Organized Abandonment

A good friend and a great reading teacher has started a blog so that her students can respond to issues, share their thoughts on line, and so that she can promote her students’ literacy through digital media.  I love it.  And, I can’t resist.  She has two prompts and I weighed in on both.  I suspect she will block me soon. 

Her most recent prompt like a rock in a pond has triggered in me layers and layers of rippled thought.  The text used as a prompt is entitled, “Don’t throw out the old, just add the new,” from the book, When Textbooks Fall Short, by Walker, Bean and Dillard (2010).  I have not read the book.  But, I disagree with the premise. 

In my opinion we in public education have never experienced the generational divide between teachers and students to the degree we feel it now.  Never.  The core educational premise has always been that students learn content and process from teachers, go on to learn more, become teachers, and return to the classroom to replicate the experience for the next generation via the same basic instructional techniques and processes by which they learned.  That is no longer true.  For the very first time, many teachers are facing a student body who know considerably more than they do, and what they do not know they can quickly find via digital technology.  And that is very scary to many teachers.  It ends the cycle that has existed for almost 200 years in this country.

Worse, teaching is a scary proposition anyway.  I shall never forget my first day to teach.  I was petrified.  I had no idea if what I had planned would last the entire period.  I did not know the kids.  I lacked confidence and experience.  I somehow got through that first day, and many, many days afterward.  About my third year of teaching I realized I had a file folder for every unit I was going to teach, I had read the textbook, I had tests, I had handouts, I was confident.  Teaching was not scary anymore, but I was complacent.  I had grown comfortable in what I was doing and all that first year fear was gone.  I did not want that fear to return so I dug in more to insist that my teaching was great and if the kids didn’t learn it was their fault because for the previous two years they had learned.  I was so wrong.  It took a kick in the butt by a great friend and colleague to show me that I was stuck and would never get better.  I had to find new ways, new strategies, and new technologies to improve my instruction.  Once I started down that path I felt some fear as I was now doing things I had never done before, but I was also excited, and my kids learned more.  I risked returning to my first year of teaching to be a better teacher by my 5^th year and even better by my 10^th year.

I quickly learned that to add new to what was already a full agenda I had to give up some old.  I heard Larry Lezotte speak about Organized Abandonment, that is, teachers and schools are either asked to do new things each year or adopt new things each year and never stop doing any of the old things.  That is an impossible task as the school year becomes so full it rapidly becomes impossible.  The only way to survive is to pick those things, no matter how sentimentally significant, that do not contribute to learning today, and quit, drop them, abandon them, throw them away.  Man, is that scary.

More so now with the incredible advances in technology.  I have often heard that it took 30 years to get the overhead projector out of bowling alleys and into classrooms.  Some teachers resisted the overhead because they were comfortable with the chalkboard.  I took a course in audio visuals as part of my teacher preparation in which I learned how to use an overhead projector, a purple ditto master duplicating machine, a filmstrip projector, a slide carousel, and a 16mm movie projector.  All of those devices are now obsolete.  If we continued to require teachers to master that technology we would be wasting our time and theirs.  We do not.  We have abandoned them.  And we are better off.  However, I suspect that our students looking at the ways we teach now are reacting as though we are still using filmstrip projectors.

There are so many exciting concepts now available to us with the technology that is already out there.  Some districts are experimenting with BYOD, or, bring your own device, where students bring smart phones, tablets, laptops to class to augment instruction.  (Meanwhile, some districts are working hard to ban such devices from students.)  Some districts are experimenting with flip instruction, where the teacher produces a digital lesson posted on line that students watch at home.  Class time is then devoted to practice, extension, and application of the lesson the students have already received.

I just read a list of the jobs most likely to become obsolete in the next few years.  Amazing.  Those jobs include switchboard operators, assembly line workers, bank tellers, toll takers, librarians and travel agents.  All this work is being replaced by more efficient technologies.  We have already seen major shifts in education.  We rarely buy dictionaries or encyclopedias or subscribe to magazines.  Textbook funds may now be used for technology and not just textbooks.  I suspect within the next few years textbooks will be obsolete.  That will only be a problem for teachers and parents who were of the generation where textbooks were sacred dogma in each class.  That is no longer true.  Once published, a textbook is immediately out of date and there is no reason to remain shackled to such a book for ten years.

We have to re-think instruction.  We have to re-think the relationship between teacher and student and content and process.  We cannot make these leaps holding on to antiquated plans, processes, and physical materials.  We must practice organized abandonment and not have someone convince us we can add the new without abandoning the old. 

We know learning does not occur without teaching.  Teaching must evolve as the learners evolve.  I do not ever want to see “teachers” on the same list as bank tellers.  We must practice organized abandonment as we develop new and dynamic digital instruction.  My friend the reading teacher is well down that road and I am proud and impressed. 

The fear can be replaced by excitement.  We will support teachers in the transition.  But we must change.  Part of that change will be to abandon old ways.  So take a moment and grieve the trashing of your old transparencies.  Then, move on to much more exciting processes.

Organized abandonment is a good thing for kids.