One of the things that I find myself thinking about a lot is how embracing tenets of 21st century teaching - including, but not limited to using more classroom technologies - has changed what "being on task" looks like and sounds like in the classroom. Empowering students with devices of their own, allowing them to work at individual paces, requiring collaboration: each of these choices increases the likelihood that students will not be sitting still and quietly in desks, eyes trained on teachers, hanging on their every word. Now, that's often fine with me, but I know it's very uncomfortable for some other teachers.
I don't blame them, necessarily. Even in the 21st century, in my own well-respected education program, I listened to discussions about how to enforce certain voice levels and monitor eye contact as a means of checking student engagement. Once, we in my pre-service cohort were asked to describe the classroom we'd like a future administrator to observe if she were walking past our rooms. It was staggering to see how divided the responses were; we'd had so much of the same preparation, read the same texts, studied with the same professors, but still I was in a small minority when I detailed noise - chatter, laughter, spontaneous conversation - as a part of the learning environment I'd be proud to have created. In the first job I took, teaching high school English in Tucson, Arizona, the evaluation forms used by the administrators who performed my observations had a chart for timed "on-task readings," on-the-spot tallies of how many students were demonstrating active engagement. What determined how many students were included in those counts, among other things, were eye contact with teacher and active listening; a student who initiated a conversation with a peer while a teacher was talking, even quietly and relevant to the subject of the lesson, or another who doodled in his notebook while listening to a presentation or directions, would both be considered "off-task."
All of this is to say that it isn't surprising that so many teachers seem threatened by designing a lesson, let alone a more global classroom environment, in which students' eyes are on screens instead on them, when students aren't just allowed, but encouraged, to initiate their own explorations parallel or tangential to the discussion happening in the room. Indeed, I've found that it doesn't usually take long for someone to ask, when I mention the years I spent in a school where each of the students had her own tablet laptop, how I managed to keep them from playing games instead of taking notes during class. Even in that one-to-one setting, some colleagues who were usually lukewarm to the degree to which technology was embedded in the school's design got most excited about their ability to lock students out of their email or the internet while they were logged into a virtual classroom space; the impulse and eagerness to use technology to restrict students rather than empower them seems borne of a concern about letting students' attention wander too far out of the teacher's realm or control.
The implication seems to be that the availability of technology compromises classroom management, as if we ourselves didn't write notes to classmates in our looseleaf binders while feigning attention to transparencies on an overhead. This fear scapegoats the tools we use in class, when the attention should be instead on the lesson design and pedagogical strategies that help achieve student engagement. It's not unlike a discussion I've had when about the amount of time I give students to discuss questions among themselves, informally and without assessment; I've been asked frequently how I can be sure students are actually discussing what I asked them to. Obviously, I walk the room and check in with individual groups, and ask for some quick reporting out at the end, but the much more important strategy I employ is asking them interesting questions that they want to talk about. Adults who bemoan that "kids these days" don't have any attention span haven't watched them play video games for two and half hours, or spend a whole Saturday designing Lego robot; they absolutely do have attention spans, but seek activities and discussions that engage and interest them. It's not really that surprising; I have the same preferences myself.
I'm digressing a bit. I just want to forward that shifting expectations of what students at work look and sound like is a very necessary part of adopting more progressive pedagogical practices.
