Reflections on 30 years in education…

As we welcome a new year, thoughts often turn to new opportunities. On a personal level, I’m choosing to reflect on almost 30 years of working in the field of education, thinking about what has changed, and what has stayed the same. In conversation, when asked about what I do for a living, it is often commented that it must be rather mundane. For those of us who work in the dynamic world of education, dull and mundane are not words that we recognise.

I’ve given some thought, firstly, to what has changed over the years. The first thing that springs to mind is technology. I’ve lived through many changes in technology that have impacted education. I can think back to the mid-1980s when the personal computer was being introduced. I didn’t quite manage to catch that wave in terms of my time as a school pupil but I remember having to undertake a “computer orientation” course when I first started at university in 1989. From that time onwards, substantial changes in computer hardware and software have impacted on different aspects of education including curriculum design, teaching materials, assessments and assessment methods. During my time at the chalk face, I can remember being a trainee teacher and spending many hours creating the most colourful acetates for use on the overhead projector. It wasn’t too far into the future when the overhead projector was consigned to the bin (I immediately missed the creativity if not the blown bulbs!) and we had access to a mobile or fixed digital projector in our classrooms. Of course, this linked into development work as many of our teaching and assessment materials had to be digitised. I can now reflect on these changes in technology being a driver to development work; it became a necessity in order to keep up with the pace of technological change.

Another development which allowed even greater opportunities was the emerging use of the internet. By the mid-1990s, I was teaching in a further education college and the use of the internet was creeping into everything that we did. Whilst it was an expectation from both management, and students, that we would make good use of the internet in our learning and teaching, it also became a classroom management issue as students developed their addiction to all things online!

An interesting area which I remember quite clearly was the hope that this move into a digital world would negate the need for paper. Surely all of our learning, teaching and assessment materials could now be digital? Who needed paper? The truth was clear. Some aspects of technology may have moved things forward but there were two areas that were not fully understood at this time. Firstly, learners still liked to have a hard copy to support their learning and revision and, secondly, we didn’t yet have the systems in place to allow us to abandon paper completely. This was particularly evident in creating and storing an auditable record of assessment. There was also the issue of administering and developing online or electronic assessments and whether they would be appropriate for all subjects and students. I remember thinking at one point in my teaching career that as we gained access to more and more technology, life just got more complicated. It was a veritable minefield.

In the years that I worked in the wider national education field, I saw things in a different light. Instead of a focus on my own classroom or educational institution, my world was opened to a whole new range of problems which technology brought with it. Trying to manage this was difficult; and that always meant difficult decisions needed to be made. I always felt that, for a variety of reasons that we don’t have time to go into within the word count here, the true benefits of the technologies available to us were never able to be fully harnessed. Education and life became more about compromise.

Now I look at my nieces and nephews as they progress through their various stages of schooling and it feels like such a different landscape to me. It makes me feel old! But then I think more rationally and realise that many of the technologies that I’ve grappled with over the years and worked with in education are now in a better place and are better used. In other words, I think I embraced these technologies at a time when they were in their infancy and at odds with the wider landscape. Now, these technologies have matured and the surrounding systems to better support them actually exist or have, themselves, matured. There is a synergy and that’s good to see and can only benefit the learners.

So what has stayed the same? For me, and from the different perspectives that I’ve been part of or witnessed over the years, having the learner at the centre and having their best interests at heart is something that hasn’t changed. Whether you are a learner in Scotland or in any other country across the world, and despite the changes in technology that may have come and gone, those in charge of managing and delivering education and learning haven’t changed their stance on what matters most – learners.