Are teachers the worst students?

Even though my internship at the school is over now, I returned the following week for a Teacher Development Day. The day ended with me leaving the school with several questions and interesting reflections on the current state of teaching, and perhaps most importantly, its future.

While the students have no school on this day, all the teachers in secondary school should attend a full day of lectures and workshops intended to provide them with new tools and ideas to implement in their classes. It's worth mentioning that the day did not involve course-specific workshops, therefore, not all the content presented would necessarily suit all subjects. There was only one lecturer for this development day, and he specialised on the Google suite, so his workshops and presentations were largely focused on those products.

The day was structured as follows:

All in all, the content that the lecturer presented was considered and interesting, but a large majority of it I thought, would be redundant in an art class. He presented various online tools such as, Mentimeter, Flipgrid, EdPuzzle, Sutori, and Thinglink among others. While all of those were interesting on their own, they generally involved a lot of independent response-giving on the students' part, and an overcomplicated system for delivering feedback to the teacher. I can appreciate how some of these tools would very interesting to use in other taught subjects, but for art classes, the curriculum tends to be very hands-on and practical, with the student taking the lead of his/her creations, so these apps would seem to detract from that.

However, the lecturer also spoke about apps such as Google Arts and Culture, Google earth, Voyager, 360 Tour Creator, and Tour Builder, which allow educators to take their students on educational "tours" without having to leave the classroom. Teachers would instead build a journey through these apps, to teach their students about specific locations, events, cultures etc. For art history classes, these tools could be very interesting to apply, and might serve to better illustrate the concepts an art teacher is presenting to his/her students. One thing to consider though, is how long it might take to setup these tours, as the process can be time-consuming. Ultimately, the lecturer reinforced that none of us should be expected to use all these tools, he merely wanted us to consider them and choose the ones that work for us and our classes.

Throughout the day, what was most interesting to me were the conversations I had with teachers, and the behaviour I observed. During one of the lecturer's presentations on Google Chrome extensions, Ms. L spoke to me about an extension that allows its user to receive notifications of when and how their emails have been read (it gives a time, and on what device the email was read on, ie: smartphone/tablet/desktop etc.). Don't get me wrong, all of us have at some point been frustrated about not getting replies to emails we have sent out, so being able to know for certain that the email was not only received, but read by the recipient, is cunning, but also very petty… Maybe the recipient is just being rude and not replying, or maybe they forgot, or they have a particularly busy schedule at the moment. The point is, the reasons for why you have not received an email are one crucial thing Chrome extensions cannot provide, which leads to assumptions and unnecessary bitterness. Ms. L told me she found out about this extension through her own students, who called her out for not replying to their emails despite having proof that she had read them. So our conversation led to us discussing not only how that situation is uncomfortable and awkward for all involved, but it can basically constitute a breach of privacy. Nowadays, we are all so readily available and easily contacted through instant messaging, email, and phone/video calls, that we have become increasingly impatient and presumptuous about each other's intentions. Having that mentality and behaviour spread to the classroom undoubtedly begs the question, where does the boundary lie for teacher-student communications becoming invasive? Just like how a school's IT department can block social media URLs on campus wifi, should the use of these extensions/apps also be monitored and/or restricted? At what point is there too much control over these issues? And finally, realistically, is there anything that can really be done to soothe these problems, or are we inevitably moving towards obsessive inter-connectedness inside and outside classroom settings?

I'm not sure I know the answer to any of those questions, but they have been on my mind since the day of those conversations, so I thought it would be worthwhile sharing them on here.

As for the question that serves as the title of this post, 'Are teachers the worst students?', this was inspired by a remark made by one of the teachers during this development day, but it was something I had been thinking about throughout the day also. Typically (and understandably), teachers dislike being talked over, having to call a student's attention multiple times, or struggle to keep the class focused. Therefore, one would expect that their experiences with this type of behaviour, would mean teachers would try to avoid acting in the same manner when they are called to be in the role of the students… right? Well, obviously my reflections are based on only one experience in this kind of situation, and in no way do I want to generalise, but I observed throughout the day how the lecturer would often be competing with teachers that would be speaking amongst themselves while the presentation was still ongoing, and from where I was sitting, I could see that a lot of the teachers were on their computers browsing something entirely different and often unrelated to what the lecturer was speaking of.

This isn't a judgement, it's mostly just amusing, and speaks to how both are similar when you eliminate the titles of "teacher" and "student". At the end of the day, regardless of age we all get bored, and have the tendency to let our minds wander when asked to sit and listen to presentations. This realisation made me think of even more questions: If not even the adult teachers can sit still long enough to get through a presentation, why do we expect students to be any better at it? Why do we structure lessons/workshops in a similar way to that of the lecturer's if we can observe how that structure isn't effective or interesting enough to hold the focus of the audience?

If I were to attempt to even begin to answer those questions, I would start by suggesting that, from my experience as a student, and now as a teacher, I think both groups' responses partly come from a place of arrogance. As students, we have all disagreed with a teacher's feedback and thought we knew better (among other scenarios where students don't respect a teacher's opinions), and teachers (as observed on this development day) can sometimes think new technologies will never beat good old pencil and paper or other outdated practises that are not as effective on their own anymore.

As society moves towards a greater dependability on technology and online services, education should perhaps adapt and accommodate this, as there is only so much a classroom setting can do to separate itself from the outside world. Whether we agree with this shift or not, it doesn't change the fact that it is happening as we speak. Fighting or ignoring it could lead to a lack of understanding and sympathy between teachers and students. Just as society is constantly evolving, so should the way we teach. This development day taught me how adaptable and open-minded educators have to be in order to maximise the potential of their students.