Educators navigating the “techlash” may be reaching out to experts on both sides of the issue, combing through research, or considering caregiver concerns as they figure out the right way to balance instruction using digital tools with other screen-free forms of teaching and learning.
Most are likely not scratching their (metaphorical) beards old-school, philosopher-style, approaching the issue from an ethical lens.
But that may be a good way to start, suggests Priten Soundar-Shah, a visiting scholar in the philosophy department at Harvard University who has a background in both technology and education, and is the author of a new book, Ethical Ed Tech.
Thinking about ed-tech use ethically means empowering teachers to decide which tools are appropriate for their students, and when and how they should be used, Soundar-Shah emphasizes. And school district and state education leaders should avoid one-size-fits-all mandates on how much, or how little, screen time students experience during the school day, he says.
Soundar-Shah spoke with Education Week about how district and school leaders can consider big questions about education technology—including how to decide which tools to buy and how to do professional development on artificial intelligence for teachers—from an ethical perspective.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are school and district leaders missing when they don’t apply ethics to questions of appropriate use of technology in classrooms?
We need to start with thinking about what ethics in education means before we can fully apply that to the scope of education technology. We need to articulate what we value and align that with our policies. The bulk of this work has to happen at the classroom level.
A lot of the initiatives [on screen time] you’re seeing are very top-down [coming from the district or state]. The reason that happens is because we don’t trust our individual educators. We also haven’t fully trained them to make these [tech] decisions in a nuanced way inside the classroom.
We’re trying to do this blunt force. We’re looking for the easiest answer that could apply to every single classroom in the school. But that’s not a thing.
So what’s a better approach?
When you see a school district put out guidance saying “Fridays are screen-free,” that’s an instance of them trying to make decisions based on [concern] about technology in the classroom, instead of helping an individual [teacher] figure out how can we be more intentional about using screens.
If a particular teacher decides that they need to be on a Chromebook on a Friday instead of a Thursday, they should be allowed to do that. That would actually be professional judgment being exercised, and probably better for the students. But we don’t give teachers that autonomy.
Teachers need to be trained to make decisions including: Are we going to bring this tool into our classroom? How much are we going to use this tool? Which data are we going to provide this tool? They also have to teach students how to use the technology in a responsible way.
When should that kind of training happen for teachers?
In an ideal world, we would be doing this in preservice training programs. That’s not happening, and so I do think that this needs to be something schools and districts take on as part of the professional development burden.
The professional development we’ve been doing on AI over the last three years is very tool-based. Oftentimes, it is your vendor that you’re purchasing a particular ed-tech tool from teaching you how to use a tool. The minute the tool changes, that means you have to bring the vendor back in and [learn] about the new features of the tool.
[Better training would include high-level questions such as]: What are algorithms? How are they trained? What are the potentials for bias? What are hallucinations? Figuring out the fundamentals of the technology, but not in the context of any, one, particular tool.
What does an ethical approach to ed tech mean for procurement?
Decisionmaking, and especially procurement—deciding which tools to use—is very vendor-initiated. What that means is that you’re at a conference and you see a vendor presentation trying to pitch you something, you get all these emails in your inbox. You get the sales pitch. It is all very much driven by the vendor putting themselves in front of you and saying “you have this problem, here’s how we solve it.”
Instead of starting conversations about “should we adopt this tool or not, because we got this sales pitch from a vendor,” [leaders should] have a conversation with the teachers and say, “what are our biggest pain points right now?” And then go search for a tool.
I know that seems really simple, but it is not how we practice.
