We could write a book on how teaching has changed over the last ten years. It feels like our profession has been in hyperdrive recently. Classrooms look different, lessons look different, pedagogy looks different, and teaching strategies look different. There has been a push for 21st-century learning.
A lot has happened in ten years including the evolution in education. In 2013, the Boston Marathon bomb attack occurred, President Barack Obama began his second term in office, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, The Big Bang Theory was the number one non-sports show on TV, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was Pope Francis, and I had just completed my first year in administration after ten years of teaching.
As you can see, much has changed in ten years, and what does it mean for the classroom? Below is a list of the top changes in the last decade a group of educators with over ten years of teaching experience has lived through.
Technology
When I left the classroom in 2012, I left behind ten years of teaching technology applications at the middle school level in a larger-than-average district in Texas. At the end of the semester, my students and others in the district at my level were producing short videos of their own, building basic budgets in Microsoft Excel, and definitely knew how to save and find documents on the computer. There are many districts now across the country that would laugh and scoff at this as now many eighth graders are making short animations and coding on a regular basis. This is just one example of how technology in the classroom has changed.
Mobile Classroom Games
The access to using technology in the classroom has changed dramatically. Many one-to-one districts now exist; the internet is at millions of students’ fingertips daily. Many games and programs used daily in the classroom (Kahoot, Gimkit, etc.) have allowed teachers to add content to online games for student learning. These games can be played on Chromebooks and every teacher’s favorite: the students’ cell phones.
iPads, LCD Projectors, and Smart Boards
Ten years ago, we thought iPad carts, LCD projectors and Smart Boards were the wave of the future. Schools spent countless dollars putting iPads in the hands of our students. We downloaded apps that students could use for exploration and apps they could use for remediation. The problem with iPads was that students had a lot of temptation of using them for gaming more than education purposes. Also, iPads are not super sturdy on their own (in many states, they are classified as consumables). Lastly, younger students often needed help typing on the spaced-out keypads. There are ways that have been developed to improve these issues over the years.
Smart Boards and LCD projectors allowed teachers to project computer screens on touchscreens so anyone could manipulate the visuals. The problem was that the bulbs did not last long, the boards would need calibration on a regular basis, and only a few students at a time could actively participate in the lesson.
Chromebooks
Now we have interactive flat panel monitors and Chromebooks. The interactive flat panels (IFPs) do not need calibration since the display comes from inside the monitor and not from a projector. In fact, many of the IFPs have internal CPUs so they do not even need to be hard wired to a desktop computer. Multiple sources and visuals can be pulled up on the screen at one time and students can use their Chromebooks to interact with the monitor by logging onto sites such as Pear Deck.
Chromebooks have benefited from the invention of the Cloud for storage purposes. Much like the iPads, Chromebooks do not contain a hard drive so saving information on them is not an option, but students can use virtual storage to save important work assignments and resources. In fact, using the Cloud is an excellent storage option because students can now log on to different computers and continue their work because they can access the Cloud from anywhere.
Chromebooks really proved their worth during the pandemic. With millions of students learning from home, many districts equipped the kids with Chromebooks so school could continue through distance learning. Teachers could use learning management systems like Schoology and Canvas to create classroom pages with Zoom links, resources, and student assignments. This practice allowed classes to continue to meet virtually so the school could continue even if our buildings were closed.
In the classroom, teachers are now thrust into helping students apply, measure the validity of the information, and process the information coming at them at all angles. In some ways teachers have moved from providing the information to allowing students to find the information on their own and then facilitating the processing of said information.
Every teacher that was included in this non-scientific survey and many articles on Google covering this topic had technology as the number one factor in the evolution of the classroom in the last decade.
School Security/Mental Health
From 2009 to 2018, American schools saw 356 shooting victims. Since 2018, there have been even more. This has brought about the redesign of many schools, practices, and school budgets as school safety has become more of a concern for many good reasons.
How schools, parents, legislators, and communities look at the practice of providing safety for staff and students has evolved into more of a priority than ever before.
This also relates to the mental state of our students. America’s Health Rankings of Women and Children report that suicides in adolescents ages 15-19 have risen 29% over the previous decade.
Our school counselors, administrators, and staff likely have all now had some training on how to spot mental health issues and then how to discuss those issues with students…and sometimes even between staff members.
Schools have had to become first responders to mental issues and develop their own protective measures for physical and mental safety.
COVID-19 Pandemic
A ten-year review of education is not complete without a discussion on the effects of COVID-19 pandemic. One positive effect of the pandemic was that after students went home for a few months, the value of the in-person teacher was raised exponentially. Data from around the nation showed that students without a teacher in the classroom were nowhere near as successful as when the students were in the classroom. Many states went as far as to pass legislation to help curb the “COVID slide.”
A negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was the number of teachers that left the classroom and have not yet been replaced by new teachers coming into the profession. In the past three years every state in the nation has seen less teachers apply for jobs and finding them in some cases simply just has not happened. In the last three years, more schools have opened the school year with more long terms than in recent history. Granted the access to online school has helped students stay on track for graduation, but nothing has fully replaced the in-person teacher.
On that note, the access to online school has pulled more students away from the classroom, and some have not come back as some parents have chosen to keep their students at home online to complete their schooling. A few of these students have benefited from less anxiety at home, but many others have capitalized on the convenience factor of on-line education.
Student Collaboration
Nothing sends shivers down the spines of high-performing students like the words “group work.” When I started teaching 23 years ago, I loved coming up with assignments that required my students to get together in a group and work on a large project. In my naive mind, I thought the students would come together, divide the workload, and end up with a product that really represented the hard work of each member of the group.
What happened all too often was that one or two students would end up doing the work for the whole group. They knew all members would receive the same grade and did not want a poor work ethic from some to doom the grade for all. I was very creative in my Social Studies class with these assignments.
Some of my group work activities required students to assemble as a news team and report on a historical event or they would find a way to solve a problem in the real world such as low voter turnout. Not to say these ideas were bad, but I was missing the boat when it came to the structure. This problem has long plagued classroom teachers. As I awkwardly tried to coax students into getting along and working together, Dr. Spencer Kagan was literally writing the book on cooperative learning.
He and his colleagues had come up with several different structures that required students in groups to be held accountable for their roles and responsibilities. Over the last ten years, we have seen a remarkable shift from group work to cooperative learning.
More Student-Centered Classrooms
I mentioned earlier that in 2013, I had completed my first year as an administrator. At the same time, the state of Texas rolled out a new evaluation system, T-TESS.
T-TESS was an improvement on the PDAS system that existed before in that T-TESS is focused on continual improvement and finding specific ways teachers can find to help students grow based on learning standards.
But another improvement was the evaluation of how much a teacher was involving student talk and activities in the class. One educator in our discussion cited the decline of the lecture due to evaluation systems, more information at students’ fingertips, and more project-based learning.
What a ride it has been for the last ten years…makes one wonder what the next ten years will bring. We can know for sure that in education, changes are constant. That is why we as educators must never forget that the goal is the continuous education of our students every year. That is why we are here in the first place!
Educators never stop learning; check out our available graduate degree programs to hone your skills and promote lifelong learning and academic excellence.
