Education is changing rapidly. And well it should. Our understanding of the human brain, how we learn and what are the best practices in education are changing as well. The main culprit? Technology in particular and science as a whole. These are allowing us to do things and understand things that we never knew before.

For example, in the field of psychology, we can now measure things in ways that were previously not possible. The main reason for this is computers. These both allow us to perform experiments in situations that are virtually identical for every participant and perform statistical analyses in seconds that would previously have taken us days to compute by hand.

This allows us to test everything under the sun, something that is giving us an ever greater insight into the objective functioning of the human brain rather than only the subjective opinions of generations gone by.

How we see ourselves

More generally, technology is changing society’s very perspective of how the brain works. We’ve gone through numerous iterations of the functioning of the human body and the brain. During the middle ages, we had a very simplistic belief of how the mind worked. Then we believed there were four senses of humor that decided our emotional disposition, as well as whether we were ill or healthy.

These were sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic and they were associated with optimism, short-tempers, analytical and peaceful respectively. That was it. Those were the boxes in which for hundreds of years all of the humanity was pushed.

Then, with the advent of technology, that changed. First, we compared ourselves to steam engines, with valves, tubes, and pressures. Then we compared ourselves to computational machines, analytical, logical and based on pure thought. Today we have a popular model that takes seems inspired by the internet, where everything is interconnected and there are layers that we’re not even aware of.

This has suddenly given us space for the emotional mind, the subconscious and unconscious triggers and effects that we previously discounted. And we’re finding out how important these are. For example, in his book, the Happiness Advantage Shawn Anchor talks about how being happy and a good state of mind can change how well we learn, retain information and problem solve.

This is slowly trickling through into the classroom, where more and more the emphasis is on engagement, interest and provoking students to want to learn, rather than stamping information into their heads whatever the costs.

The technology advantage

Of course, that is something that is been made a great deal easier and that is technology. Suddenly, teachers (as well as students) have a huge number of tools available that weren’t there in the past. This means they don’t have to rely on their own storytelling skill and some pictures alone like they did in years gone by.

Instead, they can bring in multimedia, computers, videos and whatever else they want to weave into their classes. In fact, the technologies are coming so hard and fast that really the only limit on the rate of innovation in the classroom are the teacher’s own willingness to take up new technologies and the school’s budget and liberal-mindedness.

If done correctly, technology can utterly transform the classroom and directly apply the lessons that are coming out of the neuroscience labs, the psychology experiments, and our technological innovations.

Learning the wires

The problem, like in so many situations in modern life, is that the teachers and the students need to actually learn how to use the new tools that are available. That’s easier said than done. Each new platform and tool that the teacher wants to incorporate into the classroom have a steep learning curve.

What’s more, many of them are so different that understanding one platform only helps nominally with the next one that the teacher might want to put into their class. This, combined with the high workload that many of us face in this modern day crime, means that there is a real bottleneck – with some teachers refusing outright to embrace new technologies and bring their classes into the 21^st century.

“Not on my watch,” these teachers seem to be saying. “Why should I be called upon to embrace all these new innovations when so many generations before me did nothing of the kind?”

The importance of teaching the teachers

This is where technological education comes in. It is vital for schools and universities to take the time and make the resources available for the teachers to learn the new methods of teaching available. Not only will this allow them to use new tools to make their classes more engaging, but this will also allow the teachers to grasp some of the underlying philosophies that are changing the landscape even as we speak.

There are many ways that this can be done, but the best one by far is to make the time available during work hours to master new technologies as well as attend workshops into the effects and advantages of the new opportunities that are out there.

Yes, this will mean a short-term sacrifice on the school’s behalf, as the teachers will have less time available to teach classes, grade work or help students to get academic help (students can start to order their papers, safe to buy essays, etc). In the long term, however, as these teachers will internalize vital lessons and the quality of their teaching improves, they will make back far more than they originally invested.

What’s more, by giving teachers the space to learn, we now know that we’ll – in fact – boost their engagement and their interest in the job. This will give the teachers more reasons to stick around and in that way reduce turnover.

Last words

For the first time in history, the biggest bottleneck in the advancement of our species is the limited scope of our own mind. It used to be said that ‘science advances from funeral to funeral’ suggesting that science could only advance when the old guard passed away. (Interestingly enough there is actually some recent evidence that proves this theory true). Now, this is also coming to be true in the field of education. It is no longer the technological limits but the human limits that decide how quickly a school and a class advances and adopts new technologies.

The consequences thereof are severe. The more the teacher takes up new technologies and introduces them into the classroom, the better equipped her students will be for what the modern world will throw at them in the years to come.

For learning how to use new technologies doesn’t just teach these students how to engage with this new technology, it also teaches them how to learn to use new technologies. What I mean are those students who have more exposure to new ideas being far quicker in understanding the use of and the advantages of using the new opportunities that are out there.

We should, therefore, do whatever we can to improve the access that students have to new technologies and new ideas. And the best place to start in that regard is most certainly with the person at the front of the classroom.

So let’s start with them.