Digital Leadership and Curriculum Mapping: LeiLani Cauthen and Michael Broach

Many districts had given every student a device years before the pandemic, and some were already asking what came next. This episode of edCircuit’s Education Today podcast, presented by Soundtrap for Education, approached that question from two levels. LeiLani Cauthen, CEO and publisher of The Learning Counsel, described where she believed the digital transition in schools was heading and why the human side of teaching mattered more, not less. Michael Broach, academic dean at Bishop Kenny High School in Jacksonville, Florida, then explained how teacher collaboration on a shared curriculum mapping initiative had changed the way his teachers plan. The interviews were recorded as COVID-19 school closures were taking shape, though the pandemic was not the subject of either conversation.

Education TodayS1E3, Digital Leadership and Improving CurriculumApril 1, 2020 · 26 min 12 sPlay episode: S1E3, Digital Leadership and Improving Curriculum (26 minutes 12 seconds)0:00-26:12Follow on SpotifyApple

Stalled after one-to-one

Cauthen said she met many leaders whose districts had run one-to-one device programs for five or six years and now felt stagnant. The average district, she said, had somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 different apps in circulation, a level of sprawl unlike anything in the commercial world. What districts were groping toward, in her view, was the kind of structural change other industries had already been through, as ride-hailing reshaped taxis and online retail reshaped stores.

She was careful about what that change would mean for teachers. The common fear is that technology will take their jobs. “It’s actually not true,” she said. The real question is how schools use people for their human qualities. Today, she noted, roughly 3.3 million teachers are expected to do largely the same set of tasks, while students could increasingly receive personalized, workflow-based learning.

The Learning Counsel had spent years leading districts up what she called stair steps of maturity. More recently it had turned back to the bottom step, because so many districts had not yet reached it.

The teacher who would not give her the answer

Cauthen, author of The Consumerization of Learning, said good learning software can now do much of the direct teaching, and that is what unsettles educators. But she does not expect everything to move online, because people still need human interaction. The question is what the humans do.

She described a demonstration of a math program at one of The Learning Counsel’s events. She answered a problem incorrectly and could not go back, so she called over one of the company’s teachers. Instead of fixing it for her, the teacher stood beside her and made her work through it. “She forced me to have productive struggle,” Cauthen said. Teachers, she argued, should not try to be the answer machine, competing with an all-knowing internet. Their role is to be more human, more challenging and more validating.

Identity in an infinite world

That role matters, Cauthen said, because students’ social and emotional needs had become the top issue in The Learning Counsel’s national survey. She linked it to identity. Children now experience the near-infinite choice of the internet on their phones from a young age, and for many their first identity is their digital one. School, she argued, too often ignores that identity and moves students through grades in batches like a production line, just when they most need to build a strong sense of who they are.

No easy button, and no time to see students

Asked what question she was pursuing next, Cauthen said her concern was no longer the technology. Schools should not try to solve learning with a single monolithic system, she said, because software and knowledge keep changing; there is no easy button. Her concern was the human side. When her workshops ask teachers to list their daily duties, teachers keep adding to the list, often thirty items more. Leaders who step back and look at that list, she said, see that teachers have no time to give individual students real attention. If schools could take most of that load off teachers, she argued, students would have a reason to want to be in a physical school.

Searching for lessons

The episode’s Data Insight, also from The Learning Counsel, found that 55 percent of teachers spent up to four hours a week searching for lessons and 32 percent spent four to ten hours. That works out to between 10 and 25 percent of a teacher’s working week, time many teachers said interfered with their effectiveness.

Broach said the figure matched what he saw. When he started teaching, he was handed a textbook and told it was the curriculum. Instruction was teacher-centered, and his job was to deliver the book. Students’ needs, technology in the classroom and higher expectations had since forced teachers to think much harder about how they teach. At a college preparatory school like Bishop Kenny, rigor was high, and teachers were combing through Teachers Pay Teachers, professional resources and other sites to find better material.

The rest of the job had grown too. A planning period that once covered planning and grading now also had to cover updating grades quickly, because everyone expects instant feedback, keeping the learning management system current, and answering student and parent email every day.

Curriculum mapping built from the bottom up

Broach’s answer to the search problem was a curriculum mapping initiative that teachers built together. It would have been easier and cleaner, he said, for the academic dean to hand down units and tell everyone what to teach. It would not have been as effective. Over two years, teachers developed unit plans and lesson plans together in an online curriculum mapping system. Across about 70 teachers the results were not uniform, and the process could be “a little messy,” but teachers were working together and talking about what they taught.

The map also changed how new teachers start. During induction, Broach shows them the curriculum mapping suite, the work already done and the colleagues who can help. New staff arrive knowing the school already has a culture of collaboration and planning, instead of feeling like a teacher alone in a one-room schoolhouse.

Teacher collaboration: a culture where teachers ask for help

The English department showed the change most clearly. After several retirements and some growth in enrollment, the department reorganized who taught what. With classrooms side by side and shared plans, its teachers collaborated all day, shared lessons and observed one another’s classes.

Broach said the bigger shift was cultural. Teachers were no longer afraid to say they did not know how to approach a lesson or to ask colleagues for ideas. One teacher had recently emailed the whole faculty about a new project modeled on the television show Shark Tank and invited colleagues to serve as guest judges. “That’s really what we’re looking for here,” he said, “that kind of openness and collaboration.”

He was quick to credit the faculty, who teach six classes and each lead two sports or clubs. Broach still teaches a class himself, a new course this year, which he said keeps him living the life of a teacher.

Listen to the full conversation in the player above, or find every episode on the Education Today show page.

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