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To Improve Education – Focus on Pedagogy Not Technology

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It’s an exciting time for technology in education. Global tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are promoting adaptive teaching systems to give each student a personal tutor that responds to their personal needs and ability. Machine learning systems can analyze data from online learning platforms to predict a student’s future performance. Virtual reality offers alternative worlds of historical re-enactment and scientific wonder. Even drones have been recruited to the teaching of geography.

But technology alone won’t solve the deep problems of education. The reason is simple. What thrives in the lab rarely survives in the jungle of a school classroom or university lecture hall. Adaptive learning systems may work for a week or so, but students soon get bored with mechanised tutors and teachers struggle to cope with students progressing at different paces. Predicting future performance through machine learning is fine, but how do you use the results? What do you tell a student who is predicted to fail the next exam? Virtual reality is a cool device for an inspiring lesson, but how does a school or university cope with a cupboard full of virtual reality headsets, all needing to be untangled and charged ready for use? And how do you manage a class of students stumbling around with their heads in VR boxes, or waiting in line for their turn to view ancient Rome?

After 40 years of technologies for learning – educational television, language labs, classroom response systems, programmable robots – the only specifically educational technology that is widespread in schools is the electronic whiteboard. A review of evidence for interactive whiteboards (IWB) in schools found that they may alter how teaching happens in school classrooms and may increase the motivation of teachers and student, but the studies of IWB show “no significant or measurable impact on achievement”. The most important piece of technology for schools over the past decade is not improving students’ performance. However, the report concludes that “in the hands of a teacher who is interested in developing the independent, creative, thinking skills of their students, (the IWB) will be used to further these purposes … It’s not what you use, it’s how you use it.”

It’s not what you use, it’s how you use it. We need to focus on how teachers use technology, not just the technology alone. The key to this is pedagogy. By ‘pedagogy’, I mean the theory and practice of teaching, learning and assessment. A teacher with effective pedagogy can make a success from even the most mundane technology, or no technology at all.

We now know far more than we did even 10 years ago about which teaching and learning methods are successful. Here’s a quiz for you. Which of the following study approaches are effective (yes, all of them can work in some contexts, but which ones are generally useful)? The answer is at the end of this article (for the evidence, see ‘Learning the Smart Way’ by Paul Kirschner and Mirjam Neelan).

  • Learning spaced over time, instead of all at once
  • Questioning what you have learned                                        
  • Using mnemonics (keys) to remember content                  
  • Highlighting and underlining key information                      
  • Letting study and practice of topics overlap

The ‘big four’ overarching pedagogies, with firm evidence from classrooms studies, are: feedback for learning, cooperative learning, visible learning and personalized learning. Giving a student immediate feedback on performance, especially in online learning, is one of the most effective ways of improving retention and exam scores. Cooperative learning – through group projects and collaborative research – is the great success story for education of the past fifty years. It works best when students have shared goals, know when and how to contribute, share rewards, and can reflect on their progress. Visible learning involves students setting explicit goals, the teacher seeing how each student is progressing, and each student understanding what the teacher requires. Personalized learning works best when students have group as well as personal tasks, the classroom is designed to support personalized acitivty, and students can discuss their performance.

Within these generally successful approaches to teaching, learning and assessment, there are many novel methods and techniques. I’ve compiled 40 of them into a new book: Practical Pedagogy: 40 New Ways to Teach and Learn. Some of these pedagogies will be familiar to every teacher, such as ‘learning to learn’ and ‘learning through storytelling’, but are being developed in new ways through technology. Others, such as ‘spaced learning’ and ‘teachback’ have been tried at small scale and now need more widespread use. And some, such as ‘translanguaging’, ‘stealth assessment’ and ‘rhizomatic learning’, offer ideas for the future.

Put innovative pedagogies together with new technologies and you have a powerful brew. Take, for example, flipped learning where students are introduced to a topic through instructional videos then explore the topic in more depth in the classroom. There’s now good evidence that flipped learning is effective, providing the classroom time is used for cooperative learning. Flipped learning combines two of the big four pedagogies – the students do personalized learning while watching, pausing and reviewing the video, then they engage in cooperative learning and problem solving for the classroom lessons.

What happens when the order of flipped learning is changed, so students start by exploring the topic in a group activity, then watch an instructional video? It turns out this is even more successful. Students who worked together to explore a complex new topic then watched a mini-lecture significantly out-performed those who watched the lecture before carrying out the hands-on group activity. One explanation is that the students who first watched the lecture were restricted to exploring what they had been taught, but those who explored first ranged more widely in their activity and discussion.

Technology is a central to flipped learning. The instructional material is delivered through online video and the group activity for the ‘explore first’ study was carried out on an interactive tabletop display. But the technology is in the service of pedagogy. Also, the key technology for flipped learning – instructional video – is controlled by the learner, not the teacher. Flipped learning is just one example of an effective pedagogy. If we first understand how students learn and how to teach effectively through practical pedagogy, then we can make good choices about which technologies to adopt.

Practical Pedagogy: 40 New Ways to Teach and Learn, is published by Routledge and available at a 20% discount with code BSE19 from www.routledge.com/9781138599819.

Answer to the quiz: learning spaced over time, questioning what you have learned, and letting study and practice overlap are generally effective strategies.

Written by Mike Sharples.

Mike Sharples is Emeritus Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK. He will be speaking about this at this year’s OEB Global 2019. You can register for this conference here.

27 Responses

  1. Eckart

    Very good article! I have observed a similar confusion to what you describe as
    “It’s not what you use, it’s how you use it”:
    It’s the confusion between workpiece and tool. When you give a brush and paint to a child it will make a nice drawing that fits to his/her age. When you give the same tools to an artist he will create something overwhelming like Michelangelo did it.
    It is realy important to make that difference other wise companies jump from one educational tool to another without knowing what “piece of art” (=workpiece) they want to paint.

    Reply
  3. Emma

    Yes I really agree to pedagogy type of learning students relate themselves to their felliw learners .they experience socialization and learing thru sharing of ideas in achieving their goals in the learning process.

    Reply
  4. Nakalembe Irene

    The article is on point i have not just seen but experienced similar challenges at my time in school.The teachers somehow seemed to be on a different page from the learners and the initiative to make ends meet was almost not there.we should therefore ensure learning materials are used right.

    Reply
  6. Chole Richard

    We must have a clear knowledge and understanding of the PURPOSE of education before we implement an activity or utilize tools for teaching and learning. Tools and activities must be detected by and aligned to the PURPOSE OF EDUCATION.

    Reply
    • Annelie de Klerk

      Too much emphasis is currently on technology and the pedagogy is left behind. Teachers are so overwelmed with everything that’s going on with technology that they forget what is really important. Wonderful and informative article.

      Reply
    • ahmadun

      Yes I really agree to pedagogy type of learning students relate themselves to their felliw learners .they experience socialization and learing thru sharing of ideas in achieving their goals in the learning process.

      Reply
  7. Maizam

    Yes! Experienced it first hand. Pedagogy should guide teaching efforts, supported by technology. Not vice versa.

    Reply
  11. Peter Maleta

    Powerful input. We note also the benefits of combining technology with pedagogy when contextualised through research methods to determine the content of the point of departure. It also reduces costs which sometimes discourage classroom practice innovation

    Reply
  13. Hennie

    Perfect!
    Also: Do not survey students on whether they found technology helpful, if using technology was irrelevant for the purpose of learning or administered assessment. If an examination only requires them to regurgitate a textbook, using technologies may be perceived as a waste of time.

    Reply
  14. Measury

    A very informative article where every teacher could relate and somehow reflect of how to make learning effective as possible. I strongly agree that pedagogy is the core of teaching.

    Reply
  16. Sayed Shamsuddin

    Whatever the ways we taught, realization and translating those into practice by the learners are the ultimate parameter in measuring the teaching and learning success.

    Reply
  17. Ahmed Abdulla

    Technology is very important. I believe it is important change the pedagogy using technology.

    Reply
  19. Jose Ames

    It is not what sort of technology you use. You can be knowldgeable. a sage on stage. We need more than that for a class to be engaging and make an active one. Pedagogy is a fine art technology cannot teach. class is to be an active one.

    Reply
  22. Brams

    I am really glad I’ve found this information. Today bloggers publish just about gossips and web and this is actually irritating. A good website with interesting content,

    Reply
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    It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using

    Reply
  25. Telkom University

    Can you elaborate on the balance that can be struck between leveraging technology and maintaining a strong pedagogical foundation?

    Reply

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