TPCK is Alive

Sandra Day O’Connor, Benjamin Zander, Greg Mortenson, Rosalind Wiseman--these are just a handful of speakers that I have been fortunate enough to hear speak at my school. In addition, we are so lucky to have countless professional development opportunities right on campus including Alec Couros, David Jakes, and the delightful Flat Classroom women Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay (I truly enjoyed reading about their recent Flat Classroom Summit in Qatar). This past week featured a day with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach that was a terrific way to frame the way we should be thinking as the words of 21st Century skills and literacies buzz in our minds and often make our heads spin. What I liked about the day was the way she essentially tried to reframe the way we approach things and, in the spirit of Benjamin Zander, forced us to think of all of the possibilities. Her emphasis on sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action as stages of what we should be developing with our classes is exciting and daunting, but she left us with plenty of examples of people who started small and made it big.

Alongside of these stages was an introduction to something called the TPCK model, which I affectionately call the Tupac model. This visualization is helpful in describing, and conceptualizing, the perfect storm that has to occur in teaching in the 21st Century. Before, a solid handle on your content was all you needed in an Independent school, add some pedagogy if you were teaching in a public school (a distinction I have never quite understood) and then recently, we have been asked to dabble in some technology. But as I have struggled to frame the role of technology every time I learn more, this model truly helps me see where I need to be aiming my work day after day.

Mishra and Koehler in their work “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge” state: “Though not all teachers have embraced these new technologies for a range of reasons—including a fear of change and lack of time and support—the fact that these technologies are here to stay cannot be doubted. Moreover, the rapid rate of evolution of these new digital technologies prevents them from becoming ‘transparent’ any time soon. Teachers will have to do more than simply learn to use currently available tools; they also will have to learn new techniques and skills as current technologies become obsolete. This is a very different context from earlier conceptualizations of teacher knowledge, in which technologies were standardized and relatively stable. The use of technology for pedagogy of specific subject matter could be expected to remain relatively static over time. Thus, teachers could focus on the variables related to content and pedagogy and be assured that technological contexts would not change too dramatically over their career as a teacher. This new context has foregrounded technology in ways that could not have been imagined a few years ago. Thus, knowledge of technology becomes an important aspect of overall teacher knowledge.”

In essence where teachers were asked to be experts in one area or maybe even two, they are now required to be proficient in all three areas of content, pedagogy and technology. Consequently, the stages of sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action in concert with the Tupac model has shifted my paradigm on how I view my daily work and has moved my insular classroom of academic rigor, to a broader classroom that may be even more rigorous due to the diverse thinking skills I will be demanding from my students.

The Breaking Point

My colleague Scott and I teach a class called the Sudan Project. It is a year-long course with the goal being to take over forty hours of footage provided by photojournalist Karin Muller and create a documentary about Sudan and specifically the crisis in Darfur. We spent the first semester trying to lay some groundwork for the students covering the history of Sudan, the nature of the conflict, other geo-political conflicts, documentary film making and training them on the video editing software they need for producing this film. We’ve have our had ups and downs, but for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class with no blueprint, I have been fairly pleased with our progress…until today. Today was our first production meeting and the power of the mob ruled the day. Students were broken up into groups to produce ten mini-documentaries that will then be sifted through for the final product. As groups began reporting, we heard the start of grumbling: it took a long time to download the footage; the timecodes aren’t matching up with the shot lists; there is so much footage to look through; there is no way to do this task in sixteen school days. The frustration built as each group reported to such a point that when a young woman wanted to report the success she was having with aligning the shot list and the clips, students were literally shouting her down. Normally my colleague and I play a bit of good cop/bad cop, but in this case we both put the hammer down. When the students left disgruntled, we simply stared at each other and realized that this was really our first hurdle that the class had to overcome. Sure there were technical glitches with their documentaries from first semester, but the gravity of their job was finally hitting them. Their frustration and anger had two sources. One was the overwhelming work of sorting that few anticipated because they simply did not know the process: They were not used to the idea that there was no easy solution to this problem. The other was the realization that they were responsible to the people they were seeing in their film. As one student said, “I don’t want this to be a show on Animal Plant looking at some weird place. I want my audience to be able to connect with the humanity of these people.” I know that meaningful learning is born out of frustration and while I would not wish such discomfort on my students regularly, in the midst of my own aggravation, I was lucky to witness one person’s triumph.