Disruptive Classroom Technologies: A Framework for Innovation in Education

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Sunny Magana. Dr. Magana is a Milken Award-winning educator, author, and ed tech researcher, a sought-after speaker and consultant. He's the author with Robert Marzano of Enhancing the Art and Science of Teaching with Technology, as well as his new book, Disruptive Classroom Technologies, a Framework for Innovation in Education.

[00:39] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:42] SPEAKER_00:

Sonny, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:43] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much for having me, Justin. Pleasure to be on the show.

[00:46] SPEAKER_00:

Great to have you. Let's dive right in by talking about why we need a framework for innovation. You know, schools always are trying to be innovative. You know, if we see a neighboring school doing something innovative, often we kind of look at that and say, oh, you know what, maybe we should adopt those same approaches. But you've developed a framework for thinking about innovation, particularly when it comes to technology. And I wonder if we could start just by having you talk about where that comes from and what purpose it serves in the schools that you work with.

[01:14] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. Great question, Justin, and thank you for that. I've been studying the impact of technology in education contexts for 35 years, and I found a really staggering pattern play itself over and over again. It's that school systems buy technologies, and they experience change. an artificial bump up in student engagement. And that's followed immediately by a decline in engagement with very little to no impact on achievement.

[01:40]

So for the past 35 years, at least that I've been observing this phenomenon, Schools have been on a roller coaster of inflated engagement, followed by a decline in engagement, and again, almost no impact on achievement. We've had technology integration frameworks for the past 25 years, starting with the TPAC model and other models that have developed, but the preponderance of research shows that the average impact of technology on student achievement on a scale of 1 to 10 is a 3. 3 out of 10. And that was most recently developed by Dr. John Hattie. My thinking is that we don't need any more technology integration frameworks.

[02:19]

We don't need any more information frameworks that are focused on technology use because they fundamentally have not worked. The needle is still stuck in And an effect size of 0.34. The research that underpins my framework is based on enhancing highly reliable pedagogies with technology. And that's where innovation comes in. Innovation isn't when you create something new or use a new tool.

[02:42]

It's when you use your existing resources and your existing understanding of pedagogy to accelerate student learning. And so that's why we need a framework for innovation to build a common language, a common understanding of what innovation with technology looks like. And that's why I built the T3 framework. The T3 framework is a framework for innovation based on the research that I've been involved in for 35 years.

[03:06] SPEAKER_00:

So I know a lot of our listeners will be familiar with, say, the SAMR framework, the S-A-M-R framework, substitution, augmentation. I don't even remember what all four letters stand for. But, you know, obviously a lot of schools are stuck at substitution where instead of paper worksheets, we're doing electronic worksheets on Android tablets or, you know, we're just doing kind of the digital version of the same old thing. And I wonder if you could set us up to understand the different levels of the T3 framework that you've developed and how those work.

[03:33] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it sounds great. You know, the trouble with that framework is that it's based on absolutely zero research. There's zero evidence underpinning the SAMR framework. And so it's really an opinion based framework, which we can't. afford to rely on opinions when it comes to the hearts and minds of our most precious natural resource, the youth of our country. We have to follow the direction provided by research and, in the words of Karl Popper, put our ideas to the refutation of research.

[04:04]

We have to have our ideas that serve teachers and students scrutinized the highest level of academic scholarly research in order to provide more reliable resources. The other trouble with this hammer model is that it's so equivocal. People are still, at five years now, interpreting what redefinition really means. And no one has a common definition of that. So without a common definition, people are still interpreting, and they can't really observe it, so they can't measure it. And that's a failing.

[04:34]

The other thing is that there are no strategies. What are the strategies to move towards higher levels? And so building upon the past is really important to me. We need to honor the past and honor where we've been. But we also need to move forward and move forward by using the guiding lodestone of research. And that's what I've done with the T3 framework.

[04:54]

I've taken the research by myself, by John Hattie, by Robert Marzano, and put together a framework that increments the value added by technology in terms of its direct impact on student learning.

[05:06] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I think that's where we've got to be really honest with ourselves when it comes to making an investment. You know, are we making an investment in technology in order to just say that we're a kind of a tech forward district and that we're not falling behind our peers? Or is it actually going to make teaching and learning better? So, yeah, take us into that. What are some of the differences that we can expect to see technology making and how do we kind of parse those in your framework?

[05:30] SPEAKER_02:

Here's what we've learned from the body of research, the preponderance of research is is that when technology is used to replace a teacher, you can affect a very, very low effect size, very low. Fortunately, that's the predominant way that technologies are used, as teacher replacements. When technology is used to supplement what teachers do, you can expect a moderate effect, an average effect. When technology is used to enhance highly reliable teaching and learning strategies, you can experience and expect large to extra large effect on student learning. So the strategies in The first level of my framework, which I call T1, that's the translational technology domain. That's how technologies are basically used in schools to translate from an analog environment to a digital environment.

[06:13]

There are two elements in that domain, the translational technology domain, and one is called automation and the other is consumption. And they are just exactly what they sound like. We use technologies to automate administrative tasks or teaching and learning tasks. Or we have students consume content, knowledge, and information on a laptop, a device, a smartphone, a phone book. Automation and consumption add value. There's no doubt about it.

[06:37]

It adds value. We need to increment and move forward in our ability as educational leaders to build capacity for that entry level technologies. Unfortunately, far too many schools stop there and they leave their technologies just to automation and consumption. And that is a key reason why the needle of impact on technology has stuck at 0.34 for the past 50 years. We need to get better.

[07:03]

And in order to get better, you've got to go through another stage that I call the transformational technology stage. So the domain T2 is the transformational technology use domain. And within that domain, I have two elements, production and contribution. Production is the element that has several strategies now, three strategies of production, three strategies for contribution. And that the production strategies have students produce Their own mastery goals, their own means to track and monitor their progress, the amount of effort they invest in their progress and how they feel about it. And also produce knowledge artifacts that represent what they know, what they can do and how they think about what they know and what they can do.

[07:46]

And this makes student thinking and learning visible. to themselves, to their teachers, and to their peers. To take it up a notch, the second element in the transformational technologies domain is called contribution. So take everything that I just said about students using digital tools to represent and express what they know, the declarative knowledge, what they can do, which we call procedural knowledge, and how they think about it, which is often referred to as metacognition or meta-learning. But now, students are using those tools to design tutorials to teach someone else what they now know. Kids Teaching Kids is well grounded in the research literature on learning sciences, and it has an extraordinarily large impact when students use digital tools to create, archive, and then curate digital learning tutorials that are made by students for students.

[08:39]

It's a concept I call class sourcing, where the resources that are used to help students achieve mastery are designed, developed, curated and talked about by the students themselves. This takes education to an entirely new level. The effect size of those strategies that I just described in the transformational technologies domain were observed by Robert Marzano and his researchers to have an effect size of 1.6. which is enormous that's an enormous effect size if i use that scale that i shared with you before that currently technology uh the needle of impact technology is a three out of ten the strategies my framework are a 16 out of 10. they're quite literally off the scale and that shows an acceleration of student learning and cognition that's equivalent to gaining an additional three or four years of academic achievement in a single year.

[09:35] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so we're going beyond just the kind of efficiency gains that we can get at T1, at that translational level, and we're really getting into the transformational level where students are actually producing work on technology, setting their own goals, visualizing their progress toward those goals, and teaching others, creating artifacts that others can use, tutorials. And as you were talking about that, I really was thinking about the work that you and I do in our respective lines of work as authors and as consultants, you know, as adults, that's what we do, right? We communicate with other people, we set goals, we create things, we try to have an impact on other people through those things. So in terms of authenticity, I think that is off the charts. And no surprise that in terms of the measured learning that it similarly shows up as kind of off the charts.

[10:24] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. If we can even get close to tripling or quadrupling student learning, that's worth trying. These are highly reliable strategies that even if we don't triple learning, suppose we just double it. Think of how great that would be if every school in this country achieves a near doubling of academic achievement where it takes a child one week, whilst as before it would take them two weeks to learn content. That will provide so much value to our nation that it's, I'm telling everybody. So those strategies also create time.

[10:59]

They create time and space in the instructional day to go to the next level, which I call transcendent technology use. And that's the highest value added by technology in any learning environment. Transcendent technologies, I define it as the type of technologies that in addition to being transformational, in other words, there's a substantive change in the student doing the task and the task itself. Children now are able to identify, investigate, explore and hypothesize solutions to wicked problems that matter to them. So the first element in the transcendent technologies domain I call inquiry design. And this is not a new process.

[11:43]

This is an ancient process that goes back thousands of years. We do inquiry design when one enters the master's degree program or a doctoral program, and we're told you're going to make a significant contribution to the knowledge base. My question to education is why do we wait so long? Why wait so long? Why wait until somebody's at their doctorate to tell them that you can make a significant contribution and add value to the knowledge base by your own inquiry design? We should allow kids to do that.

[12:13]

And in my framework, inquiry design is the element where I step-by-step guide teachers to help students identify what a wicked problem is. And a wicked problem is a problem that's intractable. It's complex. There are a lot of parts to it. It's ill-defined. It's ill-structured.

[12:30]

And is yet unresolved. The bad news and the good news is that there is no shortage of wicked problems that befall life on planet Earth. In fact, I'm working with the United Nations Sustainable Goals for Development because they have 17 domains of wicked problems. We need kids to explore those problems and investigate them. find out what's been done about those problems in other areas, and then hypothesize how they can improve their world by developing a more robust solution to those wicked problems. Yeah, the second element I call social entrepreneurship.

[13:05]

And that's a great concept. Social entrepreneurship isn't just entrepreneurship or the sort of traditional entrepreneurship. The kind of thinking in a traditional mind frame would be such that you can either do good in this world or you can make money. And I reject that as a false dichotomy. I reject that vehemently. It's silly.

[13:27]

You can do good and generate revenue. Creating human capital, generating human capital, or providing benefit to systems while generating value are not opposed ideas. So the concept of social entrepreneurship is one that I think we need to embrace in education, is helping students generate revenue. more robust solutions in an iterative fashion by identifying, investigating, and constantly pushing the envelope so they build a more robust solution to a wicked problem that matters to them. And they can use a range of digital tools, platforms, platform building tools, app building tools, coding environments to create these solutions, but do it in an iterative fashion. The mantra in the tech industry is fail often, fail early.

[14:18]

Because we learn from our failures. And that iteration, that whole notion of iteration seems to be lost on education, where we tell kids failure is not an option. I also reject that thinking because failure, when it comes to deep, authentic learning, is our best option. So that takes me through the T3 frame, translational, transformational, and transcendent. And it's at that transcendent domain that students build the capacities, the mindsets, and the skills to be better prepared to masterfully address future learning problems. The transformational technology domain prepares students to masterfully address current learning problems, and we have to do both.

[14:57]

That makes education so great. That's what makes our jobs so noble is we're preparing students to master learning in the moment and preparing them for future learning at the same time. There's no other profession that does that. No other profession. That's what makes teaching. That's why we love it.

[15:16]

That's why we love what we do, right?

[15:18] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and really everything that you've been saying in the last couple of minutes really tracks very closely for me with project-based learning. You know, the idea of solving real problems for authentic audiences and not having the teacher necessarily structure that problem and structure the possible solutions, but really... giving students ownership of that and allowing their work to enter the real world for real audiences so that they are working on, you know, not a worksheet full of problems that we made up for them, but real problems that they're identifying in the world that really need some creative energy applied to them.

[15:52]

I'm curious as to where schools are starting, because as our listeners know, we have been rolling out quite a bit of training on project-based learning through the Project-Based Learning Network. And we're finding that schools are often looking for a lot of guidance on just kind of what is this? You know, where do we start? It's not that we're nine-tenths of the way there and we need a little bit of help. It's that...

[16:15]

We know this is a thing. We know this is something that we want to do. But where do we start? So when it comes to your work with schools and implementing the T3 framework, where do you find that it's most productive for schools to start? Let's say they have some technology, they've purchased devices of some type, but they really want to do this right. Where do they start?

[16:31] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for asking the question. But before I respond, I want to just address something you said. is that I identify inquiry design as a type of project-based learning, but it's not – falls in the category of project-based learning that generally people do where the teacher creates the project or creates the problem for students to do. John Hattie said something really provocative at the Visible Learning Conference last year. He said there's nothing wrong with project-based learning. It just doesn't work.

[16:59]

And that struck me, you know, that just struck me as a science teacher, as a proponent of project based learning. And then he qualifies. Here's why it doesn't work. If the projects come from teachers and are not driven by student passion and purpose, you just have compliance. And that's something that I think is really important to distinguish in my framework. That's the students that come up with the problems that they want to solve.

[17:23]

See, it's no longer perfect to ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? Because the jobs to which they'll aspire don't yet exist. And in many cases, kids are going to create their own avenues. A better question to ask kids is what wicked problem matters to you and what are you going to do about it? And that sets kids on a pathway that's full of passion and purpose and wonder and the joy, the inherent joy that happens when we realize we are taking our knowledge, our learning, and applying it to improve our world. But that's another element in my framework that helps students engage in the critical process called knowledge transfer.

[18:03]

There's three phases to learning, surface learning, deeper learning, and knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer is given very, very short shrift in education. Because it takes time. If folks do the strategies in the transformational technology domain, they'll create time and space in their instructional day to engage in inquiry design and social entrepreneurship and allow kids to apply their knowledge and through this knowledge transfer process. So that their understanding becomes a part of the permanent selves. But the big question is, how do I get started?

[18:32]

Where do I start? What's the first? And the first step I would think is to get the book, Destructive Classroom Technologies, read it, get an overview of the three domains, the elements and the strategies. And then think about identifying where you are. What's your starting point? The very first thing we need to do when going on a journey is to identify what's the here and now.

[18:55]

Where am I now? And then set meaningful incremental goals forward step by step. Then track and monitor your progress as you move through these different levels of the T through framework. When you move from automation to consumption, there may be teachers that are still not even using automation and consumption. So that's their starting point. The point is there are many entry levels.

[19:16]

You just have to understand currently where you are. Are you beginning? Are you developing? Or are you mastering? And I've developed a mastery scale to help teachers self-assess, where they are on this framework, set meaningful goals, continually track their progress, and move forward. And to help with that effort, in addition to the book, I'm partnering with a company called Participate to create online courses where individuals can achieve mastery at each level of the framework, and then earn badges, micro-credentialing and badging, to certify that they've mastered translational technology use, or transformational technologies, or moved to transcendent technologies.

[19:55]

But then I'm also developing a process where schools can schools collectively can certify and celebrate at each level at a school wide as an organization school wide systemically. We can say we've certified. We're T1 school. We're T2 school. And that's how you get started by understanding what the here and now is. setting some meaningful goals so you have a clear description of your desired outcome.

[20:17]

And you need both of those things because that creates a creative tension that allows you to move forward.

[20:23] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Disruptive Classroom Technologies, a Framework for Innovation in Education. And Sonny, if people want to learn more about your work with schools or learn more about the micro-credentials and certification process that you just mentioned, where's the best place for them to go and find that information online?

[20:39] SPEAKER_02:

Through my website, It's a platform that I'm developing to help support this work called MaganaEducation.com. M-A-G-A-N-A Education.com. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Sonny Magana.

[20:51]

That's my Twitter handle. And in fact, we're doing a bunch of T3 chats. So use the hashtag T3Chat to connect with other teachers who are embarking on this journey themselves and building a professional network of innovators.

[21:04] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Sonny, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[21:07] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much for having me, Justin. It was a real pleasure. And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[21:13] SPEAKER_00:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Sunny Magana? You know, as we think about the opportunity to give students experience solving real problems, I'm convinced that problem-based learning, project-based learning, the kind of transformational learning that Dr. Magana talked about in our interview today really is not going to be optional for much longer. When Dr. Magana talked about social entrepreneurship and inquiry design, these are things that are seen as extremely innovative at the moment that perhaps relatively few schools are doing.

[21:50]

But I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see those rapidly becoming the norm, particularly at the middle school and high school levels. We have got to prepare kids not just for future careers that we know about, but to solve the problems that our world is facing starting now. So I want to encourage you to take some first steps. If project-based learning and transcendent technology use are not already a reality in your school, I want to encourage you to check out Dr. Magana's work, and I want to encourage you to check out the Project-Based Learning Network. You can find out more at principalscenter.com slash pbln.

[22:27]

And we have a roadmap both for individual teachers and for entire schools and districts that want to make PBL, project-based learning, a real part of the student learning experience. So you can download those maps, both for teachers and for schools and districts, at principalcenter.com slash pbln.

[22:46] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.