Catering for students’ needs with tailored solutions

Delegates at last week's conference on education and skills, hosted by the US embassy in Dublin, might have been surprised to hear a keynote speaker from Microsoft talking down the use of technology in the classroom. Steven Duggan works as the director of worldwide education strategy, but he's also a former teacher and more interested in promoting pedagogy than product. "You typically see technology parachuted into a school in the hope that it will drive change or as something that's tagged on to the practice of teaching," he said. "My view is that technology is useless if it doesn't drive learning outcomes."

An Irishman who spent 12 years as an English teacher at Sutton Park School in north Dublin, Duggan is now part of a small team based in Microsoft's US headquarters, focused on what's going to happen next in education. His particular role is working with organisations such as Unesco and World Vision, trying to foster change with policy, pedagogy and technology.

“The starting point is that that traditional pedagogies and education systems are failing everyone everywhere,” he said, backing up his case with a litany of evidence. School dropout rates are on the rise – reaching 40 per cent in the US in 2012 with students leaving the system because they felt it had nothing to offer them. Other research highlights how pupils engage a little less each year as they make their way through school, the enthusiasm of the primary years slowly ebbing away. “There’s usually a statistical upswing in the final two years but that’s because a lot of kids have already dropped out,” says Duggan.

Rote learning that bores students into submission is a big part of the problem, but this is old news as far as Duggan is concerned. "The new junior cert is recognition that we need to move away from bankrupt models, but the question is how we do it," he said. The goal is a personalised learning and teaching that can be measured with new forms of assessment, according to Duggan, because the system has to recognise that every student is different and cater for those differences.

Tailored solutions
"You directly address the skills and competencies of individuals and tailor solutions to their needs. Technology is the plumbing that helps assess the individual but it's never the starting point," he said.

Another failure of the current system is the confused approach to preparing students for the working world. Duggan points out the irony of collaborative learning projects that culminate with students sitting exams individually. At some point they will be let loose in the workplace and the first thing they have to do is relearn teamwork. Systemic change is needed on a vast scale and the obstacles are many, including the many parents who still believe traditional pedagogy is a gold standard. “There is a challenge with education innovators to convince parents that things are broken. It’s already happening in the US because of the high cost of university education and the poor return. There is a fear of change, but I believe we’re at an inflection point,” he said.

Replacing "broken systems" is a work in progress with Microsoft just one among many organisations involved in partnership projects exploring new education models. The Collaborative Assessment Alliance is a case in point, applying new pedagogies around "deep learning" in 1,000 schools in countries around the world including Columbia, Latvia, UK, Canada and the US. Such large-scale projects rather than pilots are the way forward, according to Duggan. "There are pockets of innovation, including some schools in Ireland doing amazing things, but the challenge is to make it scalable for systemic change. The alliance is trying to do that and shape the pedagogy," he explained.

Phenomenon
One of the topics raised at the embassy conference was the Massive Open Online Course (Mooc) phenomenon, web-based learning on a massive scale that holds the promise of continuous education for everyone. Courses have come in for some criticism because of high drop-off rates and the lack of recognised accreditation.

Duggan has mixed feelings about them. “They offer new ways of accessing knowledge, but they are not that transformative and no new pedagogies are being exposed,” he said. “Where they can make a big difference is in the developing world.”

By way of example he talks about the Khan Academy, a not-for-profit online educational resource that reaches 216 million students with 26 teachers. This opens up huge possibilities where there are shortages of teachers and books, parts of the world where Duggan is determined to make a difference.

Resources
His global role encompasses countries with non-existent educational resources, poor infrastructure and abject poverty. In the past year he has set up Literacy For Life, pulling in aid agency partners to explore ways of teaching the most fundamental skills – reading and writing – to some of the poorest people on the planet. Starting in Lesotho in southern Africa, he has been putting smartphones into the hands of teachers and pupils – cellular networks are game-changers in the developing world – and giving them access to content.

Crucially, he developed an app for the project, Chekov, which lets users create their own mini-books in their own language and share them. Traditional publishers are unable to serve these communities because it would take millions of textbooks in thousands of languages. The economies of scale are not there to make it economic.

With Chekov, anyone anywhere can write or record a textbook in any language. And because of the auto read feature, you don’t need to have someone who is literate around to help you understand the words – this is vital because many households are in this predicament. “Books will read themselves aloud in a human voice to a child in an illiterate home. That’s transformative,” said Duggan.

Taking us back to where we started, it’s about identifying a practical solution to a problem rather than parachuting in hardware. Literacy for Life is now working with Unesco to identify three countries where it can be rolled out nationally. Ironically, children in parts of the developing world may be using technology for more impressive educational outcomes than many of their peers in the developed world. “It is possible that they may leapfrog what we are struggling to do,” said Duggan.