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.