Assessment and Evaluation

Some teachers view assessment as a necessary evil. Some view assessment as their only real tool of discipline and power. Still other teachers view assessment as an integral part of C&I, and the pivotal practice around which teaching methods and communication turns. Most teachers appreciate local, teacher-controlled assessment and loathe the high stakes assessment that produces anxiety, fear, and competitive tactics. For many administrators, parents and politicians, assessment has its justifications in accountability to standards. Indeed, it is difficult to navigate through the various forms of assessment and perspectives on assessment that teachers face on a daily basis. Everyday assessment entails hundreds of observations that teachers make of their students. This involves informal discussions, feedback and deliberate, staged activities and performances. Assessment involves volumes of documentary evidence, from daily assignments, quizzes, and tests to observations, projects, and digital artifacts. In its most stereotypical form, assessment in technology studies simply meant putting a mark on a completed project, much like a merchant places a price on a product. By current standards, this was inauthentic assessment. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, authentic assessment has transformed the way we think about and carry out assessments in the schools. Technologies of assessment had similar effects.

Organizing Knowledge for Instruction

What is intelligence? What do we know about knowledge? Are design and technological knowledge unique? Do different types of knowledge demand different organizations? How can we employ cognitive skills in the resolution of technological problems? This chapter provides an introduction to current theories of intelligence and knowledge with an emphasis on instructional organization. We will discuss learning theories and theories of cognition in Chapter VI. In the previous chapter, we acknowledged that despite the proliferation of communication and information technologies, communication skills for most people have atrophied. At the same time this proliferation of new technologies has created conditions for what we experience as information overload. For this reason, it is extremely important that teachers develop effective skills and techniques for the communication, organization, and presentation of information and knowledge. It is essential that teachers develop working understandings of current theories of knowledge and skills. Our understandings of technological knowledge and literacy along with the theories that we act on determine the way we teach about, through, and for design and technology. Current theories of intelligence, or cognitive pluralism, and the organization of knowledge are fundamental to effective instruction. This chapter builds on the basic communication and organization techniques provided in Chapter I. The effective organization of instruction requires the effective organization of knowledge.

Classroom Management, Facilities Design and Safety

Classroom and facilities management require more than a series of techniques. Management and safety require a philosophy. Veteran teachers who “make it look easy“ have not perfected the techniques of management inasmuch as they have integrated certain techniques into a system and philosophy of C&I, assessment, discipline, facilities design, and safety. We can think of our combination of techniques and philosophies as flexible superstructure that complements our somewhat inflexible infrastructure of architectural units, devices, software, tools, and machines. The greatest amount of anxiety for new teachers tends to be over classroom management, and specifically the way that individual students are disciplined for incivilities. Rather than confronting incivilities, effective management and safety depends on preventive infrastructure and systems that are in place. This point cannot be stressed enough. Students will test new and veteran teachers alike. Veteran teachers may have the benefit of experience in dealing with incivilities such as bullying, but they rely on their infrastructure and systems of prevention rather than their reactive techniques. They know how to deal with individual incivilities but prefer preventive measures by setting a tone for acceptable classroom behavior. We will explore a range of techniques, including humor, for dealing with classroom behavior.

Curriculum and Instruction Design

Who should design the curriculum that technology educators teach? Should curriculum be developed by governments and ministries of education? Should curriculum design be privatized and limited to commercial vendors? Should teachers design their own curriculum? Who should design the instructional materials? Should all materials be professionally designed by a vendor? As we noted in the previous chapter, technology teachers have had a century of freedom in designing and customizing their curriculum and instruction to suit themselves, their community, or the students. This had its advantages in diversity. The disadvantages, as we noted, related to the inconsistencies from school to school, even in the same district. When the teacher departed from a school, he or she typically departed with the curriculum and instructional materials. New teachers often began their first school year with little more than what they carried with them from their teacher preparation programs and student teaching experiences. One major problem was that when it came time for governments to identify priorities in the schools, technology studies was overlooked because of its incoherent curriculum. As indicated in Chapter VIII, the international trend is quickly shifting toward standards and unified curriculum in design and technology—the trend is toward a consistent scope and sequence of content for the study of technology. Common curriculum and goals along with content and performance standards are the trends. From a perspective of professional vitality and political finesse, these trends are healthy. These trends offer the potential for long-term sustainability of technology studies in the schools. Nevertheless, given that all curricula are fallible and have shortcomings, teachers will always have a need for dispositions toward, or skills and knowledge in, curriculum and instructional design.

Technology Content, Process, and Standards

If status of a school subject is at issue, then content, benchmarks, and standards cannot be underestimated. Of course, the question is what content and what (or whose) standards? Technology has suffered as a school subject in many ways because of the lack of consistent content and a defensible set of standards. What technology should a student in grade 2 know about and be able to use? What about grade 6, grade 8, grade 10, or grade 12, at graduation? What are the benchmarks for each grade level? We do not yet know. Should we have consistent technology content and standards for all students from K-12? Should all teachers abide by the content and standards? Should we have exams to monitor the students and teachers? Or should teachers have the freedom to teach what they want? If a student moves from one school to another, he or she will face a different curriculum with different goals. But the teachers will have the freedom and power to make professional judgments about what to teach. Who should make these judgments?

Analyzing and Designing Technology-Based Instruction

A great irony in this age of information technologies is that communication skills for many people have atrophied. Students take low levels of communication and high levels of information overload for granted. This state of affairs has dire consequences for education, where clear, cogent communication is a prerequisite to learning. While it is tempting to “get with the times” by reducing communication to brief, sloppy exchanges, our challenge as teachers is to contradict these trends by modeling formal communication and information skills. This chapter begins with a description of an effective teacher to remind us that teaching involves a wide range of dispositions, knowledge, and skills. The remainder of the chapter focuses on demonstrations, lesson planning, and instructional objectives. Lesson plans and objectives are fundamental tools for demonstrating the applications, explanations, and implications of technologies to your students. Demonstrations are the single most effective method for technology teachers. Organization and communication are the keys to effective demonstrations. The intent of this chapter is to provide you with the instructional tools that ground the practice of teaching technology studies. Communication, demonstrations, and lesson planning. These are the tools that will help you to immerse yourself in the craft of teaching. Recalling the model of reflective practice explained in the preface, this book takes the form of cycles that begin with you as a teacher. Over the first four chapters, you will be challenged to identify with certain instructional practices and techniques, and to choose among those with which you most identify. This chapter provides the tools for scaffolding a wide range of curriculum and instructional dispositions, knowledge, and skills. The operative word in this chapter is practice. Practice, practice, practice!

Justifying Technology Studies

Why should we teach technology in the schools? What is the reason for accommodating technology in the school curriculum? Why should we have to justify existence? Are the public schools an appropriate institution for developing economic human resources? Should students be taught to think critically about technology? Is the technology laboratory or workshop the place in the school where the students can “put it all together”? Will technology studies lose its identity in an alignment with math and science? Should technology studies serve to remedy long-standing inequities in technology? Should technology studies be aligned with ecology and sustainability? Is the future engineering education? These are some of the primary questions that impinge on the direction of technology studies in the schools. Throughout the 20th century, technology studies expended an inordinate amount of energy justifying itself. At times, it seemed as though this subject was trying to be all things to all people. In this chapter, we make the case that there is one, and only one, persuasive justification for the inclusion of technology studies in the schools. That justification is the content of technology. No one will buy all the things to all interest groups’ justification anymore.

Instructional Methods and Learning Styles

How do we factor the variability of students into our instructional methods? All students are different, and yet there are many commonalties from student to student. Should students simply design their own education, an education that theoretically would be tailored to their needs? Should students be left to their own desires and needs, as Rousseau advocated in Emile in the late 1700s and as A. S. Neill advocated in Summerhill in the 1960s? Or are there ideas and methods that all students should simply endure for the good of the social system? We have learned quite a bit about accommodating the variability of students through research into instructional methods and learning styles. If we vary our methods, we have learned, we accommodate a wider range of learning styles than if we used one method consistently. Teaching methods are the complement of content, just as instruction is the complement of curriculum. Technology teachers tend to over-use projects and problems, ignoring the options and opportunities that the balance of teaching methods offers. In this time of global hazards and changes in our lives wrought by technology, it is essential that technology teachers maintain a refined sense of how to teach about controversial and sensitive technological issues. It is essential that technology teachers have a command over values clarification methods as well as demonstration and project methods. Given that technology teaching methods are often research-driven, twenty-two research methods are outlined in this chapter. Forty-one teaching methods are defined and five that are central to technology studies are explained in detail. The chapter concludes with detailed sections on the relationships among instructional methods, personalities, and learning styles.

Feelings, Values, Ethics and Skills

We began this book by acknowledging that the mere word “technology” provokes strong emotions or feelings from the heart. Advertisers play on these emotions by using technology and language to incite interest and action. For some people, design, skills, tools, and machines produce fear and feelings of insecurity. Others feel power and security. Some feel excitement and some dread and stress. Very few of us are unmoved by technology. While skills and technology generate strong reactions within us, we are not passively moved; technology does not merely act on us. We actively participate; we actively control, manipulate, resist, or negotiate technology. We bring our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values to bear on our skills and technologies. Our values are always present in our actions. We assert some and suppress other values when we act. We may value what technology can do for us or what we can do with our technologies. We may value what technology cannot do for us. The purpose of this chapter is to contradict the distinctions that we commonly draw among emotions, skills, and technologies. On one hand, technology provokes strong emotions and visceral responses. On the other hand, many technologists are committed to removing emotion, the most misunderstood of “human factors,” from their work and technology.

Learning Theory, technology and Practice

Why do we use technologies in technology studies? Couldn’t we teach technology in a classroom without the complex lab and workshop infrastructures that characterizes technology studies? We could argue that this is by tradition; this is the way it always was. We could argue that we are involved in training students for occupations that use the technologies we use. We could argue that technology is naturally practical and demands that we offer practical activities. Tradition, vocation, or imitation. Not one of these three will get us very far. We could argue that students learn best when they are active; enactive experiences are best. With this argument, we verge on theoretical issues that underpin technology studies. However, neither experiencebased learning nor enactivism account for technologies in any adequate way. We need to retheorize learning theory to make it work for technology studies. Learning theories deal with specific notions of feelings, knowledge, and skills by addressing the problem of how we learn. Whether we are aware or not, our teaching practices are necessarily shaped by any number of learning theories. We are conditioned or socialized to express particular learning theories through years of participation in schooling and informal education. Sayings such as “we teach who we are” or “we teach how we were taught” suggest the power of our socialization into education. We are all products of our formal schooling and informal education.