The Misguided Push for Technology in the Classroom
On tools, screens, and schools
In this digital companion to The Dumb Phone issue, Peter Shull—school teacher and author of the highly-praised novel Why Teach?—reflects on the regulatory push for technology in the classroom and its consequences.
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When I began teaching in 2007, I did so nontraditionally, coming into the classroom through a backdoor accreditation program. Equipped with a degree in English and thinking to hold the job for two or three years, I signed my contract, agreed to take online classes as I taught, and traveled to Hays, Kansas, two hours from my hometown, to take a five-day crash course at the regionally popular Fort Hays State University (“Affordable Success!”) where I would earn first my teaching certifications and then a masters degree.
I didn’t think I was signing on for the long haul—I didn’t plan to become a “lifer”—but I was looking forward to my new job. For one thing, after working as a barista at a coffee shop and a teller at a bank for the previous few years, I would now be earning a paycheck large enough to live on and even begin paying down some of my student loan and credit card debts (it was large enough—if only just). For another, I had liked high school. Not the classes, per se, but being a high schooler: the newfound freedom; the increasing awareness of the greater world around; the ride. Having just finished my four-year undergraduate degree in five-and-a-half years and learned a few things along the way, I thought I had some wisdom to share with the younger generation at the school I had once attended. I thought that, if nothing else, I could prepare them better for life than I felt I had been prepared.
When the first bell rang and I started teaching a class that was my own, I was surprised by a number of things. First, the distance between the honors classes I’d taken in school and the so-called “regular track” classes I was assigned was much greater than I had imagined. Second, while I had learned a great deal in the years since I’d left the building—and while the world changed significantly between 1999 when I graduated and 2007 when I returned—it seemed the high school students I had been assigned hadn’t really changed much at all. If they had changed, in a world in which access to the internet was more ubiquitous and cell phones and MP3 players were now the norm, I wasn’t sure it was for the better. Then, too, some new legislation was reshaping education in unforeseen ways.
So profound was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act—and so shaken was I by it—that I, who had never planned or wanted to be a teacher, spent more than a decade of my life writing entire novel about it: Why Teach? The novel goes long on the bureaucratic absurdities of the twenty-first century academic experience: the school’s expansion from four principals to seven, the use of administrative checklist tools to replace holistic teacher evaluations, the overwhelming and overriding importance of “the test” replacing all other educational priorities—but an angle I didn’t address in my writing was the push to incorporate technology in the classroom. There’s only so much one can do in a novel, and the technology angle, while worth examining, didn’t fit neatly into the structure of the book I conceived of.
Technology in education is worth addressing, though. As human beings, we’re distinguished by our use of tools. We like to use them; we like to shape things. There’s an assumption that we, ourselves, are immutable; that while we’re using these tools to change the world around us, these tools aren’t changing us. This belief, of course, is false.
The NCLB legislation, best known for its standardized testing requirements, is less well-known for mandating “technological literacy” in all eighth graders in the country—leaving individual states to interpret what this meant—and pressing schools to make significant use of technology in instruction.
Broadly speaking, a book is a piece of technology, as is a pencil, or even a chalk board–but this isn’t the “technology” anyone is looking for in twenty-first century classrooms. Pencils lack a certain spark, and marker boards do not glow. The language is loose, the rationale understandable, and the expectation pretty clear: “technology” means electronic tools, preferably with microchips and backlit screens. Thus, staring down the obligation of preparing lessons that check off as many boxes as possible on administrative walkthrough forms, teachers began making greater use of electronic overhead projectors and presentation software: PowerPoint, Prezi, and/or Google Slides. An old-fashioned overhead projector, the likes of which I used in my first two years on the job, wasn’t going to do it. Teachers had to use “modern” technology.
That this type of instruction is still “instructor-centered”—that there’s not much material difference between doing a lecture using a PowerPoint and doing one with a piece of chalk and a chalk board—doesn’t register. The “use of technology” is broadly and uncritically accepted as improving students’ classroom experiences and learning. Provided access to this type of technology, why wouldn’t a teacher make use of it?
At stake in the NCLB legislature was the wide divide between the lowest and highest achievers in American education. The stated impetus of the act, after all, wasn’t to raise all students’ achievement, but to prevent vulnerable and low-achieving students from being left behind. As a piece of legislative legerdemain, the act did its job impressively well. If some students in America reap greater advantages from their educations and have better outcomes, the reasoning has an awful lot to do with money: educationally, the benefits of affluence stack up fast. Kids from homes with money have more access to books, magazines, newspapers, tutors, coaches, and horizon-broadening vacations. They hear the word “no,” far less than their more impoverished peers. Seeing their parents and their neighbors dress up for work, affluent children come to understand a wider array of potential outcomes for their educations than peers with less money do. Benefiting from conversations with college-educated parents, they hear more varied discussions with more sophisticated vocabulary at home, and, benefitting from parents who often work more regular hours–or can afford to live on a single income–they typically see their parents more often at home. They are less likely to be children of divorce, less likely to be uprooted and moved in the middle of a school year, and less likely to suffer hunger or abuse. Their schools benefit from stronger tax bases and pay their teachers more; their class sizes are generally smaller, so they get more one-on-one attention. To suggest that the ways we teach and test can correct for all of these imbalances and keep disadvantaged students from being “left behind”–to say that the Republicans of 2001, by implementing this act, were the “pro-education” party—was a stroke of legislative genius. And one of the most significant, if under-addressed, aspects of the act was the act’s push for greater use of technology, humanity’s great panacea, that shiny and attractive-looking toy lying there near the bottom of Pandora’s box.
It’s worth noting here how unevenly the repercussions of the NCLB legislation were felt across the country. For middle-class and affluent districts, the relative ease with which they could pass the multiple-choice state assessments largely meant they could go on about business as usual. Educational trends come and go; most of the time teachers can bend this way or that and keep teaching as they have been. For less affluent and and lesser-achieving districts, however, the repercussions of the act were felt within a few short years. Schools that had formerly been ho-hum and hard-luck—places where hardworking students, teachers, and administrators were doing the best with what they had been dealt–now suffered the stigma of being labeled “failing.” Top-down pressure was exerted: state education departments onto local ones, superintendents onto principals, principals onto teachers, and teachers onto students. Whereas in better-off schools, teachers could spend a week or two on focused test-prep and districts could add a support class or two to their class lists, lower-achieving schools were required to write and implement plans of improvement and overhaul their curricula. They were pressured to demonstrate how they were using the most up-to-date educational thinking and technology to improve their student outcomes.
I’m not sure that teachers or parents and students from better-off districts can understand the degree of rapid change that failing the test—and thus running the risk of losing accreditation—forced on low-achieving schools that were already resource-starved. My experience was one in which teachers and administrators, who may choose to motivate students using either positive reinforcement (“the carrot”) or negative (“the stick”) most often made use of the punitive, effective-in-the-short-term techniques. Mine was one in which low-achieving schools were turned into laboratories for the testing of “researched” but heretofore untested educational theories that theorists were thinking up in locales far away from the many living variables of my real classroom.
I placed the word “researched” in quotation marks above because I’ve grown dubious of a great deal of educational “research.” As a practicing educator, I’d argue that the techniques and strategies I put into action every year based on my education and experience are researched. The long-standing and much-criticized “industrial age” education everyone was eager to replace during NCLB was not, in fact, a static model, but one that evolved over its many long decades. Teachers have been paying attention to our inputs and outputs, in the short term and the long, for centuries. Pressing our administrators on the “research-based” practices they insisted we implement in our high school ELA classrooms, my fellow teachers and I often found that the “research” they were referring to was conducted in elementary school classrooms, or mathematics classrooms, or in a country where schooling wasn’t compulsory. Often, the sample sizes were small; often, the types of learning being measured were simplistic. Almost never did we see evidence that long-term learning retention and outcomes had been considered. More often than any of the above, we were told by our administrators that they didn’t have the research with them, but could show it to us later—and we never saw it.
Which is all to say: as much as the inclusion of technology in classrooms makes intuitive sense, this “logical” move was often pursued rashly as part of a broader, desperate trend among impoverished and failing schools to include glittering but ultimately empty statements in their plans of improvement. To say “we are modernizing with the newest technology,” or “we’re integrating technology to level the playing field,” or “we are embracing twenty-first century tools” certainly sounds good, but are these things true? To question the validity of technology in the classroom, as I am now, runs the risk of earning the kind of side-eyed dismissal typically reserved for flat earthers, but as an educator I think we should be in the business of critical inquiry. There’s a pervasive assumption in our society that newer is always better—doubly so for new technologies. Alongside this, we assume that more is always better. School-level administrators, once charged with holistically evaluating teachers based on what they saw in classrooms, saw the district- and state-level administrative ranks above their heads swell during NCLB and lost a great deal of autonomy. Too often, they became box-checking functionaries gathering data for “curriculum and instruction” specialists in district “home offices” far removed from real school campuses and classrooms. Decisions were made by data gathered in aggregate; for teachers facing regular administrative walkthroughs, it wasn’t how technology was being used in the classroom that mattered, but whether it was being used at all. A first- or second-year teacher new to the profession was encouraged not to teach well, but rather to check as many boxes as possible. If giving notes by way of PowerPoint—or reviewing information by way of an online game—garnered a checked box, then one should do it. The worst story of mandated box checking I ever heard was at a conference in Denver in 2008 or ’09. A second-year teacher I was chatting with from one of the Denver-area districts told me that the administrators walked in with lists of “high yield strategies” on their clipboards two or three times a week, and if teachers didn’t regularly check off X number—I think it was five or six—in ten minutes, then the teacher could be subject to reprimand and/or termination. To be plain, I’m all for “high-yield strategies,” but often two or three used in an entire fifty or fifty-five minute class is sufficient. To cycle through five or six strategies in ten minutes is to risk whiplash for the students; it’s to move so fast no lesson or learning could possibly “stick.”
Is a classroom in which students are taking notes from PowerPoint a better classroom than one in which the instructor displays notes on an overhead projector, or writes them on a marker board? Is it better than one in which the instructor stands at a podium and lectures? There’s something to be said for technology’s ability to allow us to readily include pictures, charts, graphs, videos, and music, but if the lesson being conveyed doesn’t call for such, what exactly have we done? Added bells and whistles? Removed friction? Sped things up?
Speed is not always a virtue in education, and friction is necessary for learning. Presentation technologies might enable us to deliver more information faster, but I’m not sure they help students learn. I don’t think they help students cultivate the persistence, curiosity, concentrative stamina, and self-regulation abilities we might broadly call “study skills” so that these students can really grapple with material and become life-long learners. Instruction using presentation technologies is still subject to the same criticisms of much “sit and get” education—the instruction is still teacher-centered. Students treated to fast, technology-enabled presentations can become rushed. Rather than thinking about the information their instructors present, they can become mere transcribers—perhaps not so bad if they will review this information later, but how many students regularly revisit their notes after class in this, or in any, day and age? There’s something to be said for a lecture that moves at the pace an instructor can write on the board, or a lecture that isn’t really a lecture at all, but an instructor-led conversation. The pacing is amenable to student learning in the first case, and the conversational friction of thoughtful engagement in the second.
Engagement, considered by many the sine qua non of education, plays an important role in this discussion. In addition to checking boxes as they observe teachers using technology, administrators enter figures and check boxes for “engagement,” measured often by simple counts of how many students have their heads up, their eyes up, their pencils moving, or their fingers on their keyboards. These simple indicators are hardly signs of attention, much less engagement, but we use them for markers nonetheless. (Every teacher I know can tell you stories aplenty of students who didn’t look actively engaged—who were drawing or checking out members of the opposite sex—yet could repeat lectures back nearly verbatim, and of students who, with eyes up almost the entire period, pencils moving to take fulsome notes, demonstrated at the end of units that they had learned and retained nothing.) Thus, teachers are incentivized to make use of shallow and attention-garnering technologies, such as electronic presentations and games, to engage their students’ attention so that heads are up and children are smiling when administrators walk in.
I should be careful not to create straw men or overstate my case. It’s true, as I’ve suggested above, that technology can be used well and is often a valid tool in the classroom. It’s the prescriptive use of the tool that I’m primarily concerned with, and the fact that teachers are often encouraged to put the cart before the horse—the tool before the task—and reach for new electronic technology first to teach their lessons when other techniques might be more germane. Likewise, I’m concerned that the shiny veneer technology gives a classroom can cover for shallow teaching and learning. Making heavy use of technology, that is, can allow a teacher to “fake” education, and I’m concerned some teachers might not even realize the fakery they’re engaging in. It may be that my concern is subject-specific. Perhaps the use of technology in a math classroom, or science, social studies, or any of our myriad elective courses, is effective. I’m not equipped to discuss those other classrooms. But in an English classroom, the highest ends I can achieve involve teaching students to (1) read and understand long, sophisticated texts, such as novels, longform essays, and pieces of research (which is to say, to become sophisticated consumers of texts and ideas), and (2) formulate questions and conduct research to answer those questions, recognizing validity in sources, identifying bias, and synthesizing understandings to present informative or argumentative pieces of writing. “To learn to write is to learn to have ideas,” as Robert Frost puts it, or, in my less elegant twelfth-grade instructor formulation: to practice organized writing is to practice organized thinking. When a student says “I know what I want to say, but I can’t say it,” I have to gently point out that, in fact, they do not know what they want to say, and then gently coax them through the thought experiment of trying to verbally express it so we can distill that verbal expression into a written one. To be sure, some technologies, such as online databases and word processing programs, which facilitate and expedite our abilities to gather research and do our writing, are useful employments of technology in the Language Arts classroom—perhaps the very best uses, by my estimation—but after these tools, the usefulness of many others begins to fall off rapidly, and the liabilities and consequences for using them begin to mount.
Popular uses of technology in the classroom too often correlate with shallow learning. They are too often driven by teachers’ desires to pander to students and garner easy engagement. Presentations with lots of bells and whistles and online learning games too often emphasize lower-order thinking such as basic knowledge acquisition and engagement with eyes and voices but not with minds or prior learning. A teacher putting on a “Kahoot” review game could earn high checklist marks during an administrative walkthrough, but only have engaged students in lower-order “knowledge,” “understanding,” and “application” thinking skills. While I’m a proponent of these skills—indeed, I’ve written about how some classrooms might undervalue them, and many of our students, while appearing to develop them, might merely be “playing the game” of education—I know that the higher-order thinking skills of “analysis,” “evaluation,” and “synthesis” are going to be needed by our students in a number of capacities in their lives. Such skills are, I think, more difficult to develop playing electronic quiz games.
Popular classroom technology’s tending toward lower-order thinking skills isn’t the entire story in terms of reducing student learning, though. Emphasizing lower-order thinking skills, these technologies also encourage oversimplification. Users of presentation software are encouraged to keep their slides simple and minimize the amount of text on each one. The United States military, occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan during the first few years of my tenure as a public school teacher (and for several years afterward), understood the capabilities and limitations of PowerPoint well. In a popular New York Times article in 2010, it was revealed that the use of presentation software was found to be useful in placating journalists during press briefings in Afghanistan. Military presenters found that putting together dull and busy but ultimately empty PowerPoint presentations was a good way to waste a great deal of journalists’ time without saying anything, a stratagem they referred to as “hypnotizing chickens.” On the other hand, perhaps more relevant for my current arguments, another commander found that using PowerPoint presentations to prepare soldiers for duty on the ground was insufficient to help soldiers develop real understandings. The country had a long and complex history, to say nothing of a significant and complex culture, before the United States occupied it, and, as the commander put it, “some ideas aren’t bulletizable.”
The notion that requirements of significant learning defy the simplification and bulletization that technology enable are shared concisely in a speech by Faber, the professor-in-hiding Guy Montag meets midway through Ray Bradbury’s prescient novel Fahrenheit-451:
“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”
This “pores” speech touches on my chief problems with the mindless implementation of technology in the classroom, why I think education shouldn’t go out of its way to be easy and entertaining—quick, smooth, and seamless—for students. Technology too often smoothes out the pores; it enables students to run their hands over the material too quickly. Education should be more than superficial training, and should provide students with more than a passing familiarity. Proofs of true learning need to go deeper than multiple choice answers and whether or not children have their eyes up and are laughing. There’s something to be said for the desirability of difficulty in an educational setting, so long as that difficulty is carefully calibrated to pique and challenge students, requiring them to grow. Educators decry “helicopter” parents, who hover too close, and “snow plow” parents, who remove obstacles from the paths of their children, but instructors who oversimplify material and provide simplified understandings in place of complex interactions with material are also engaged in coddling behavior. These instructors can rob students of opportunities to be appropriately challenged, to struggle, develop autonomy, and to grow.
There’s been much written about A.I. “slop” in the last two years—the ways artificial intelligence can flatten and homogenize information, rechewing pre-chewed food and serving it to us lukewarm. I’ve seen it broadly decried in the writerly and teacherly spaces I visit on the internet. But it’s not just A.I. that is dangerous. We’ve been tending toward the smoothing, simplification, and regurgitation of “slop” long before ChatGPT was released in November of 2022. We had already been simplifying and bulletizing, “prechewing” the food for our students, making it look like we were doing teaching in order to check boxes on walkthrough forms when, in fact, real education was not taking place. In a thread decrying the use of A.I. in education on Substack, a teacher cautioned that we shouldn’t eschew all technology; that tools like Kahoot and Quizlet were “really powerful tools,” but when I see these tools being used in classrooms, my thoughts go to those military briefing rooms in Afghanistan, journalists being fooled and placated by colorful slides and bullet points. Data, I hope we all know by now, can be used to hide as much as it reveals, and a veneer of technology use in a classroom can disguise superficiality. It can demonstrate motion without progress, the appearance of learning when none is taking place.
If technology’s abilities to speed up and facilitate are so useful as to be impossible to turn back from, these classroom advantages might be outweighed by the twin threats of student cheating and distraction. The former problem is self-reported at alarming rates and substantive enough to deserve an entire essay of its own. The latter makes such a profound impact on classrooms that I suspect the military commanders I referenced above might agree the handing out of screened devices to students for largely unregulated use is tantamount to the distribution of Weapons of Mass Distraction. An instructor can regulate student device use, of course. They can regularly walk around the classroom while they speak and while students work; they can appeal to tech services in the building to have apps and websites banned. But students easily become adept at opening and closing tabs on their screens as teachers move around the room, and they quickly find work-arounds for banned or blacklisted sites. Today’s high school students don’t poke one another, don’t throw things, seldom doodle on paper, and rarely draw on their desks. They look at their devices. They watch short videos, listen to music, tune-in to sporting events, fill online shopping carts, gamble, cyberbully one another, and even trade cryptocurrencies. Surely, my reader might say, school filters prevent students from accessing sports betting sites and cryptocurrency exchanges! But a school that allows school devices often at least tacitly allows for personal devices, and schools that work to curb personal device usage often face stiff pushback from not only students, but parents. Without the backing of a school-, district, or state-wide policy there are only so many fights a teacher can handle. A “teacher’s discretion” policy is no policy at all, and students with phones have the entire world in their pockets.
Beyond the dangers of superficial and shallow engagement, the erosion of complexity and sophistication, the erasure of desirable difficulty, the enabling of cheating, and the facilitation of distraction, there’s also, if I might wax poetic, the issue of the classroom’s soul at stake. I find that, though we have tried often and mightily in the last few decades to measure it—and while we have made significant overtures in the last few years toward regulating and restricting it—a classroom is still a place that defies measurability and can, if allowed, offer immeasurable good. It’s more than the sum of its parts; it moves through time and space in unpredictable ways; it offers nourishments students don’t know they need and often don’t realize they’re receiving. The complaint that students don’t learn anything they can apply in life while in high school abounds and reverberates so regularly as to be commonplace in our culture, but who among us doesn’t regularly revisit high school memories in their day-to-day life and recall that period in dreams? Who hasn’t had a sudden epiphany when something they “learned” but didn’t learn in high school suddenly clicks into place years later? A classroom is a place where young people come to commune together, and they do so in the presence of adults who largely have their best interests at heart. It’s a place where we might learn more from what has been called the “hidden” curriculum than the written one; a place where young people are regularly in the presence of others who are, in myriad ways, both similar to and different from themselves. It can be a place of forced silence and forced sound where people communicate face to face in real time. It can be a respite from the algorithmically-narrowed experience catered to our youths by their devices; a place where seemingly arbitrary lessons are delivered one day and find their analogs in “real” life many years later.
Behind my desk I have a pair of corkboards stocked with quotes I’ve written down from my readings over the years. One of the most meaningful comes from a letter that Bernard Saint-Gaudens wrote to his son, the famous American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who spent several years in Paris learning his craft. “You will never find any peace for your soul and mind excepting in work. That is the true source of our welfare. Through work the soul aspires to God who bestows upon it a power of will and wisdom which nothing can overthrow.” We find sustenance in our work and satisfaction when our work is well done. When work feels easy or cheap, we feel cheap doing it. Cheapening our work, we cheapen our lives.
A.I. boosters and tech evangelists speak of educations enhanced by artificial intelligence as utopian goods that could unlock boundless potential in our students. They describe classrooms in which every student is treated to a specially-tailored learning experience–but I’ve seen classrooms where every student is sitting in front of a screen, every one of them has a headset on, and every one of them is “engaged” in learning that is purportedly catered to them. These are not happy classrooms. It may well be that the top twenty-percent of students could thrive in such environments, and maybe some others who are technologically inclined, or self-motivated or introverted to begin with—but in general, our top twenty percent of students will always thrive, and on the whole I believe most students will be unhappy if divorced from whole-classroom experiences and interactions with their human instructors and human peers.
What I might be talking about—what might be more palatable to my readers if I term it as such—is mental health. In his mega-viral essay “End The Phone-Based Childhood Now,” Jonathan Haidt makes a convincing case correlating the decline of our young people’s mental health with the rise of cell phone acquisition and young people’s use of social media. For me, the time period he notes is also one that correlates highly with the standardized testing era and the forced inclusion of technologies in classrooms. The coupling of standardization and narrowed curricula with the use of technology that oversimplifies and removes nuance can buff the wonder right out of the world. Couple this with the omnipresent status of our students’ little phone screens and the notorious shallowness of social media, and we have a recipe for ennui, anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness. Here, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit-451 is relevant again. In that dystopian society where no one read books, everyone wore audio-transmitting seashells in their ears, and Montag’s wife’s great wish was to get a fourth wall screen in her living room so she could be surrounded by her virtual “family,” Montag arrives home to find she has attempted to end her life by taking a bottle of pills and, supremely blasé about the whole tragedy–because it is so commonplace in their society–a pair of technicians use a device to snake the pills out of her stomach. The only thing Bradbury doesn’t anticipate is the size of the screens and their omnipresence in our pockets.
I’m typically more of a “realism” guy, but a dystopian Bradburian end-game feels like what we’re heading for in our increasingly tech-saturated schools. If Bradbury’s novel feels too far afield from reality as you think of it, though, consider this: both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sent their own children to largely tech-free schools, and tech leaders like Peter Thiel aggressively restrict their own children’ s screen time.
Books, too, are pieces of technology, and, though comparatively antiquated, I still believe they are superior to PowerPoint and Prezi, Google Slides and Google itself, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. When teachers desire sustained and deep engagement with ideas—when they want students to engage deeply at their own pace—books and interactive exchanges with peers and experienced, knowledgeable instructors are still the best vehicles to deliver information, teach critical thinking skills, and help socialize young people. In a fast-moving era where the internet and artificial intelligence are helping to drive change at an unprecedented rate, we do our students a disservice when we don’t help them to slow down, build broad and deep stores of knowledge in their own minds, and learn to investigate, argue, and think critically in the presence of real people and good old-fashioned books.
 | A guest post by
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Indeed: https://amardashehu.substack.com/p/what-do-students-want-of-ai