What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me

"Despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good." (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014)

This grandiose conclusion was drawn when the authors tested groups of students taking notes either on laptops or longhand. "Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops." (Professor Cindy May, Scientific American).

At least two important questions went unaddressed:

1. Were the subjects in the experiment equally experienced in paper and electronic note-taking? If not, maybe you are actually measuring their aptitude with the medium.


2. What do you mean by 'classrooms'? In the experiments, only podium lecturing was tested (recorded TED talks and verbatim reading of scripts). That's not what the classrooms look like in the schools I know.

What have I learned from 1-to-1?

In nearly all of the lessons I have taught since 2008, the students have used devices for nearly all of the time. Before then, not at all. I changed abruptly because my school did and I was interested to see how far I could take the new model.

You may be an interesting teacher, but you can't compete with the Internet

One sees the truth of this even in staff meetings if teachers have their device lids up. They are not paying proper attention because your brain can't process two information streams at once. In lessons, it's the same. When I talk to my students, I insist they should not be looking at their screens. A strategy which works for me has been to organise my class as an 'inverted horseshoe' with desks around the edge of the room, laptops facing outwards. This means that when I talk to the group, I can ask the students to face me and turn their backs on their screens.

And then I shut up so that they can get on with it. Ergonomically it's an advantage too. When the students are all working, I can stand in the middle of the room and get to anyone quickly. Not every colleague has been convinced, but it works for me.

You are already an expert

I had been teaching Physics for several years before I landed in a 1-to-1 classroom. The internet had become a cornucopia of excellent teaching materials. There were assessments, simulations and videos; there were resources produced by great teachers, inspired students and world-renowned physicists. I started a wiki and embedded, linked and organised all of the assets I had found, but after I had planned my courses there were many I hadn't used even though I knew they would be great for the students. I took a step back from my role as gatekeeper. I flung back the gate. No! I took it off its hinges. In their own time, the students who wanted to know more browsed the wiki and found materials which suited their learning style and because it was online, the site also welcomed up to 5 000 visitors per day.

1-to-1 intimidates many teachers because they assume that students are more comfortable with devices than adults. This may be true, but it's not important. A teacher is an expert explainer; he is knowledgeable about his subject; he knows good teaching ideas when he sees them. A good teacher who doesn't use technology (yet) is still a good teacher. Technology is just another tool he should use to become the best teacher he can be.

Let go

So technology enabled me to improve what I was giving to my students. It also freed me to interact with them in my version of the flipped classroom. Some of the instruction was flipped to the home, but more importantly, it was flipped to the virtual classroom I had made. As the students learned from my curated resources, I could spend time with those who needed support.

To do this, I had to trust in the students' wish to learn. I wasn't standing at the front commanding their constant attention. What they were doing instead is still called note-taking, but it only vaguely resembles the activity which Scientific American said laptops don't do well. Alongside their text, students dragged in images and graphs straight from the wiki. They added photos of my sketches on the whiteboard; links to my curated videos; their own found resources (which we could then add to the wiki).

open up the kitchen and the larder, not just the dining room

The traditional classroom is like a restaurant. The visitors consume what the chef produces because she has the knowledge and expertise. But what if the clientele were allowed to choose ingredients from the shelves and then prepared their own meals under the tutelage of the chef? Of course it's inconceivable; the result might be nourishing, but is unlikely to be sophisticated. This, however, is what we have done to the classroom when we gave the students access to the same resources the teachers have (but not the expertise). The metaphor sounds outrageous, which shows what a radical change education has seen.

Of course, if all we do is try to use devices to replicate the activities which were developed for paper, we will, like Professor May, be disappointed by them.