Moving the cheese
April 15, 2008 by Brad Edwards
We all go down the same hole for the cheese. Just like those lab rats, if the cheese is moved, there’s confusion and frustration. Just moving a pile of papers from the kitchen counter to another location causes serious brow furrowing in my household. Let’s face it, it’s easier to do tasks repetitively rather than recreating a process, even ones that are flawed. Especially teachers who have little time for invention, dusting off last year’s lesson plans and ditto masters (remember those??) was a piece of cake compared to developing something new all over again.The greatest challenge for technology integrationsts is to enlist a teacher’s help in moving his/her cheese. So how can this happen? Teachers have to want to move it. They need to know why they should change, even if that change is slight.
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Very true Brad. This is a daunting time to be a lazy teacher. There is too much accountability these days and too much pressure to continually innovate and re-invigorate your lessons. I don’t think most teachers are lazy, though. But they don’t want to significantly increase or complicate their already demanding workload. In my experience, if a teacher can be shown an easy-to-implement way to add interest and rigor to a lesson (one with easy yet significant payoffs), they will accept this change. They are also more willing to accept this change if they see fellow staff members using it with positive results. The key to good technology integration is to understand the needs and goals of each teacher and to customize the technology to meet these needs. We have all spent too many hours in technology workshops that involve training us how to use software that we never intended to use anyway. If you keep it simple and aim for small, ongoing victories you can change the culture of a school over time.