An Interview with Kevin Fairchild

It does not take long to find an example of a futurist whose prognostication has been horribly inaccurate. Fairchild does not attempt to predict the next big, technological advance. Instead, he focuses on preparing students for the unknown. He equips them to think critically and become lifelong learners.

In this interview, Fairchild stresses to educational leaders the importance of focusing on being ready for whatever comes. Adaptability is essential, as is leveraging the tools that are available for a given purpose.

Tell us about your role and the importance that technology has played in it.

I was a high school science teacher. I taught Physics and Earth Science for 16 years at a suburban high school outside of San Diego and used technology as much as I could. From data collection devices to simulation software, I utilized technology in both my science lessons and labs.

Then an opportunity arose in my school district to be a teacher on special assignment for technology and learning. I took that position for four years and eventually became the Coordinator for Instructional Technology, where I continue to serve today.

In my role, I perform some of the professional development and some of the teaching, but I primarily support the teaching of teachers and administrators. Most often my work is about teaching strategies to teachers for integrating technology into their instructional programs.

Walk us through how you educate teachers about integrating technology into their instruction.

We try to provide instruction based on what teachers say they need. It is always a balance between addressing what teachers say they want and also discerning what we perceive to be unrecognized needs. We always put learning first.

Our goal is to achieve better learning outcomes through technology-based instruction that utilizes tools, websites, and strategies. When teachers ask about the latest app, or what the newest toy is, we do not give them answers. That is not our goal.

Our objective is to have students use the tools available to achieve the intended outcome, not to capitalize on the latest and greatest new toy.

We try to focus our professional development sessions specifically on teachers. Sometimes we customize workshops for different schools because schools are often at different levels. However, mostly we differentiate for our teachers district-wide.

If we are in a workshop and a teacher wants to do something with HyperDocs or learn how to use Google docs, we work with them. Then we have other teachers in the session who may already know HyperDocs and Google docs and are trying to really engage their students at higher levels of knowledge.

It is less about differentiating by schools and more about the people who are in the room learning, which is not unlike being in the classroom.

What is the biggest shift you have seen in classrooms as a result of technology integration?

The biggest change I have seen is the students’ ability to leverage research resources. Years ago, it was the textbook and encyclopedias that we looked to as the main sources of information. If teachers wanted to bring in other opinions, perspectives, or resources, they had to go find articles, copy them, and distribute them to students.

Even in the early days, when teachers could take students to a computer lab, there were not really the kind of search tools that are available now. Students would typically be given two or three websites to read and summarize as if they were articles.

We have an opportunity to make a big difference with kids now, teaching them to sift through the immense amount of information and sources that exist on the internet.

The questions now are: how do they evaluate the information they are gathering and then how do they do something with it?

For example, students do not need a textbook now to have information about the Civil War. There is a lot of information out there online.

The downside is that not all information is accurate and not all of it is good.

We have to teach students how to be good consumers of information. At the same time, we want to encourage them to have a wide variety of places to go and get information.

Have you found a magic bullet to help teachers and students learn how to locate and evaluate their sources?

There is no magic to it. It is highly dependent on each teacher’s own comfort level. That is where we try to work with teachers to provide tools for them and raise their awareness and abilities.

There are a lot of teachers out there who do not realize what a good source is or what good websites entail. How do I find reliable information? How do I compare different sources? Many teachers do not know how to do that, so we work with them.

There are tools out there that teachers can use. One example is the evaluation criteria method known as the Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose (CRAAP) test, which has different online forms for users to go through.

Digital citizenship and awareness of information is going to come with practice. There are a lot of teachers and a lot of adults who did not grow up with all of this technology and information available.

We have to recognize that our kids are going to live in this world as adults and we have to be able to help them navigate their way through it, or we are all going to be in real trouble.

What are the next steps with regard to how we proactively think about technology integration as leaders?

There are really two pieces to it.

First, from a funding standpoint, we have to treat technology as an essential part of schools, a necessary part of school budgets, and not as an extra that is simply cool to have. Students need to be hands-on. In order for that to happen, funding models for schools have to change.

Second, it doesn’t matter what funding we have if teachers do the same kind of instruction that they have always done. We try to move teachers towards a more student-centered set of instructional practices that will enable kids to be master learners of whatever comes down the pike next.

I don’t think any of us can predict what the next big advance is going to be or what the trends are going to be in the next five or ten years. All we can do is prepare kids and ourselves to be ready for whatever comes.

If we are trying to guess what the next thing will be, we are very certainly going to be wrong. If we instead try to prepare kids to be master learners who can learn about whatever comes their way, judge it critically, and use it for what they want, then our students are going to be ready to succeed. That is what I think educational technology leaders need to focus on.

Talk about how you have seen districts use their budgets to make sure technology is integrated effectively in their schools.

Within a school district, we cannot do much about the money we have coming in. We have what we have.

One of the things that we need to be able to do at a district level and on a school site level is to have the commitment to say, ‘We are going to provide the best technology, the most technology in classrooms that we can, given the money that we have.’ This is a commitment, as much as a commitment to having desks in the room, whiteboards on the wall, and supplies for the teacher.

The other piece is to make sure that what we are funding and what we are providing supports the instructional vision and outcomes that are being targeted. For example, if a school does not have enough money to go one-to-one and buy a device for every student, they can either put a whole class set of devices in a few rooms or put partial sets in each class.

Let us think about which of those models supports the kind of instructional shifts and instructional changes that we would like to see. If the goal is to move to a more student-centered model of instruction, then having fewer devices in more classrooms supports that better, from my perspective. This is because if there is a teacher who stands and delivers, one who is just lecturing to kids and having them take notes, giving him or her a full class set of 36 devices will likely not change instruction. The teacher will continue to do what has been done and the kids will simply write notes on their devices rather than in a notebook.

That approach does not change instruction.

If the teacher is given 12 devices, however, maybe one for every three students, he or she is more likely not to use them in lieu of paper and pencil, put the devices in a closet, or set them aside. Now kids will be working in groups. This approach supports and encourages an instructional shift.

When we think about allocating the resources that we have, we must think about it from a standpoint of what allocation is going to move the school or district in the direction that we want it to go, given that new resources are finite and that we do not have all the money that we want for everything.

These are the two things that I think we must have. We have to make a commitment and then have that commitment support the instructional vision that we are trying to reach.

Who is someone you have found helpful in articulating why our teaching needs to change to meet the needs of today’s students?

Will Richardson is a writer and thinker who guides a lot of what I do. He has written several publications, and we incorporate his TED talks and other speaking engagements into our professional development sessions.

Richardson does a superb job of explaining why schools need to adapt and how our instruction should also be adapted.