not immediately useful to teachers. Historically, Lagemann (2000), argues that the early feminization of teaching coupled with the exclusion of women from most colleges contributed to the split between research and practice. Women were seen as naturally fit for teaching because of their deep understanding of children. But, at the same time, there was a belief that women lacked conceptual skills. This was mitigated somewhat by providing them supervision by male principals and administrators. Teacher preparation took place at teaching institutes, normal schools and academies. With the advent and rapid growth of high schools in the 1890's, teacher education moved from normal schools to high schools but continued to attract women from working class backgrounds. At the turn of the century, efforts were made to move teacher preparation to the college and eventually to graduate study at universities. This was done to provide a better education and to attract teachers with a stronger intellectual orientation. But with increasing options open to women in the later part of the century and limited career advancement in teaching, this goal continues to be difficult to achieve. Beginning with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905, universities have viewed themselves as positioned at the pinnacle of a pyramid with K-12 education providing the base. Many of the curriculum reform efforts of the last century have been expressly aimed at diminishing teacher initiative or as a way to address uneven quality of teachers. Curriculum reformers in the 30's and 40's establish a "scope and sequence" of curriculum to constrain teacher choice. Curriculum researchers in the 60's overtly tried to design curriculum to be "teacher proof." The effort to develop curriculum standards, with minimal input from teachers, is a current strategy to place decision making outside of the classroom. While researchers and educational reformers developed programs, often with new technologies, to increase learning, these programs were not adopted by classroom teachers. These failures fueled complaints about teacher quality and their lack of conceptual understanding. Cuban (1986) chronicles these cycles but also faults researchers for not achieving a balance among complex learning dimensions of classroom instruction. Whatever the cause, the gulf between educational research and educational practice continues to challenge the development of a science of education (Lagemann, 2000). Berieter (1999) suggests that the solution is to be found in new institutional relationships:
It cannot fall only to teachers to be the bridges across this divide as Berieter indicates. There have to be changes in the educational community that create opportunities for a richer engagement of teachers and researchers in a professional community--a community which seeks to understand and create the most effective learning environments for students. Professional Engagement and Teacher Leadership While teachers often resent control by administrators, university researchers, and political leaders, the field has yet to develop a strong, self-regulating professional community (Lagemann, 2000). This is partly because the structural organization of teaching leaves little time for building community. However, using survey data it is possible to answer some questions about both the philosophy and teaching practices of the nation's most professional engaged teachers. A national survey, Teaching, Learning and Computing, 1998, collected data on 4,000 teachers with extensive sections on teaching philosophy, teaching practice, computer use, educational background, and engagement in professional activities. Riel and Becker (2000) used this information to identify a subset of teachers who indicated a high level of professional engagement beyond the classroom and beyond the school. These were teachers who had been identified as teacher leaders (representing about 2% of the teachers in the nation) by both local and distant educators. They mentored their peers either formally or informally, attended and spoke at conferences, served on committees or exchanged email with teachers in other schools, and may have published articles or worked in partners with university teacher education programs. At the opposite end of the professional engagement axis were teachers who had minimal contact with teachers outside of their classroom and engaged in teaching as a "private" practice. This group represented 58% of the teaching population. The contrast between these groups is striking. Teachers leaders view teaching and learning as a co-constructive process in which students are asked to think deeply about issues, generate their own ideas, work collaboratively in projects, and share and evaluate their work within a public classroom forum. These teachers, as a group, have made and continue to make a much stronger investment in their own learning. They are teachers who were more likely to have attended select universities, earned higher grades in school and received more graduate degrees. They spent twice as much time in professional development than do private practice teachers. In contrast to teachers who remain isolated in their classrooms these teacher leaders were ten times more likely to also be among the leaders in the use of educational technology--a very dramatic finding. The use of computers, as well as their goals for computer use, again indicate that these educational leaders have a very strong passion for constructivist learning that is congruent with the dimensions that have been described in this paper.The overall finding is that there is a clear match between the relationship of the teacher to the educational community. Those teachers who are actively engaged in learning and leading, who have developed a voice that extends beyond the classroom to a professional community are more likely to engage students in knowledge construction in the classrooms, encouraging student voice in presentations of their ideas to classroom community. Those teachers who are isolated from a professional community, who are only recipients of knowledge, teach in ways that isolated students, and stress information reception and recitation. Expert teacher knowledge of teachers is not routinely recorded, negotiated, and stored in community spaces for use by new members of the community. Web technology tools make it possible for learning partnerships among educators at schools and universities to work together to create professional communities. Many efforts are developing both across fields and within disciplines. Unlike the curriculum projects of the past, these efforts are not developed and delivered, over the Internet, to teachers. Instead they are invitations for teachers to join educators from different sectors in partnerships that promote learning. I give three examples. The first is a professional community in math; the second is an effort to link practice and research; and the third is an online context for community development.
Tapped-In is one of a number of community building tools that organizations can use to build their own online communities. The current job description of teachers does not include either the development of, or the use of community knowledge. Not all teachers have the same intellectual skills and investment in developing expertise. Those with more skill often leave teaching because there is no career ladder with different responsibilities and rewards. Professional teachers work long days. Even the best teachers cannot teach well when they teach all day. They need time to engage in challenging activities that will enrich their teaching. They need to work with adults in educational contexts that help them evolve new ways of solving new and old problems. The Future of Teaching * suggests how such a system could be structured. *This Link downloads file named mrielfutureteaching.pdf which can be read with free Adobe Reader. | |||||
| Conclusion One way of understanding the usefulness of the Internet in schools is to examine the current edges of the network. What is now on the horizon, digital ink, telerobotics, virtual creatures, simulated environments, multimedia editing) will soon be classroom tools. Whatever the exact dimensions or properties of evolving new tools, it is easy to predict that they will be wireless, portable, integrated, with vast storage capacity and cheaper and more ubiquitous than the cell phones of today. The Internet will be freed from the desktop boxes. Instead information will be tied to locations using longitude, latitude and attitude. Handheld screens or projected images from glasses will be able to read bar codes now embedded information in merchandise. Information will be displayed on virtual signposts, talking objects and 3-d animations that might guide us through a museum or help keep a team of students connected. Digital Ink will make it possible for books to be printed, unprinted and reprinted at will. Given these possible developments, we need programs and policies that will assure that educational applications continue to be designed to support teaching and learning. This takes a greater "intellectual" investment in schools by a larger part of the community. Citizenship Service to Education This is an idea for dramatically increasing the size of the learning community available for classroom learning. As an extension to the many tele-mentoring projects, an agency like the Department of Education could manage a national "education service" similar to jury duty. Citizens could be contacted to "serve" as online learning consultants to students and teachers across the country. Individuals would be expected to go through a brief online training program (similar to the direction provided by a judge to a jury). Once completed, they will be listed in a national database available to schools. An individual might serve for different periods of time based on many different factors. All citizens are historical informants for the periods and places they lived. Most will have particular information about a job or career, and many will have other areas of strong interest that they could share. As intergenerational projects find, personal histories can transform personal memories into community treasures. National Cabinet of Collected Thinking All nationally funded research projects could, as a condition of the funding, be required to spend some of the resources to make an intellectual contribution to schools. This contribution might be:
This process would foster interdisciplinary collaboration and uses of cross-disciplinary datasets, Technology tools can help students visualize difficult to understand concepts and processes such as changes in wind speed and pressure, or interactions of molecules. Teachers could join the research teams to help oversee the development of these resources. This work could help transform teaching contracts to 12 months with active work on research in disciplines. This reading and writing would help teachers continue to develop their knowledge. Their participation in partnerships beyond the classroom will help them understand how learning communities can be used for student learning. These intellectual products would then become the heart of "public" education. This would help develop the community of teachers and learners that would continually renew public education. Video Archives of Teaching Wisdom Now is the time to capture the wisdom of our best teachers so that we preserve what teachers have learned over decades of practice. Print publications are not the best tools for capturing teaching knowledge. Computers with enough memory and storage capacity are now within the reach of schools. The cost of digital cameras is rapidly dropping. Regional Technology Centers and university-school partnerships have begun the process of documenting good teaching, but these efforts are limited to only a few exceptional examples. Every school could be producing their teaching archives. Schools of education could provide leadership in developing a national treasure of teaching knowledge by forming teams of expert teachers, novice teachers, university teachers and researchers, and discipline experts with the task of creating documentaries of how to teach specific content. Master teachers bring years of experience and teaching materials. Novice teachers bring enthusiasm and time, the technology resources of the university and the time to learn new skills. University professors bring theoretical frameworks and technology resources, and researchers and discipline experts widen the context with information from other studies and fields. The shared task would be to create a documentary through video clips, resources and materials on how to teach a particular subject to a group of students. These documentaries could be used to form a national database of teaching wisdom. They would help make teaching more public. When teachers see what takes place in other classrooms, they can compare and contrast it to their own approaches. When students see what happens in other classrooms, they can better understand the different roles of learners. Analysis of video at the university allows for rich grounded discussion of teaching and educational theory. Teachers could look for new ideas by watching how teaching in different regions with different resources and students organize their lessons. Members of the community could see how their school environment and resources compare to those of students in other regions. These could become the basis of research partnerships; through collaborative analysis best practices could evolve into national standards rather than having these imposed on teachers. Support for Educational Research Tied to Development We need a closer relationship between teaching, research and development. The current separation evolved from past political and economic constraints on the structure of schooling. The development of communication tools and computer software makes new forms of partnership possible. Teachers can be researchers, researchers can be designers, and designers can be teachers. A community approach with differential skills produces a synergistic outcome. This shift requires a reorganization of teaching to enable teachers to work on teams. Teachers do not need to teach all day. In fact, they would be more powerful teachers if their teaching time was not so concentrated. Researchers need to work in schools to understand that decontextual randomization and control of variables often strip away the very processes that need to be studied. Working with natural variation and "design experiments" can provide rich understanding of the complex issues that affect learning. Publishing should not be the end result of research. Researchers should not leave others to implement their findings. Instead researchers should be involved in experimenting with designs for implementing findings. Teachers can serve as valued partners in helping to understand the dimensions of learning and teaching (Stigler and Hiebert, 1999). This is, in short, a call for collaborative learning, teaching, research and development.
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| Note: This paper was designed to be read online. All references are linked to sources which provide additional information, which are missing in this print version. If you are reading a print copy, this paper is part of a collection of "White Papers" created for the US Department of Education: Secretary's Conference on Educational Technology September, 2000 (http://www.ed.gov/Technology/techconf/2000/white_papers.html) © 2000 Margaret Riel (http://www.gse.uci.edu/mriel) | |||||
Kristi Rennebohm-Franz's first grade students in Seattle take on new projects each year in social studies, math, history, and science. For example, as part of their instruction in science, seven years ago her students started 
Barry Kramer's fourth grade students live in a farming community in New Jersey but actively use the Internet to extend learning beyond the classroom. Barry's students engage in a number of international projects in 
Generation Why,
The Internet has thousands of opportunities for collaborative projects. With Webcam and video, very young students can watch the behavior of hamsters throughout the day and night. As partners with scientists at the 
