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Episode 13.

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Music

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Schools hire IT professionals to manage the enterprise networks and systems they need to do their work.

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These new hires are likely to have learned their craft outside of schools.

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There's often a period of adjustment as IT professionals, well and all other adults who take jobs in schools,

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realize that their work is not exactly what they expected.

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Schools are a much different workplace than it is a learning place.

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In this episode, I try to shed a little light on what IT professionals may find unusual when they begin working in a school.

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What makes schools so unusual?

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Public schools are prepared to enroll all students in the service area,

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except for those students with very specific and intensive special needs,

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and they provide a comprehensive curriculum intended to prepare students for a wide range of educational or vocational opportunities once they graduate.

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The diverse nature of the students and the broad range of the curriculum is a part of what makes schools an unusual place to work for IT professionals.

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Of course, there are other schools that select their students and that teach a specific curriculum.

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I'm talking here about private schools for youngsters, higher education, workforce development programs and others,

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but the diversity of students and the population and the fact that we have an obligation to support all users of IT in schools

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makes it an unfamiliar place for many.

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I assume listeners were students in elementary, middle and secondary schools,

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and perhaps you even have some college or trade school education, along with probably some workforce training.

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If you're like most people, you have distinct memories of each phase of your education.

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When humans have important experiences, such as we have in schools, either as a youngster or as a parent later on,

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those will bias our beliefs about the experience for others.

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We assume everyone's experience in school was like ours. It was not. Not even for our classmates.

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We assume that everyone should learn what we learned and they should learn it, how we learned it.

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This may be true, but it may not be true.

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I think it's a result many adults pursue work in schools with the intent of replicating the structures and the instructions they experience,

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but that's probably not what all students need and it's likely not what all schools do.

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I guess I never really thought about that, but it makes sense that some people liked school and some people maybe didn't.

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The individuals who make up the leaders who set school agendas, policies and procedures is an interesting group of folks

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and an interesting aspect of public education.

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In general, we recognize two groups of people who participate in schooling as adults.

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There are those who like school and were successful at it.

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Individuals in this group tend to advocate schools that reflect their experience.

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Then there are those who do not like school and probably did not succeed at it.

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These individuals tend to advocate different organizations and types of teaching than what they experienced.

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In many cases, those who are not successful advocate for students and they form strong relationships with them.

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While this is an oversimplication, of course, the nature of these two groups and the composition of educators,

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it is noteworthy that both groups include individuals who value school enough that they want to work there and they want to support today's students.

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The perceptions, experiences and biases of individuals who never returned to school in any capacity are silent in the design of schools.

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But it doesn't really matter if we are only talking about IT, right?

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I mean, IT professionals know what we should do with IT in schools, right?

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One of the most important things to remember as you consider a position working in a school is that your education deserves no special consideration.

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While IT professionals may not exert direct control over teaching and school management decisions,

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the priorities they set and the devices and configurations they deploy do exert strong influences on what happens in classrooms and how it happens.

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When they work in schools, IT professionals are often asked to build systems that don't make sense to them or that's contrary to their expectations.

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One thing with this podcast is that educators should make decisions about the technology they need and what it must do in their classrooms.

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It is the IT professional's role to ensure that whatever technology educators need to do their work is working.

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They should not be telling teachers what technology they should install or how it should best be used in their classrooms.

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But don't teachers just teach?

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For many adults, one of the most puzzling aspects of beginning to work in schools is realizing that teaching is a more interactive and dynamic activity than they experienced or that they remember and or that they see in the popular culture.

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When one thinks of a classroom, you usually think of a teacher standing in front of students who are unseated and rose and the teacher is telling them what they need to know.

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I call this the standard model of education and for IT professionals, it's familiar and it's a very comfortable classroom in which we can design technology.

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All we have to do is give the teacher a computer and a projector, maybe some web access and a presentation application and we can just let them teach.

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Many educators come to realize largely because they're listening to the cognitive and learning scientists who are discovering how human brains actually work, that telling and testing is not teaching.

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So they need a much different arrangement of technology and different technology capacities in their classroom than when they follow the standard model of education.

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Okay, I see what you mean with teaching, but the folks in schools get to make decisions based on what they think should be done, right?

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Well, there are many more factors that affect schools and how we make decisions in them that are commonly recognized.

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Most of these factors are not new, but their effects on schools are often hidden from students and parents.

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So IT professionals and again other adults can arrive to work in schools and they're surprised that these effects exist.

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What do you mean?

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It may seem silly to say it, but schools are places where you find children, lots of children, and they reflect the economic and social and racial and ethnic populations in the areas where they serve.

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Ostensibly, children are at the center of all the decisions we make about what happens in schools, you know, we're always supposed to be supporting student learning, but the reality, however, is somewhat questionable.

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Consider, for example, that there is ample evidence that high school age people benefit from and their learning improves if the school day starts later in the morning, but few schools have adjusted their schedules to align with this finding.

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One of the things we learned when doing about schools during the COVID pandemic in 2020 is that schools provide reliable childcare for large parts of the population.

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And while that's an important function, we don't want to minimize it.

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It does seem contrary to the goal of teaching the academic curriculum, which is traditionally ascribed to schools.

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One of the reasons the decisions that are made in schools may be contrary to what is good for students is that they're multi-dimensional.

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Schools fulfill several purposes and different groups exert influences on the decisions that are made there.

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Can we look at them one at a time?

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Of course. First, schools are political organizations. They're funded by taxes that are levied by state and local governments, at least in the United States, and citizens serve on the school boards that govern local schools.

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Because the officials who fund and govern schools are elected, their selection is a political process. This opens the process of school governments to partisan politics, and participants in such decision making are not bound to evidence and reason in the same way that scientists and scholars are.

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So any decision can be justified when you're making a political decision, even if it affects schools and what happens to students there.

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We hear candidates for local, statewide, and even national offices in the United States identifying education as an important part of their platform.

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Yes, and that contributes to the fact that schools are also regulated organizations.

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Governmental agencies, which take their directions largely from local legislators, define the policies that local school boards are expected to adopt and they provide guidance on the contents of those policies.

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They also prove qualifications necessary to become a licensed teacher or administrator, and they approve teacher education programs that are offered by colleges and universities.

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In the United States, the federal government did not exert much influence on education until the Department of Education was founded in October 1979, and since then it has sought to influence decisions and priorities through grant making and other programs.

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But most school regulations and decisions are made by state and local government agencies.

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So, we see there are political influences that affect what happens in schools. Are there any others?

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Within schools there are yet other factors that affect the decisions we can make. Schools are hierarchical and authoritative organizations.

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Teachers have some authority over students. Administrators have some authority over students and teachers. This authority is not absolute, of course, but it does influence the decisions that are made and the actions that are taken.

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In some schools, this authority is grounded in part, in age. Teachers and other educators are adults and students are children.

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But authority can also come from the position that one holds. Administrators have more responsibility and more authority than teachers.

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It also comes from expertise. Teachers are experts compared to students and ostensibly administrators have greater expertise than teachers, but we all know that may not be true.

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As a result, even in the classroom in which the students are adults, there exists a hierarchy and authoritative relationship between the students and the teachers.

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Further, schools are organizations that rely on diverse expertise and this is particularly true in relation to information technology.

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Early in the history of desktop computing in schools, when a classroom may have had just one or two computers in it and these were not connected to networks,

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it was common to find a tech savvy teacher who supported and managed the devices that were in their classrooms.

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Few educators today have the training or expertise needed to configure and manage the enterprise and business class IT systems that we find in schools.

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In most jurisdictions, the executive leaders who are responsible for school operations, including IT, are licensed educators who began their career as teachers,

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but who may not have been in the classroom for many years and so the technology that was familiar to them may be primitive compared to what's been installed today.

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As a result, many initiatives are proposed and even undertaken without the complete consideration of the technological implications.

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The opposite of that is true as well. IT professionals often undertake technology initiatives without complete consideration for the educational or operational implications.

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Does all of this really affect what IT professionals can decide?

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Because schools are multi-dimensional and many groups influence the decisions that are made there, no person who works in the school has exclusive authority to make decisions about their work.

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In this, school employees and leaders are like the employees and leaders in other regulated and board governed organizations.

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The employees and leaders in other organizations, private organizations, may not have the same experience with authority and regulation.

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Of course, in some private organizations, decisions and judgments are grounded in financial success of the organization.

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If they make enough money, then decisions are good.

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In schools, this measure is largely absent.

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Various factors emerging from the political, regulatory and authoritative nature of schools contribute to the decisions that are made, the actions that are taken, even if they seem unreasonable to those who are implementing them, and judgments of success.

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Students are not often aware of these competing influences in the schools they attend.

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This makes schools as workplaces for adults very different from schools as learning places for students, and some adults find it very difficult to work in schools as a result.