Cont. of Reaction to Wenglinsky

One of the most interesting parts of Wenglinsky’s book is Chapter 1, where he presents the correlation between standards, teaching, and technology. More specifically, Wenglinsky writes about our nation’s school curricula being a mile long and an inch deep, and he writes about higher performing countries, such as Japan, using a constructivist approach rather than a didactic one used by the majority of teachers in the United States. Unfortunately, I find this to be true. Although I agree with Wenglinsky’s support of the constructivism versus a didactic approach to education, I believe it is a huge undertaking that will be opposed by many teachers who have been in the business for quite some time. He goes on to express that we need to provide more training in the use of technology and that teachers need to provide their students with guidance in using technology, not so much controlling the learning environment; however, teachers who have been teaching for a long time show much resistance to change and are not willing, even for the sake of their students, to change their teaching practices. I observe that some teachers would like to just collect a paycheck and are not concerned with providing the best instruction possible, which in contemporary classrooms involves technology of various sorts. In order to provide teachers with more of an incentive to use technology effectively in the classroom, the pressure of “covering” a curriculum needs to be reduced, and teachers need to feel more rewarded in their efforts to create such a technological learning environment.
Furthermore, Wenglinsky writes that constructivism and the use of technology to support this teaching theory require that students use higher-order thinking skills and that teachers need to empower their students to do so. If teachers do not feel empowered using technology, which is what we see in many school districts around at least the Lehigh Valley area, how can they project empowerment onto their students? Teachers need to be open to professional development and to actually using what they learn in the classroom. Long gone are the days of lecturing and taking notes for an entire class period. While this type of direct teaching has its place, it should not be all that is used in contemporary classrooms. An important question that the use of technology in schools poses is, where do schools get the MONEY? I realize that schools can get donations, grants, and so forth; however, let us consider No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the fact that lower performing schools, typically with less funding and in poorer neighborhoods, do not receive the same perks as do higher performing schools, typically with more funding and in more affluent neighborhoods. Consequently, schools that are more successful in general receive more funding, which in turn typically leads to more access to technology resources than schools that are less successful. This seems a bit backward to me.
Conclusively, if we as a nation are committed to increasing the use of effective technology practices in schools, we need to get committed as a profession to enhancing our comfort levels with technology and to empowering our students to feel comfortable using technology. We also need more support from our state departments in narrowing the scope of our curricula and making it deeper. Finally we need assistance from our federal government in assigning qualified people to design the nation’s educational programming and goals as they relate to the needs of our diversified schools and students.