I attended a dinner last night for a man I greatly respect. He was my Principal when I was a middle school teacher and now he is being elevated to the Superintendent’s position, a move that should have been made years ago. There were a great many educators in attendance spanning several generations. This man, as a person, educator, and administrator, is very popular with people he has worked with, now and in the past, because he gets it. Whatever “it” is, he definitely gets it. I think “it” is a balanced combination of intelligence, understanding, passion, compassion, fairness, and leadership. This is a rare combination of skills for most, which limits further the number of educational leaders who get it.
The gathering of teachers celebrating the occasion included a great many who had already retired over the years. Reminiscence was the main course of the evening. Stories, experiences, and sharing made up the side dishes. The ages of educators ranged from the very early 20’s to the autumn years of 70’s. It spanned 50 years of teaching. What struck me for reflection was the fact that many of the experiences of the older generation of educators had little to do with the role of educators today. Of course it still involved adults teaching kids, but the position of teacher seems to have evolved to a different level.
Back in the day, the teacher was the center of information. The teacher was the Hunter, gatherer, and provider of content. (That description always brings to mind visions from Lord of the Flies.) The teacher was the expert. The teacher was the “go-to person” for the information within the subject he or she was licensed to teach. The teacher maintained the position at the front of the classroom in order to dispense or provide the information to the class.
If the teacher did not have an answer, there were books and sources to help hunt down the information. Teachers would gather information over a period of years to provide to their students. The most experienced teachers had the largest collection of file cabinets in their rooms. When it came time to retire, they would dole out their dittos and files like hoarded treasure to the up-and-coming, fledgling teachers. Those younger teachers became the new controllers of content. It was control of information that was the power of education.
Today, there has been a shift in the acquisition of information. There is too much information for most people to be experts. Information is exponentially accumulating minute by minute. Publishing is instantaneous. Content that was non-existent this morning is available online by this afternoon. Teachers can no longer be the sole hunters, because there is too much to hunt. They can no longer be the sole gatherers because there are not enough file cabinets or rooms to house them. Without the ability to hunt and gather with focus and purpose, how can the teacher be the provider?
The strategy for teachers today has to be different from what it was. Teachers still need to be content experts, but that becomes the starting point and not the end of the process. No longer are they the hunters, but the leaders and guides for the hunting parties. Teachers need to send out the hunting parties with clear direction and finely honed hunting skills to capture the content. They then need to gather the content from each of the groups to share with all of the other groups.
We have shifted from mastering the content, to mastering how to master the content. We no longer hunt it down, but teach that skill to our students. We need not provide content directly to our students, but rather provide the skills for them to present and cooperate and collaborate with others for the purpose of mastering the skills to learn information and provide it to others.
As educators, our task should no longer be to teach content, but rather how to find, access, analyze, understand, and create content. This should be the role of teachers today. It is probably one of the few things that teachers can directly affect in the way of educational reform. “Give a man (woman) a fish and he (she) eats for a day. Teach him (her) how to fish and he (she) eats for a lifetime.” (Sentences were so much easier when they were sexist.) This is an oldie, but a goody. This is not a place where many educators live, but it is a place where many should begin to move. If we support reforming an education system that does not seem to be working to the satisfaction of those who support it, more educators need to change the things they have control over.
My Island View 
That would mean taking the risk to unlearn, relearn, leap… and trust the net is there… waiting to tweet, hunt, gather, create and decipher content together, away from the isolation of the old control chambers… The only way to go…
We create and propagate content on a spectacular and increasing scale, but content is not knowledge it is information. It is important that we don’t get totally hypnotized by “content” for its own sake because of our attention biases and instead bring our focus back to real knowledge as well.
I follow a lot of tweets and blogs and articles from some very smart people, and very very very little of it is actually usefully original information that helps me learn something new. I follow them because they sometimes do point me toward something useful if I filter them scrupulously.
The opposite is true when I read a carefully written book. Every page has insights and make me think deeply and learn something new and then also points me to other sources to learn from. Content is not all equal, most of what we call content is really not something that we can learn much from, we propagate it because the technology makes it easy to propagate it and because we want to bring attention to ourselves.
We do need the skills to manage the huge flood of content, but in my opinion it would be drawing a completely unfounded and counterproductive link to further claim that we somehow have less need for subject experts.
The basic knowledge of individual domains is still subject to expertise. Eliminating or devaluing experts is the opposite of positive educational reform, it is giving up on the concept of knowledge in order to try to keep up with the latest fads, fashions, propaganda, and many, many duplicated copies of the same information.
We do need to add skills and expertise that bridges the growing domains and helps us manage their content. We also need to train and use domain experts and not ignore decades of research showing compellingly how experts think differently in their domain from non-experts, and how their different thinking is essential for educating people in each domain.
Triviallizing expertise to mean “information gathering” without the metacognitive skills and deliberate practice required in each domain would be point toward the death of serious ability in important domains, I think we can be pretty confident of that from what we know of learning theory and expertise.
Todd I agree in large part. It is no easy thing to find the time to be reflective and synthesize new knowledge from the stream of data available to us today. This is the difference between following a constant stream of data on the Gulf oil spill and listening to journalists. There may be value in both. I am aware of the events in Thailand, I don’t begin to understand them. I would need to seek out some experts.
Twitter and Blogs provide access to these experts in a way that snapping on CBC Newsworld, BBC or CNN do not. I was used to two or three trusted aggregates of news and information. That was good, this is better.
It does not seem to matter which medium we select, there is always a tendency for some topic to become viral and consume the conversation repetitively.
Great way to look at it! It’s been tough making the switch. I was taugh by hunter/gathering sages and it’s what I wanted to be when I became a teacher. As I’ve seen the ways of the sage fail over and over I’ve started to adopt the ways of the 21st century. The new tech tools have made making the switch much easier! Times are a changing and we need to catch up to best help our students.
Your description of teachers in the days of yore really took me back to my childhood. And not necessarily in a good way!
I think the best thing we can tell teachers is that it is okay to give students freedom. Too many teachers ( my colleagues) are married to the textbook so they believe they Must get through that entire book and in June they brag about it. I love to point out to them that half the content in textbook is out of date!
Great post! Thanks for being so insightful!0
Okay Kelalford, I’m only on fractions and its almost June! There are three more chapters in my Math Makes Sense textbook. I’ll do one a week and we should be fine I think. Then I will have bragging rights too!
We break this cycle when we learn to differentiate a large group of young people. We can do that when the assessment mavens decide to chill and trust us to teach.
I couldn’t agree more. What students need is not rote memorization they need critical thinking and analytical skills to process and apply what they’ve learned in new,hopefully, better ways. Ultimately that should be the goal of education, to advance knowledge a
Some useful ideas that I would also support – particularly using the textbook as only one of many resources, drawing out students’ existing knowledge and skills, and providing useful material for life beyond the classroom.
However, I don’t think we should be considered bad teachers if we haven’t updated our lessons for next week with new stuff on the Internet this week. Not everything changes that fast, not everything that is new is good, and not everything that is “last week” is bad.
Also, as an English language teacher, I’m afraid your proposition of no longer teaching content won’t work.
How are Taiwanese elementary school kids supposed to learn English if all I do is show them “how to find, access, analyze, understand, and create content”? I assume I would have to get my Chinese co-teacher to write this in their first language and then leave it up to them to discover what they need by themselves.
They would then some how search the English web – not easy when they can’t read, write or type English characters, there are few computers available and I only see them 40-minutes per week – work out what would be appropriate – again not easy as they can’t read English – and then show me their great discoveries. Of course, they wouldn’t be able to explain to me what they discovered, as I don’t speak Chinese and they won’t have magically learned how to speak English.
Oh, I forgot to mention, some of these are grade one students (about 5 years old).
Come on, this just won’t work in my situation. What about those that teach students to play a musical instrument? What about those that teach ballet or sport? According to your proposition, they can just read about it or watch it on the Web and go out and play.
Honestly, what is required in your remarks is the context you are speaking about. When you say ALL teachers, you should clarify the educational sector you are talking about. That way they might make more sense to those of us not working in that environment.
Awesome post Tom! As a teacher librarian I couldn’t agree with you more! From my perspective I see that both teachers and students need to develop stronger skills in becoming effective users of information in our digital landscape. A primary responsibility of the school library media specialist is to guide students and staff on how to be effective consumers and producers of information using 21st century tools. You are exactly right… that all educators need these skills … not just the school librarian–although that is a great place to start to build capacity for these skills in our schools. Unfortunately, many don’t seem to get this. In this time of budget cuts the school librarian is often the first to get cut because what we do can’t be tied to standardized test score. Such a travesty! Note the verbs in your statement below… access, analyze,understand and create… these are the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. When we teach these critical thinking skills we teach our students to become independent thinkers… which is the true foundation of a democratic society.
“As educators, our task should no longer be to teach content, but rather how to find, access, analyze, understand, and create content. This should be the role of teachers today. It is probably one of the few things that teachers can directly affect in the way of educational reform.”
Tom,
Thanks for reinforcing the change in the role of teacher. I do not think that this message can be restated enough. It hit me again last week when some of my students were in a skype call with some students from Van Meter, Iowa discussing the transition from a traditional classroom to a 1:1 classroom. The students at my school could not comprehend the teacher as guide, facilitator, etc.
Of course you do not have to be a teacher in a 1:1 school or classroom to make this shift. But I am hoping that it will expedite the change for our school.
Thanks again!
People can’t learn effectively without both the domain-general skills for handing information and using information processing technology that Tom is talking about and the content and metacognitive skills underlying domain-specific expertise that Greg is talking about. Don’t most people agree on that much?
From my experience, you can’t get very far solving a problem if you don’t have the domain expertise to know the right questions to ask and the right sources to rely on. No amount of Googling will tell you which information is relevant to the specific problem at hand and how reliable it is without adequate domain expertise. There are no technology tricks or simple rules that accomplish this in my experience.
And if you don’t have the information “content” hunting and gathering skills, you can’t get beyond a narrow range of sources when a problem spans domains. Nor can you make effective use of of more than a small part of the enormous amount of information available to you.
I always wondered why I learned so much more outside of school than in school, why I understood more when I found texts myself rather than relying on the curriculum being presented. I think it illustrates what Tom is saying, that we have to learn to find good information ourselves in a broad manner, not just be spoon fed narrow content.
It also bothered me that I started learning a subject in most cases more deeply after the class ended and I had the time and freedom to think about the subject in a new way rather than just read about it and drill. That illustrates the other side, that the specific content does matter, it just can’t be force-fed on a schedule. I don’t know how that insight can be exploited in education, it doesn’t seem to fit the way schools work in general.
My experience has been that at least in my case, education had to plant the seeds for thinking in the right ways and asking the right questions and finding good sources, allowing me to cultivate their knowledge and abilities in each area. Each domain has its own way of thinking, and they all rely on certain common information gathering and organizing skills but each subject goes well beyond that as well. How can education work with this natural learning process rather than against it or ignoring it? That’s the real question I feel needs to be asked.
Tom,
Great post with a great analogy. The majority of my thoughts are going to be in reference to your last paragraph. Teachers can no longer be the “sage on the stage”. Since I have professional development on the brain right now, I’ll equate it to that. How many PD sessions have we sat through that followed the “sage on the stage” model? A lot. How meaningful were they? Not very. Teachers do need to be creating more. Students need to see their teachers creating more. Guess what teachers? That means you have to be creative yourselves if you want to foster it with your students! I know, it’s such a crazy concept! You get what you give when it comes to level of engagement, creativity, and productivity.
“We need not provide content directly to our students, but rather provide the skills for them to present and cooperate and collaborate with others for the purpose of mastering the skills to learn information and provide it to others.”
The last 4 words of this statement are so critical. Provide it to others (in reference to what do with the the information once they have learned it). We can’t just keep following the “consume consume consume” approach to information. In my opinion, students need to create in equal parts (if not more than) to what they consume.
Tom,
Great read! I’m curious as to how we can alter “experienced” teachers mindsets to accomplish the new role of the teacher. I think that beginning teachers and experienced teachers need to be taught different ways to understand this paradigm shift. Content knowledge (as you say) is still important, but maybe it is more a matter of being knowledgeable in finding the best sources for that content?
Thanks Tom!
I really enjoyed this post, Tom. My role now is predominantly to develop staff and I’m frequently alarmed by what people just “don’t know” about accessing and using available tools and therefore, can not possibly teach.
That’s a lot more frightening in this climate of rapidly changing technology. When content mastery was the expectation, at least kids could access the content independently if they were motivated to do so.
But now, students are frequently SO far ahead of the adults in their lives as relates to use of technology, and yet there are huge gaps in their abilities to effectively apply those skills in a way that facilitates growth.
Learning requires the ability to create meaning from information. Being able to make tools perform is not enough; kids need their teachers to guide them in creating meaning and connections with those tools. A shift is needed, and your analogy is spot on.
The reality is that we are not all experts in the fields we are assigned to teach. Even as a high school teacher I was asked to teach outside my specialty. This made resource-based learning difficult and I had to rely heavily on the experience of others. I taught in K-12 schools with eight or nine staff before internet made effective professional learning communities a reality. Mentoring learners to consume, produce and publish content in these areas was challenging to say the least.
As a learner, I followed the following pattern. When I became a teacher librarian I passed it on and still use it:
Dictionary
Encyclopedia or almanac
Reference work
Periodical
Realia and pictures files
people
I would consume in that order, produce content organized around the first two on the list (using the encyclopedia as my initial outline) and then begin to take ownership of the content so that the published content was reflective of my own understanding.
Information technology has introduced a more flexible, less linear progression, but it essentially begins the same way: with a textbook or general summary produced by someone with more time and experience than I or my students have. It is really not where the content begins, it is what you produce and publish.
[…] Today, there has been a shift in the acquisition of information. There is too much information for most people to be experts. Information is exponentially accumulating minute by minute. Publishing is instantaneous. Content that was non-existent this morning is available online by this afternoon. Teachers can no longer be the sole hunters, because there is too much to hunt. They can no longer be the sole gatherers because there are not enough file cabinets or rooms to house them. Without the ability to hunt and gather with focus and purpose, how can the teacher be the provider? via tomwhitby.wordpress.com […]
Great reflective piece. I agree that “more educators need to change the things they have control over.” We have heard a lot about 21st century learners, but what does it mean to be a 21st century educator? If we expect our students to be life-long learners, we need to model the skills we want students to learn – learning and innovation skills, digital literacy skills, career and life skills. Educators need to provide students with meaningful learning experiences through project learning, problem-based learning, design based learning, etc.
These methodologies will teach students the importance of collaboration, teamwork, leadership and innovation.
One of the earliest lessons I remember from my student teaching days was that it’s OK to tell the students, “I don’t know.” Although I haven’t thought about it exactly in these terms, I suppose I have always eschewed the ‘hunter/gatherer’ role to some degree in my teaching in favor of allowing the students to develop more independence in their learning. I don’t think that’s necessarily unique to an ed-tech perspective, but rather what we’ve come to currently understand as good teaching.
I wonder if, one day twenty or thirty years in the future, teachers will be blogging (or whatever the 2040s equivalent is) about back in the early 2000s, when we were all so ignorant about good educational practice. Will ‘good teaching’ look much different then?
Hmmm…
I don’t hunt or gather. I don’t even lead the hunting party. I would liken my role in the classroom to that of a Shaman 😉
I agree that we must teach our students the skills necessary to hunt and provide a home (intellectual place) for themselves. I think of myself as that type of teacher but I have recently been rudely awakened. I was shocked to find myself standing in front of a group of students who do not want to hunt or fish. They want to be fed. They mimic the baby bird with mouth open waiting to be fed.
They know the meaning of wait time far better than I do. They will wait to be fed. Recently I have gone back and forth between allowing them to starve and then feeding them right before they starved to death or rather starved to “F”. Some of them are belligerent and not willing to bend (think independently) but some of them truly seem not yet ready to hunt. They are soooo used to being fed that when I ask them to feed themselves using the tools that I have given to them they look at me and ask with all sincerity “what do I do?” When I reply “what would I do?” they can repeat and talk themselves through what I went over but they are almost trembling with anxiety.
They know when I go to trainings and learn new activities/skills because when I try them out I let them know that I am trying something new that I thought was cool. I allow them to see me struggle to do things that are new for me so that I can model for them what it looks like to problem solve. I know that they need to see both our failures and successes so that they are not fearful of trying the unknown. My student body ranges from 13-17 and I am daily amazed at some of the complacency/uncertainty/?? I have to work through as I teach them how to hunt and fish.
I deeply believe that I am to teach the tools but I just wish sometimes that they were more willing to put the fish on the hook.
Thanks for your post.
Tom,
As always, a very insightful post. While I agree that some teachers may have taught with the approach that “control of information was the power of education,” I don’t think it was or is true for all. Many of the best teachers approach it as having a command of the content and it’s delivery while understanding that it is never a total command or perfect delivery. There has always been an overwhelming amount of information, it is just easier to access at this time. I don’t remember a time that I did not have a pile of unread books at home (or a wish list from the library or bookstore).
Teachers need to hunt and gather continually (life long learning) in order to model the same for our students. We have a perspective on the material and our students to share (provide) what we know about each in order to create focus and purpose in our classrooms.
Tom,
As always your post is very insightful and ‘spot-on’! I hope that if my students don’t learn a lot of French [IF], then they can learn different ways to learn, how they learn best, how to enjoy learning and that no one should ever stop learning. The benefit of teaching a subject area as vast and ever-changing as a second language is that you can never ‘know it all’ and thus you are always modeling learning for your students. We’re just lucky that way.
Anyhow, thanks again.
Amy [TNschatz]
ps .. I’d LOVE for you to think about how to best handle working with people I call ‘69.5-ers’ .. those people who do ‘just enough’ to get by. They drive me nuts! =S