Podcast: Dr. Scott McLeod on Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning

We’re listening to the Getting Spurred podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. We’re your host Caroline. And Mason. And today we’re talking with Dr. Scott McLeod, who is an associate professor of educational

leadership at the University of Colorado, Denver, and is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on technology and learning. In today’s podcast, Scott argues for four big shifts that are transforming learning. Moving from recall to more complex problem solving, doing authentic work, adding voice and choice to build student agency, and infusing technology in powerful ways.

Let’s listen in as Scott talks to Tom about how technology can help create powerful learning experiences. Scott McLeod, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you. I am absolutely delighted to be here.

How did you become a middle school teacher in Charlotte? Oh, great question. So I was a history major at the College of William & Mary, and was looking around for my first teaching job, and we had a job fair, and Charlotte Mecklenburg schools snapped me up.

Where’d you go to high school? I went to high school at South Lakes in Reston, Virginia, part of Fairfax County. When did you know you would be a teacher? I did not know until I was at college. I went in thinking I was going to be a pediatrician because I liked kids, and came out the other

end thinking that I loved social studies and thought it would be a great area in which to teach and work with kids. So I don’t know, somewhere during those four years that path changed. Why did you do your PhD at Iowa, and why is there a JD by your name? So I’m teaching eighth grade in North Carolina.

My wife is a middle school counselor, and we knew we wanted to go back and get our terminal degrees. I had had a chance at William & Mary to stay and get my master’s and pick up my principal coursework, and I just absolutely loved my school law class. So when we were looking around for places to go, there were three places in the country

that let you do a joint JD and PhD in school leadership, and save about a year’s worth of courses, and we both got graduate assistantships and ended up at the University of Iowa and discovered we loved the Midwest. So basically did the law degree almost for fun, just pure interest. Wow, that’s interesting.

Has that given you an interesting and unusual perspective in the last 20 years, would you say? Absolutely. Having a law degree in your back pocket is really helpful in a number of ways. And it dovetailed really nicely with my social studies interests and passions around civics

and effective government and court systems and things like that, so that was great. I teach school law in our principal licensure program, so it’s been a boon there as well. And when you run into those everyday hassles with the local or national company or customer service problem or whatever, it doesn’t hurt to have those letters after your name when you contact customer service.

So lots of advantages. All right, Scott, I want to dive right into the big question of the day. Sure. So starting about 25 years ago, I called the shift from print to digital the most important shift in how human beings learn in history, and it doesn’t feel like it’s working.

We’re 25 or 30 years into putting computers in schools and still kind of waiting for the transformation. What gives? Wow, that is a phenomenal question. I think lots of things are not giving, actually.

Starting with the premise of the question, which is that the shift from print to digital will transform learning. I think most educators still conceive of education as primarily a face-to-face in-person learning experience, and as a result, have continued to keep digital devices and online environments sort of over on the side, right?

And as nice to have and wonderful compliments or auxiliaries to what we do, but not at the core of what we do. I think our students recognize that these new digital learning spaces are really powerful places to play and learn and explore and connect and share. For whatever reason, our educators and our school systems have been slower to realize

that. We know that school systems change slowly. We measure change at the pace of decades, not days or months. And so while we’re seeing a infiltration of devices into school systems, in most places they haven’t affected the core of what we do on a day-to-day basis yet.

And in fact, in many places, including here in Colorado, we’re still struggling with basic access to digital devices in many schools. We can’t even count on every student having a device, for example, even if we wanted to take advantage of the affordances that these tools and environments bring us. Scott, yesterday, Edwick released their Tech Counts survey.

And I guess I was disappointed to read that fewer than a third of America’s teachers said edtech innovations have changed their belief about what school should look like. So it doesn’t feel like we’ve helped to create a new picture of opportunity for American teachers. Why is that?

Why haven’t we been able to create a new, maybe new shared vision or visions of learning? Sure. Well, it’s hard to teach or facilitate what you don’t know. I think what we find is that the ability of most of our classroom teachers and building level principals to understand what technology can bring to the learning equation and how

it can really empower kids in some really amazing and powerful ways is just not there yet. So I don’t know if we just need to cycle through the generation of educators who didn’t grow up with ubiquitous learning technologies and that maybe the next generations will realize those affordances more effectively. But right now, it’s not uncommon still in 2019, almost 40 years after personal computers

started entering schools. It’s not unusual to encounter classroom teachers who laughingly joke that their kids know more about the technology and the learning spaces than they do. And that’s not really a recipe for powerful educator facilitated learning, is it? So I’m thinking about my own case as a school superintendent.

We were one of the first districts in the country to go one-to-one in 1995 and my daughter, Caroline, who leads getting smart, was really the first generation of kids to go through secondary school in a one-to-one environment and it was a little bit hit or miss and it was a naive sort of content-free approach, but generally quite positive for her. But in retrospect, you’d have to call it a technology integration rather than transformation.

It was sort of a technology as a tool. I wouldn’t say that our case or many other early one-to-one cases were a case where we use technology to fully re-engineer the learning experience and the learning environment. Is that what I hear you saying? That we’ve begun to integrate it with sort of mixed results, but we haven’t really reimagined

and re-engineered the learning experience and the learning environment. Sure, absolutely. And I think what you just described, every system and every individual educator goes through that learning curve. First we figure out how do we use technologies to help us accomplish what we’ve done before,

maybe more efficiently or slightly better, whatever. And then hopefully we kind of emerge through that implementation curve and out the other side and start recognizing some of the more powerful transformative effects that you talk about that are possible if we’re willing to get there. But I think the bigger issue is really one around what are our desired goals and outcomes.

And I wouldn’t say that for most educators or parents or communities right now, the goal is to transform the system. And I think the most powerful barrier to changing and transforming schools is our mindset about what schools should look like in the first place and our conceptions of what schools should look like and how it should operate and what happens there are deeply, deeply

rooted in our historical roots. I’m glad you mentioned that at the community level because it is not just a teacher barrier, it is the community’s idealized memory of school and the deep gravity that the sedimentary layers of policy have created. And it’s this combination that’s really a Gordian knot.

Yeah, and Tom, we’re not going to find school transformation in places that aren’t looking to transform school. It’s that simple. I mean, that’s not the goal. Right.

So, Scott, we’ve known each other for a long time, but just I want for our listeners’ sake to gain a sense of appreciation that you’ve been in the ed tech space and a leader and advocate for many years. Maybe you can describe the work that you did in Iowa when you were at the intermediate unit and helping schools all over Iowa and nationally implement technology.

Sure. So, I’m a professor of school leadership. I prepare principals and superintendents and most of my work with schools and leaders across the globe has really been focused on how do we transform school, as you said, for the demands of the 2000s and beyond.

How do we adapt traditional schooling systems to a global innovation society and prepare future ready graduates and all that? I am the director of a center called CASEL. It’s the only university center sort of focused on future ready leadership needs and how do we support school leaders and systems to do that work, not just teachers in the classroom.

I also took a four year break while I was in Iowa from higher ed and was kind of like second dish in charge of one of our intermediate educational agencies. During my nine years in Iowa, we moved Iowa from six one to one districts to 220 one to one districts. I think the nation’s largest grassroots one to one movement.

So, in about half a decade, we went from almost nobody to about two thirds of the state giving our kids powerful learning devices. And of course, we saw every variation of one to one deployments imaginable as part of that curve. And then, you know, once you get the devices, then the question is, what are you going to

do with them? What kind of learning are you trying to facilitate? What kind of outcomes are you trying to make happen in your system and so on. And so, just have served a connective role for people in terms of connecting schools to schools, districts to districts, leaders to leaders, people to resources, communities

to the possibilities, really sort of see my one of my essential roles as an education professor as not just a facilitator, but also a connector to others and in the resources that will help you do what you want to do. Scott, you’ve written a couple of books for Solution Tree. A couple of years ago, you wrote a book called Different Schools for a Different World, which

is a terrific list of arguments for why we need to update our vision. But I’d love to chat about the book you published last fall with them on harnessing technology for deeper learning. Maybe you can start by just giving us the thesis for the book. Why did you write this book and what limitations of current frameworks did you see that you

wanted to address in the book? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity. So when I work with schools, we talk about four kind of big shifts that most schools are trying to make.

One is the shift from recall and regurgitation to more complex cognitive work. How do we get kids engaged in deeper thinking and problem solving more often than they are now? Second big shift is really around authentic work. How do we give kids more meaningful learning experiences that are connected to the world around them, rather than being so isolated and decontextualized within the classroom?

Third big shift is around how do we give kids agency around that work? How do we say we want lifelong learners? How do we actually help them learn how to exercise control and ownership of what, when, where, how, and why they learn and with whom? And then finally, the fourth shift that we work on together is around powerful tech

confusion and how do we use technology as a lever to make those first three things happen? So, you know, arising particularly out of my Iowa context where we had all of these districts that were going one to one, you know, we would, my colleague, Julie and I would visit school after school after school where they had done the easy part of getting devices and upgrading bandwidth and so on, but we’re really struggling to shift the needle in terms of learning and

teaching. So, after many conversations and realizing that some existing frameworks like SAMR, which is really a technology continuum, not a learning continuum, and TPAC and others just weren’t really driving the kind of changes that we had hoped to see in schools, Julie and I came up with this lesson or unit redesign protocol.

It’s really a discussion protocol, not a framework that we call the four shifts protocol. And so in the new book, Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning, it’s actually not that much about technology. It’s mostly about the deeper learning part. And it’s about how do we take lifting lessons and units and start shifting them in small ways through concrete specific think about and look for that would allow us to start moving lessons

and units in the direction of the four shifts, right, towards deeper learning, towards more authentic work, towards greater student agency and using tech to help with that. Yeah. And the exciting thing, Scott, is that while traditional measures might sort of downplay the shift that we’ve seen in the last 30 years, I am encouraged by more schools engaging in in deeper learning. It may surface as project based learning, more community connected learning,

we often call that place based learning, much more focus on student agency, not just as a byproduct, but as a primary outcome. And as Michael Fullen said on a podcast last year, he’s really excited about the global momentum that he sees around deep learning. And so that I think I was wrong in signaling this, this focus of print to digital as the big shift 30 years ago, it’s really the shift from, from sort of the content regurgitation

to more complex and authentic work that you’ve described that is the big shift that we’re beginning to see. Yeah, I hope so. You know, I think like you, I get to visit a lot of these schools that have put project and in crew based learning and student agency and sort of, like you said, community place based learning at the center, what they do. And it’s really hard not to walk away from those schools wishing that your kids were there, right? Right.

Because they’re just such phenomenal places. But I think, you know, most schools in America aren’t there yet. And the question is how do we get them there. And so one of the reasons that Julie and I created the protocol was to help people start to make the moves. Because it’s one thing to tell the teacher, Hey, you need to get deeper learning or student agency into your classroom. But if she or he doesn’t know how to do that very well, then if we can give those educators

some very concrete think about and look for and create a structured redesign process for them, where they can start taking stuff that they have in their pocket right now and start shifting a little bit, then those smaller changes add up over time to some capacity building and some greater comfort levels. So what we’re finding with the protocol is that the reason it seems to be taking off so quickly in schools all across the globe is because one, the specificity of the

items in the protocol gives teachers something to hook on to, right? It’s not just like, Hey, give your kids more agency, but it gives you specific questions to think about and redesign around. The second reason it’s taking off is that because there’s a lot of choice built into the protocol, that as an educator, you can sort of pick your pathway through it. So maybe you only focus on one section or maybe you only focus on a couple items within a section. And you can choose

to go as deep or shallow within those items as you want. So there’s a lot of flex around sort of starting points and comfort levels and experiences and skill sets and so on. We’re also finding that it’s a very nice bridge to a more complex PBL work. It’s a tough jump for a teacher to go from fairly traditional instruction to full blown four week gold standard PBL works projects with kids, and that’s a really big leap for most teachers. But if you can build your own capacity as a teacher

in your own capacity and the capacity of your students as well in smaller slices, right? So instead of giving my kids lots of agency for four weeks after doing very little of that, maybe we can try it for a couple days and see how that goes with this little mini lesson or whatever. Right. And so we build our capacity to get towards that more complex work over time. So there’s lots of reasons why the protocol is taken off. It’s free online at bit.ly slash

four shifts, the number four. So people can use it however they want. There’s lots of resources on the resources page. So you don’t have to buy the book. The book just gives eight redesign examples and some tips and strategies for implementing in your school. The protocol itself is open source. Scott, can you give us an example of what this might look like in an elementary lesson? Elementary lesson? Yes, absolutely. So whenever I do redesign workshops with teachers, I always

start with the mystery Skype activity, which is proven to be very popular among elementary teachers. One of the things we see with mystery Skype is that, you know, the basic premise is that you’re going to have two classes connect online and guess each other’s location in sort of this 20 questions like format. And there’s a little bit of technology used with the webcam connecting the classrooms together. And there’s a lot of enthusiasm with students. But, you know, bottom

line is it’s 20 questions when it boils down to it. And at best, only a few students are guaranteed to do deeper level thinking in that activity. There’s lots of other roles around the activity, like the photographer or the question asker or the back channel or whatever, where there may not have that sort of more complex thinking work that you’re hoping to make happen. So, you know, when I redesign mystery Skype with teachers, what we do is we use the protocol and we start

asking questions from the deeper learning segment section of it. And we start to realize that we could have kids do different things, right? We could actually have instead of this trying to guess each other’s location, how about if we gave them something more meaningful to work on together, like maybe the students are collaborating with their classmates in another country. And instead of just guessing location, now they’re formulating common challenges in both communities that we

could maybe work on together in some kind of design thinking process with prototypes and pitch solutions and so on, right? Maybe we can find ways to break up the role differentiation so that instead of one whole class to one whole class via one webcam, now maybe we’ve got six or seven small project groups on each side and we’ve got six or seven webcams happening simultaneously. And now what we’ve done is because we’ve broken out that learning work and distributed into smaller groups,

more kids are doing that deeper thinking work rather than just a few of them and so on. So, these are the kinds of shifts that we would make with the deeper learning section of the protocol where we would say, let’s start figuring out if we really want deeper learning to happen for most kids in the classroom most of the time, what changes do we make in the activity that help us get there? How might you redesign a let’s say a secondary social studies lesson?

I think about secondary social studies a lot. I think we’re seeing an epidemic of lack of knowledge about how government really works, for example, in the United States here. But a growing interest, right? I think we’ve traditionally pegged secondary students as apathetic to the world around them and what’s happening in politics and civics and so on. But I think our new generation of students is proving a little more activist and would like to be involved and we think they are. So, this whole

concept of action civics is a fascinating notion to me. How can we get students out into the community engaged in real civics related projects where they’re talking to people in the community, they’re identifying what issues are important to them and their neighborhoods and the people around them? How can they be more active in those places where they’re actually doing authentic lobbying and other political and civics related work? And we’re getting kids out of the classroom

reading dusty chapters from their textbook about the three branches of the government and the Judiciary Committee and whatever. And instead, they’re actually doing government at least at the local community level and maybe at the state and national level as well. And so, how do we connect students to those resources and people around them that would help them be the kind of engaged active citizens that we want them to be when they leave our school systems? And we don’t have to

wait for them to do that after they graduate. They can start doing that right now. That’s great. So, we would use the protocol and we would go through and say right now, you’re reading about how laws are made in the chapter in your textbook about the legislature or whatever and that’s kind of boring, right? But why don’t you identify a challenge in your community, something that you wish was better or different and let’s go hack at it. And I think we have lots of examples just in

recent years of students who actually have been able to influence and pass legislation, which is awesome. I mean, that’s an incredible message to send to our youth that they can make a difference in the world right now about things that they’re passionate about. We love that idea, Scott. We just posted a podcast and a blog on schools alive with possibilities, schools that are helping kids make a difference right where they are and promoting deeper learning while they do it.

This work requires mind shifts on the part of teachers. You describe them in chapter six. How would you summarize that? I think we have to, like you said, embrace the possibility. One of the things that I still struggle with is that it’s actually easy to put a number of these examples in front of educators. I’m amazed at how many of them still don’t seem to be very interested. I get all lit up when I think about things like action civics and what we can really do with kids

in the social studies space to make an impact on the world around them. When I encounter classroom teachers or school systems that seem to shrug it away, they’re like, yeah, that’s interesting. Then they go back to what they’re already doing. I wonder what’s going on there. What’s that dynamic? Is it a lack of interest? Is it a lack of will? Is it a lack of capacity? Those are the systems level factors that I’m interested in as a leadership professor. How do we shift the system

so that any individual within the system can see some different possibilities and can maybe make some different things happen for our youth? I want to do a quick lightning round borrowing from Tyler Cowan. I have a list of things that I’ll start with. I’d love to know whether you think these are overrated or underrated. AR, augmented reality. Currently overrated. Is the technology just not there yet?

It seems mostly to still be at a gimmick. I haven’t seen for the most part the transformative use cases that would require significant investment. I love the idea of AR and VR of putting kids in simulations and experiencing environments that they otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to experience. A lot of it is still very gimmicky. It’s like, oh, look at this cool thing you can do. It is interesting to think about how it can inform and enhance active civics at some point

when kids can have real-time access to big databases and specific to a zip code or a topic. Yes, overrated today. How about automated scoring? Automated scoring. Getting there. I wonder if it will ever be able to get past the technical aspects. I’m skeptical. Really get at the hearts of good writing. But for more technical, less creative writing, can surely ease a teacher’s workload. Adaptive learning. Overrated or underrated?

I think underrated and overrated. Both. Overrated because it’s been sold as the pathway to personalized learning. The pathway to personalized learning is not through technology, it’s through the personhood of our students that sit in front of us. Underrated in the sense that if we use adaptive learning software well, it creates new learning models that would open up the kind of project and inquiry-based learning that I think really lights kids afire.

Assistive technology. Definitely underrated and also underutilized. Seems to be a lot of really cool stuff coming out that is really helping kids that learn differently. All right, a big category, artificial intelligence. It’s going to be incredibly transformative. I don’t think we even know where it’s going to go yet

and what impact it’s going to have on education. I think right now it’s playing around on the edges and on sort of the back end of things as it moves closer to the forefront of the actual learning and teaching process. I think we’re going to be amazed at some of the things that might be able to do for us. How about the concept of anywhere anytime learning? It doesn’t matter where you are or what time it is. What matters more is whether your learning

is meaningful or not. The whole time, place, path, and pace mantra around blended learning is wonderful. If we don’t look at the substance of the learning itself, then we’re merely substituting different ways to still do low-level learning. Last question. What are you optimistic about, Scott? I’m seeing more and more schools take on the challenge of this student-driven,

active learning as opposed to passive teacher-facilitated learning. It’s still relative to early days. We have hundreds of schools in the US, but that’s still a small proportion. We have thousands of schools across the globe, and that’s still a small proportion. Even in the schools that haven’t dived in all the way yet, there’s usually some enterprising teachers and classrooms that are doing some really interesting stuff. I feel like it’s a small grassroots movement that’s growing.

We have lots of places that we can look to for inspiration and examples and implementation help. I think if we just gather our will to do something different with kids, we can really empower them and give them wings in some different ways. Lots of rays of hope and glimpses of possibility. I think right now, we’re just trying to figure out how do we start scaling and how do we somehow get beyond those sedimentary layers, as you said, of policy and belief systems that

seem to be holding us back. I want our listeners to go online and find harnessing technology for deeper learning. A great new book from Scott McLeod from Solution Tree. Scott, you mentioned a site where they can find you online, but where can people go to learn more? Absolutely. My main online presence is at dangerouslyirelelevant.org. If you want to learn more about the four shifts protocol, you can just click on the four shifts link there in the navigation menu, or you can go

directly to bit.ly slash four shifts with the number four and get right to the protocol that way as well. Awesome. Scott, we appreciate your work and your time today. Thanks for being on the Getting Smart Podcast. Tom, it’s always great talking with you. Thank you. Thanks to Scott for joining us today. We appreciate his thought leadership on deeper learning. For more on deeper learning, check out our podcast with Joel Betta that features a discussion based on his new book in search of

deeper learning, the quest to remake the American high school. We’ll link everything in the show notes and on the blog for the Getting Smart Podcast. This is Caroline and this is Mason signing off.