Re-Envisioning The Age-Centred Classroom

 U. S. News and World Report had an item this week that screamed out The Digital Revolution is Coming to the Classroom  in its headline.  It was reporting on research published by the Gates Foundation concluding that the use of digital tools in the classroom leads to enhanced learning.  The article goes on to suggest that this is especially true when the digital tools are used to enhance differentiated instruction. What amazes is that this is not something the academic world has not known for a long time.  Stephen Kerr and Larry Cuban both wrote before the beginning of the 21st Century that computer technology had to lead to re-envisioning how classrooms looked and how teachers taught. It is no surprise that now, two decades later, the Gates Foundation is finding proof of this.  What is being suggested by them in their work is that technology has to be paired up with differentiated instruction, which really means curriculum has to adjust to the student rather than the other way around.  So many of the ills of our educational system begin with the assumption that we must all enter school at a certain age and proceed, grade by grade through elementary and secondary school and on to university.  I personally was more than ready for school when I began because I was gifted and, together with a group of my age mates, went through three grades in two years. In those days it was called acceleration.  But even then, we were taught as a group even though now I can see that we were each so very different and because we were identified as a group, we bore the scars of being centered  out by our age mates and some of us didn't deal with that quite as easily as others.  Differentiated instruction assisted by technology ultimately could mean that students are not broken down in to grades but rather levels and allowed to advance at our own pace.  That really is what is being suggested by those articles and there is no reason why it can't work except that it means we need to then think about how we prepare teachers differently, how we organize schools differently, how school boards conduct their business differently. It is a huge sea change that must be confronted head on if the gift of digital technologies is to mean anything other than disruptions or add-ons.  Until we come to see that the one has to include the other, headlines will only be that with little or no change being the result.