I was already pretty comfortable with this metaphor but reactions to my initial post (which examined a tech coordinator perplexed by her faculty’s disinterest) have essentially tossed a goose-down comforter my way and invited me to bunk down with it.

Hang with me for a second:

A teaching group is receding – retiring, in some cases – and I won’t miss them. These teachers don’t fit any specific archetype – you can find them in any school, in any content area – but they do share one characteristic: they put the burden of engagement on their students.

If their students aren’t engaged, their students should simply pay closer attention or, should the teacher accept any responsibility at all, it’s for more frequent notebook checks, parent phone calls, and tougher punishment for distraction. They’re the ones who bemoan students who “aren’t there to learn,” the ones you hate sitting next to during all-district professional development. Anecdotally, I notice them leaving the job and I know that no one but their own kind will mourn their departure.

The link between some technology coordinators and these teachers seems altogether obvious to me right now.

Some technology coordinators expect teachers to meet them halfway or farther in their efforts to integrate technology into the classroom. They expect teachers to share their passion, to carry water up this hill alongside them, and when the reality of the thing closes in – teachers equally beholden to content-standards and the clock – they tend instinctively toward punitive measures: negative evaluations, citations, administrative sanctions, notebook checks.

It never occurs to them to develop a more persuasive pitch. (ie. tech units which better streamline into a teacher’s existing standards-based curriculum.)

I don’t mean you, of course. I get that some of you people put up with recalcitrance so severe it makes my hesitations look like the freaking 2020 vision over here. But there exists a line in every teacher and tech coordinator’s head, a threshold past which they say, “I have done everything I can. They need to bring it now or reap the consequences.”

Personally, the longer I’ve stalled that declaration (which is to say, the more responsibility I have assumed for my kids’ engagement) the better my classes have become. I have done my best to reject that threshold entirely, in fact, and the result has been a desperate search for engaging approaches to centuries-old material. That desperation has inspired the hungriest work of my life. I’ve never been prouder of anything.

Given that they sit on a rickety teeter-totter between both skeptical kids and skeptical teachers (while I deal with only one group of skeptics) I reckon tech coordinators have that threshold-rejecting process even rougher. What they oughtta realize, though, is that this makes hungry, persuasive salesmanship more essential to their job description, not less.

Extremists: Bad

On one end, you’ve got Graham Hughes dismissing persuasive tech salesmanship as “trick-turning and t-shirt giveaways,” tossing out firestarters like …

What we need is a big stick for when they spit the carrots out.

… and all but declaring jihad on resistant teachers with this comment:

2008 is going to be different because we are taking up the fight a little more vigorously and we are not going to let them get away it [sic] any more!

Extremists: Awesome and Awesomer

• Leigh Blackall drops some knowledge at the end of his comment:
  

  At the moment we are focusing on these technologies as tools to improve a teacher’s learning long before we ask that they be used in a classroom.

  So great. Turn the teachers into users and then into pushers. So canny. Personally, and for just one example, I’m much more inclined towards blogging solutions in my classroom after such a satisfying year playing with it on my own terms.

• And then step five of Scott’s Turn Your Luddite Administrators Into Tech-Driven Pod People article:
  

  Show RSS in Plain English. Then show the administrator the RSS aggregator you’ve created for him, with feeds already set up for woodworking, hiking, and pugs (replace with whatever the administrator’s interests are!). Show that you’ve also seeded the aggregator with some administrator-oriented blogs too, so that the aggregator can be used for both professional and personal interests.

  I mean, my word, how many of you tech coordinators have ever taken such a stealthy, guerrilla approach toward your customers, ingratiating yourselves into your faculties’ lives to the point that you could tailor a feed reader to their interests in advance of your sales pitch?

  I mean, I realize that kind of effort is beneath tech jihadists like Graham up there but, I promise you, if you can stomach the work, there’s only so much of that kind of persuasive salesmanship an obstinate, 20^th-century educator can resist.

But I mean, regardless of these two posts, good luck. I believe in your cause – I really do – even if your sales pitch is outdated.

Scott’s bold-faced question is: “Why aren’t our school organizations expecting more of their employees?” By “more” he means “tech use,” which he illustrates by comparing teachers to architects, stockbrokers, and grocery checkers:

For example, a grocery store checker doesn’t get to say ‘No thanks, I don’t think I’ll use a register.’ A stockbroker doesn’t get to say, ‘No thanks, I don’t think I’ll use a computer.’ An architect doesn’t get to say, ‘No thanks, I don’t think I’ll use AutoCAD.’ But in education, we plead and implore and incentivize but we never seem to require.

The difference, without sharpening my point too finely, is that the effect of technology on instruction is highly variable, while its effect on those other jobs is not.

Consider the vast, comical difference between a) an architect who uses computer-assisted drafting software and one who drafts by hand, b) a checker who uses a register and one who tracks purchases with a pencil, and c) a broker who relies on Bloomberg’s stock monitoring software and one who uses a ticker tape machine.

Then consider the difference between a teacher who uses blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, VoiceThread, Operator11, SlideShare, TeacherTube, Flickr, Animoto, and one who doesn’t. The difference between the two is less obvious neither is it necessarily positive. When used improperly and uncreatively, these tools do more harm than goodcf. One high profile flop; 99% of PowerPoint presentations..

If the difference between the converted and unwashed teachers were that obvious, that is, if these tools maximized student engagement while minimizing time wasted right out of the boxcf. Important Ratio #1. (as they do for architects, stockbrokers, and checkers) I’d find Scott’s question a little more pressing and a little less riddled by assumption.

But schools employ technology coordinators (a position unlike any that exist in architecture, stock brokerage, or grocery) to validate those assumptions, to prove and re-prove the opportunities which exist when teachers use these tools well.

If technology coordinators believe that salesmanship is beneath their job description, if they presume that teachers should leap hungrily at their technology before they’ll step in and set up a wiki, then they will doubtlessly find their philosophy reflected back at them in the cynicism and disinterest of their facultyNot that I’m expecting a show of hands, but I’m curious how many tech coordinators approach their job with this pocketful of presumptions. I’m at a disadvantage here as the only tech coordinators I read (Kim, Patrick, and Ken, plus Scott with his sporadic tech evangelism scripts) seem tireless in their pursuit of their colleagues..

Selling tech to the teacher is the tech coordinator’s job just like selling learning to the student is the teacher’s. Anyone who thinks he’s in a seller’s market here deludes himself. Anyone who thinks that punitive measures for the buyer will solve his market crisis (cf. John Gross’ comment at Scott’s) is even more deluded.