[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_02:
I am your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Yong Zhao. Dr. Zhao is a professor at the College of Education at the University of Oregon and the author of a number of well-known books on education. including Catching Up or Leading the Way, American Education in the Age of Globalization, and World Class Learners, Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. And if you are a school leader, as many in our audience are, I'm sure you have heard of Dr. Zhao's work.
[00:44]
And we're here today to talk about his new book, Never Send a Human to Do a Machine's Job, Correcting the Top Five EdTech Mistakes.
[00:53] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:55] SPEAKER_02:
Dr. Zhao, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Well, thanks, Justin. Tell us what it means to send a human to do a machine's job. What do you see as the relationship between our work as educators and the increasing role of technology? And where do you see us going wrong in the use of educational technology?
[01:12] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I think, first, let's start with the idea that technology, after all this investment, we really have not made significant gains in education from a large picture. But every new wave of technology gives us new hope. And we seldom have time even to rethink what we can learn from the past mistakes, and then we begin to jump on new ones. If you look at from films to television to the internet, hypermedia, and all those kind of things. I think the book, I was trying to understand is really why. Because as you know, technology has transformed many other sectors in society, but not education.
[01:59]
And I think I discovered a lot of times it has to do with we as human teachers have not trying to be really human and that means we should deliver, we should really allow machines to do a lot of things we human beings are not good at or I don't want to do it in the repetitive work. So I think it's time for us to reconsider the teaching context, the classroom and the school, and how we can deliver better education, allow us to be human beings, human teachers.
[02:35] SPEAKER_02:
Do you think we resist some of that handing over of tasks, even the ones we don't really want to do, to the technology that's available to us because we don't know what will be left to us? Or where do you think that resistance comes from?
[02:48] SPEAKER_00:
I don't think it's rain resistant. I think it's a lot of destruction. We really, honestly, have not had much time to think about it. If I blame, actually, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, all those policies, over the last, I think, 10, 20 years, when technology...
[03:05]
had its really massive change, but our education, our teachers, our school leaders, our attention has been really directed to No Child Left Behind, to Race to the Top, to raising test scores. And raising test scores does not need a lot of fancy, innovative technology. And to do that, and also at the same time, really, I think misguided the investment as well. We invest a lot of money in testing, in big data, and in really complying with those things. So we never had a chance to wonder, to think about what this innovation means for us.
[03:43] SPEAKER_02:
Now, you use the phrase ecosystem to talk about our relationship with technology in education. What does that ecosystem mean? What does that look like?
[03:51] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I think the term I think I borrowed from the transmedia concept from Henry Jenkins a while back. Think about any system as an ecosystem. We have all kinds of species that can work together. And I think a learning ecosystem is we should have multiple species in there you know we we sometimes we want to read a print book and the print book and does certain things that a e-reader cannot do you know and sometimes we need to talk to people and that that talking to people is very different than uh going to let's say look through skype or watching tv and sometimes we need to work together with other people So I think every little technology has its affordance or constraints.
[04:43]
But in our schools, we often make the mistake of everything the same. Suddenly, it's a one-to-one iPad. Suddenly, it's one-to-one microcomputing. i think it's we need to rethink about how we complement the all the different things and the human beings uh you know is one of the major what i call maybe species in the ecosystem who can guide and help organize a better learning environment so the the best example you probably can think about is uh a lot of things you know uh people use the example pokemon you know the the uh the japanese anime you know you can use think about uh There are Pokemon movies, there are Pokemon TVs, Pokemon video games, Pokemon school bags, lunch boxes, and toys. I think each one of them serves a purpose that enriches the full experience, to fully experience the whole thing.
[05:36]
So I think in education, same thing. For example, there are certain computer software that drill and kill better than computers. Human teachers, they're boring stuff. Maybe we should let machines do those things. And there are certain things like, for example, human teachers no longer need to become the only source of information. Therefore, we need to become better, maybe like moderators and supporting social-emotional development.
[06:00]
So an ecosystem basically means a diversity of different sources, species, that contribute to the balance of the system. In education, it's really talking about different sources of knowledge, information, learning, opportunities to enrich and give students a more engaging, full experience.
[06:22] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I love that idea of affordances, that each different technology or each educator, that there are different strengths and weaknesses of each technology and the things that we can do as human beings. And those affordances are... As you said, what kind of keeps us from just wanting to go with a one-size-fits-all solution? And I saw that kind of playing out because in my work at the Principal Center, we did a lot of consulting with districts around iPad implementations and training people how to use iPads.
[06:52]
And I got a little concerned that people would try to do things on the iPad that really just were not a very good fit for that technology. Yeah. And I was speaking with our local tech director here in our local school district and talking to him about all the different devices that he supports. They have iPads, Chromebooks, traditional desktop computers and things like that. And I'm hearing that from more and more administrators that we do need to pay attention to those affordances, that one device does not do everything. It certainly does not replace a teacher.
[07:22]
And we need to actually pay attention to what we want And as we think about some of the dreams that we have for ed tech or the hopes or at least the arguments that we make, you know, that education technology will help us in certain ways, maybe it'll raise test scores, but maybe that's not something that we ultimately care about. You mentioned that things like, you know, math drills can be much more effectively done with technology. Things like spelling quizzes. I've seen, you know, students get much greater gains from working with a program to help them learn spelling than, you know, than working with kind of an inefficient whole class spelling model. What are some, you know, to go beyond just what can computers do better than people, you know, that kind of basic question. What are...
[08:08]
some of the ways that you think we need to reframe the way we see technology? Because, you know, I know we tend to, in the United States, you know, buy things and then kind of justify them and then have to figure out how to use them after all of that happens. How would you like to see this whole conversation reframed?
[08:26] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I think that's a great example to think about affordances and constraints. Technology can do this, but cannot do that. A hammer is better with a nail, but a screwdriver better with a screw. The same thing in technology in schools. We also have the idea about one technology replaces another. The replacement mentality.
[08:48]
So iPad replaces Chromebook, Chromebook replaces something else. So I would like to see a rethinking approach of the education agenda. I think today's technology is not going to bring much innovation really in the traditional education paradigm. If we only talk about test scores, only talk about drill and kill, they won't work extremely well in that sense. So what we need to think about is what kind of education we want. I think that's the key is that, and then see how technology and teachers can help work together, recreate that role.
[09:27]
For example, in the book I talk a lot about the personalized learning environment. Traditionally, we always think about personalization as individualization. By the way, personalized learning Now it's misused a lot by tech companies to market a so-called new product, personalized pathway, personalized way of mastery, big data, learning analytics. I think what I'm talking about is really personalized education. in which every individual student should have access to different learning resources to enhance their strength and to realize or pursue their passion. So that requires technology because no human teachers can possibly know everything, but now technology allows us to access knowledge, information beyond what a teacher knows.
[10:16]
So that's the first thing to rethink of what kind of education we want. Another thing I write in my book is talk about not only in terms of personalized education, but students engaged in making authentic works, works that matter. And today's technology, I think, enables us to, at a much, much lower cost, allow students to create, to revise, to improve our products and send them out, potentially making them available to a global audience. So their work has authenticity, has meaning, has value. And so that's the kind of things I think we need to do. I think schools need to rethink about the new type of education.
[10:56]
If we don't just maintain the traditional paradigm, I don't think we need this kind of massive technology to improve. Any improvement there, the gain will be very little.
[11:06] SPEAKER_02:
Right, just in terms of kind of brute force spending on technology going to give us the benefits we want.
[11:12] SPEAKER_00:
And also the improvement. I think Samuel Papert said perhaps the best is that If you tie a jet engine to a horse-drawn wagon, either one will be good. You either have to slow down the jet engine or you have to break the horse wagon.
[11:26] SPEAKER_02:
How can we develop a better model of making smart use of technology? I understand in the book you talk about kind of top-down versus bottom-up paradigms. What does it look like to have a model that makes more sense than what we typically do?
[11:43] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I think the model is really we should always start from the learning needs. Like if you want to construct a learning ecosystem, in my ideas has been perhaps to a certain degree, some people think it's extreme, it's really called strength and passion driven is that wouldn't recognize the idea that everybody is valuable in a new age. And that, I have to go back to my other books to say why. And if every talent is of value, every potential is of value, and how do we teach every, help every individual, every potential to become great? I think learning should be completely personalized. And that doesn't mean students don't work together, don't, you know, we're social beings, we will.
[12:26]
So the new paradigm will be, I think I view teachers become more of an organizer, a curator of learning opportunities to support individual growth and individual students. We look hard at every child to say what they bring to school and how we can then create opportunities for them.
[12:44] SPEAKER_02:
I can imagine that going in a lot of different directions and tying into a lot of different approaches. I hear about things like Genius Hour or 20% Time or maybe more mainstream things like project-based learning and blended learning and real-world projects and internships and students publishing portfolios and having those authentic audiences that you talked about. And as I think about our audience of school administrators, you know, I think by the time something comes to our attention as something that we need to help promote and manage in terms of instructional strategies, instructional models, etc., Often it's fairly mature by the time it reaches that point, and we're seeing a lot of new models now for students to do work that reaches a broader audience, to do project-based and real-world type things.
[13:40]
What advice do you have for administrators to encourage teachers to take those steps, to take those risks, and to go beyond that, to start to make that more the way we do things, even though You know, those systems and those instructional models are not quite as mature because, you know, I think we can all envision or we can all picture a teacher here and there who is running after those things, you know, who's doing, say, Genius Hour. But we're not sure how to make that opportunity available to more students in more classrooms. And we don't know what, you know, maybe scaling that up looks like or putting some parameters in place to make sure that that's a great experience looks like. What advice do you have for us as we kind of navigate that as leaders?
[14:22] SPEAKER_00:
Well, thank you. I was just talking to a school principal and a school leadership team before talking to you, was chatting about those ideas. First of all, I think I'm very pleased and I'm very happy to see the grassroots movement, you know, the inventive, innovative practices coming out of teachers and classrooms, I think. Genius hours, flip classrooms, all those kind of things. I think it's great to see, again, teachers, practitioners become so creative and innovative. And, you know, Makerspace is another one.
[14:54]
What my concern actually is, and to school leaders, is lots of times many of those things are I think may degenerate into meaningless work, like project-based learning. Again, sometimes they can be good ones and bad ones. So I hope, number one, we are really going after the essence, the spirit of that, not only the formality of that. And the second thing is that i think school principles and we could have a broader bigger view to see how technology could change and transform of learning environments and it really enables us to create something really brand new which you know again i i write in the book so for example maybe it's time to invite the whole whole school staff team to design new type of school.
[15:45]
For example, do we still have to keep the idea of a classroom? One teacher, 25 students. Do we still have to keep grades? For example, age-based grouping. I think it's time for us to rethink a lot of those things on how hard it is for us to reimagine K-5 or K-6 as one unit of learning ecosystem for individuals rather than just, you know, first grade, second grade. And this, of course, you know, we have to work within the context of the standards, you know, assessment.
[16:24]
I was going to say Common Core. Some states don't do that. And so I think the school principal, number one, again, to go back to say, we should check to say, are we genuinely bringing a more different, innovative environment to students? One big question we can ask is that, does this kind of thing truly need new investment in technology? Or could it have been done without the technology? One thing, you know, if you invest.
[16:53]
The second thing is that with all the massive investment, we should ask for a lot more. So we'll be truly began to redefine what teachers do, what machines do, and think about different kind of grouping, you know, study teams across multi-age grouping. So I would say, you know, think about bigger pictures to guide staff, but at the same time, really encouraging supporting grassroots and staff-initiated ideas as well.
[17:20] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, I was going to ask you right about that exact topic because I was thinking about teachers like Don Wettrick, the author of Pure Genius, a book about 20% time who's been on Principal Center Radio previously. I think teachers who are that capable and that willing to really rethink how they approach teaching and learning and rethink the ecosystem that they create for their students. You know, not every school is going to have someone like Don who can kind of lead the way on that. And even so...
[17:49]
That's an extreme level of openness and courage to ask of people. So I was going to ask, what do you see as some of the potential beyond just saying, okay, we have one teacher who does this, and then hopefully everyone else can kind of get there over the course of the next 10 years? But I was going to ask, you know, what is what does that maybe look like more radically where we get away from the idea of this is Don's class and then this is Steve's class? And, you know, we have all these separate classes and it's up to individuals to kind of kind of figure out what they're going to change and what they're going to keep the same and really think about bolder re-envisioning. What are what are some more of your thoughts on how we can can kind of open the door to to re-envisioning education?
[18:35] SPEAKER_00:
That's a big question. Every system, every society wants more accepting people like that. But we really actually don't know exactly how those people evolve, but we know one thing. In some culture, in some school, in some companies, those accepting people seem to have more of those people. So that's the question. I think a school principal can probably imagine their school as...
[19:02]
that's an incubator of innovators, you know, and maybe it's like a talent hotbed. I think we can create a different culture, a culture encouraging more of Don Wittrich to emerge, or those maybe not exactly like Don Wittrich, but can become one with the encouragement and support. So what I would like to say is that I think, number one, I think always trying to inspire, to tell every individual teacher we can and we could and we're supported to become better, to become innovative. So that means the principal may have to protect the innovative teachers. Innovation does not guarantee success all the time. It also means slight deviation from standards, test scores, short-term outcomes.
[19:51]
I think it protects to say, you know, yeah, you know, in my school, we're going to innovate. If their superintendent comes down, curriculum director comes down, or school board, some parents may be unhappy about this. We will help you create that environment. That's true leadership. You're able to take a risk and be able to protect innovation. And number two, really demand more to say, you know, yes, that looks good, but it's not really exceptional.
[20:16]
That's not exactly that great. You know, a lot of times when we see some innovation, we say, oh, yeah, that's good. Especially when we see student work, you know. I'm always the one to say, okay, yeah, that's good work, but you can be much better. Students, I think, have the idea. Demand more.
[20:31]
Demand true innovation. And then not be satisfied with what you call... great mediocrity, like 100% of standardized testing is not a great list. I think I finally, as a school, a principle model, you know, when you model innovation, model being different, model asking tough questions of yourself, that you are constantly learning, you're constantly changing and evolving.
[20:58] SPEAKER_02:
Very well said. I think about the original innovators. When we look at someone like Don who's doing amazing things in their classroom, or we look at an exemplary makerspace program in a school maybe that a librarian has set up, and we think, wow, that's really fantastic. Let's bring that to our school. And then a school copies what our school is doing, and then a school copies the model that they see closest to them. And, you know, it's easy to envision that the quality would kind of go down, that the innovative nature would kind of be, you know, kind of left out as copies of copies are made.
[21:35]
So I think one thing that, you know, that really strikes me is the opportunity to, or the need to, as you said, really strive to innovate. Don't just copy an innovator, but... but really set the conditions for really striving to innovate in your own way as well. Because I think we love to know that what we're going to do has already been proven.
[21:55]
But when we copy success, often we're copying the least important aspects of that, and we might be missing the essence. So I really appreciate the ideas that you've shared with us around protecting that innovation and really striving to do something different.
[22:11] SPEAKER_00:
You know, Justin, one point when you said that, I think confidence, too. We need to really instill, help our teachers, our staff, and ourselves to have that confidence. Yes, we can innovate. We can learn from others, and we can innovate. I see a lot of what you're seeing copying going on, finding something proven going on, and again, Every teacher, every classroom, every school has its unique context. I think we can't exactly copy.
[22:39]
We have different groups of students, different groups of communities. I think we need this confidence to say we will try something different. And another point to do this is really engage students. We really should get our students involved. A lot of our students are resource-deaf, creative, and they are risk-takers. They can bring a lot of ideas, especially related to technology.
[23:00]
In the whole learning ecosystem, we should not only be about teachers, what we can do to our children. We should engage our children as active creators of the ecosystem as well.
[23:10] SPEAKER_02:
Absolutely. And that's one thing that that I've just started to realize in the last couple of months that even if we look at the idea of instructional leadership, you know, typically we've had a very top down view of that. And, you know, given that I work with leaders often, you know, that's that's the direction that things are rolling out or perhaps we're recognizing instructional leadership where we're already finding it and kind of validating and encouraging it. But, you know, I'm just starting to realize that instructional leadership can't just be something that superintendents and principals have, and it can't even be something that's limited to staff. Even if we have staff involved in, you know, what we would call distributed instructional leadership, I think we need to push it a step further and do what you said and involve students.
[23:51] SPEAKER_00:
Have them as equal participants of the designing team.
[23:54] SPEAKER_02:
Powerful. So the book is Never Send a Human to Do a Machine's Job, Correcting the Top Five Ed Mistakes. Dr. Zhao, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thank you.
[24:05] SPEAKER_01:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[24:09] SPEAKER_02:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Yang Zhao? One thing that stuck with me as I think about our responsibility to teachers and our responsibility for innovation, you know, often we're not in a position where we personally can reinvent things. We're depending on innovative teachers to try things out, to experiment, and and to take risks. And if you're an administrator, one of the best and most powerful things you can do, as Dr. Zhao said, is to protect that teacher, to provide cover for that innovation to take place without fear.
[24:45]
Because we certainly are in a time, in an age, when there's a lot of pressure to get things perfect. And that, I think, can really interfere with innovation, can really interfere with trying things differently. Another thing I want to encourage you to think about is when you have something strange happen in your school, when you have a staffing pattern or an enrollment pattern, that's just a little bit strange. Like you have to split a classroom across grade levels, or you have a, uh, co-teaching opportunity and somebody's teaching outside of their subject area. When something unusual is happening, look for opportunities to make that a chance for innovation. If the timing is right, if the people are on board, don't just treat that as one more situation to kind of tolerate and make do with.
[25:33]
Look for opportunities to set people free to experiment and to innovate. And of course, the stakes are high. We're working with real kids And we want to make sure that we're doing the best that we're learning from the examples that are out there. But I'm really inspired by what Dr. Zhao said about that mandate to innovate, to not just do what we've always done and not just copy what innovators are doing, but to really take responsibility for figuring out ways to innovate. The third thing that I want to encourage you to do is to truly see students as instructional leaders and as co-designers of that learning ecosystem that Dr. Zhao talked about.
[26:14]
And if you're interested in learning more about what we do at the Principal Center to support distributed instructional leadership and help you build capacity for that type of leadership among your staff and students, I want to encourage you to check out the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network at principalcenter.com slash leadership.
[26:31] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
