How Can Teachers Stay Up-To-Date With New Information?

Teaching is a tough gig. Engaging? Rewarding? Yes and yes, but tough? Absolutely yes. And it’s tough in a lot of ways. Not only do you have to deal with high work loads, but you also have to deal with… wait for it… students. Yep. I know. The bane and blessing of a teacher’s existence. However, there’s something else that teachers have to deal with today that… wasn’t such a big issue before, and that is the constant change of both culture and information and how readily students have access to it. There is a solution, but let’s take a moment to discuss what the problem actually is.

The Problem of a Changing Educational Landscape

Okay, so if you’re a teacher, some of this is going to seem super obvious - I  mean you deal with it every day already. But if you’re not a teacher, new to the world of education, or you’ve been a teacher for a long time, some of these problems you might actually mistake for something else. For example:

Authority: Discipline vs Peers

Teachers both are and aren’t authority figures. Have you ever noticed how well liked teachers are treated as authorities but disliked teachers are roundly ignored? Well there’s a reason for that - and no it’s not because discipline has been removed from schools. It’s because the teacher-student relationship with authority has fundamentally changed. In the past, teachers were the primary authority in a child’s life for several hours of the day and might be the sole authority for the subjects they teach. Children essentially didn’t have a choice, it was either listen and obey, or don’t learn at all. Discipline helped with enforcing the ‘obey’ angle. Today though? The average student can access literally hundreds of teachers with greater authority at the push of the button every second of the day. They can go to wikipedia, YouTube, pull up published journals, and in some cases can even directly engage with leading experts in the field who are far above their teacher in terms of qualification.

When compared to all these alternative options, authority through position and qualification is not enough, and discipline won’t solve the problem. Authority thus comes from how well liked the teacher is, how motivated they can get the students to learn, and how willing the students are to listen to that individual. This type of authority is part of what is known as peer authority and peer teaching - treating the teacher as part of a social unit with the students - is a growing approach to how to tackle many of these issues.

However, that leads us to…

Quality of Information - Teacher Testing and Student Biases

As a teacher there’s always the question of how good your information is. If you’re relying on a textbook that is three to four years old, but your students are accessing the internet and are able to immediately compare that with the the latest popular discoveries that appeared on their screen ten seconds ago, it’s easy for students to think what they’ve found online is the latest and therefore more reliable piece of information. Now, how reliable the student’s information is might be debatable, but even when the teacher is right the situation existing fundamentally leads to questioning the quality of the teacher’s information and, by extension, the quality of the teacher themselves. 

Now, for some subjects, updates aren’t so important. In Mathematics not much changes at the most fundamental levels from year to year. However in certain classes such as English, History or Religious Studies, changes can be rapid both in terms of new information, rapid in terms of changes in mainstream interpretation, but also may be affected by social and political factors occurring outside the classroom. Every time these situations occur, it opens opportunities for students to test the teacher - or witness them being tested - and if the teacher fails, well, their authority drops. 

But having the right answer isn’t always the solution. Consider, for example, any student who grew up watching Big Bang Theory or who has a passion for science and knows anything about string theory. String Theory is a popular scientific theory, but is considered by many scholars to be so bad it’s “not even wrong” because even though it answers a lot of questions in science, it is ultimately untestable. Simply put, String Theory isn’t a theory, it’s an idea; a hypothesis that would answer questions if they could prove it to be true, and they haven’t found a way proven yet. But, it does answer questions.

Now, think about that in the context of a teacher. Any online source can present some highly open-ended theory about society, maths, science, physical fitness or whatever it is you teach, and so long as they are popular enough and present their idea convincingly they can be taken as an authority regardless of the evidence. But if you try to combat that by just supplying answers, you’re not solving the fundamental problem which is addressing whether or not your answers align with the values and prebuilt biases held by your students. The earth may be round, but even if you are able to prove that it is round to an audience, that will mean little to an audience that is already primed to believe that the earth is flat - and every student in your class might be that audience. At some point, it’s not just the quality of the information that matters, it’s whether or not the students are primed to receive that information that matters also. And a teacher who stumbles when being “tested” by all these constant rapid changes becomes more and more likely to prime their students to trust a more unflappable source - such as heavily edited, highly personable and never changing documentaries, podcasters and YouTube videos.

The Solutions - Education, Reliability and Consistency

So, how to deal with this? Well, the first way is to know the subject matter incredibly well to whatever depth of detail your students are likely to understand. This might involve watching the same online content as your students, but it’s important to contrast that with academic updates like completely a Master of Teaching online and similar upskilling strategy.

The other way to deal with it is to focus on a teaching method that presents information in a reliable and consistent manner. Remember, kids are kids, but they’re also people with biases who build up those biases over time. A teacher who seems to say one thing one day and something completely opposite the other day may be right on both occasions, but it erodes trust in that teacher. Finding ways to teach information so that it all links together, so that it feels cohesive and forms a pattern in the student’s mind? That’s the key. In some cases you may find that being right or wrong matters less to your students than being reliable and consistent, and this ties back into peer teaching. 

A teacher who feels they must know the right answer every time is going to appear to crack when a student proves them wrong to the eyes of the class - even if the teacher is actually correct. However, a teacher who is willing to learn, break it down, connect their answer to other things the student’s already accept, and adopt teaching styles that make them appear reliable and consistent even when they are wrong creates an environment where teachers are trusted and given permission to be wrong sometimes. But if this isn’t already how you teach, then it very much might be something you need to go and learn, and you can’t learn that simply by watching online content and improving the quality of your information.

Ultimately, success as a teacher is tied directly to your success with your students, and many of the rewards as a teacher are tied to the same. So learning how to connect with your students and educate them at the same time is often the most pivotal part of being a teacher in today’s learning environment. Yes it’s hard. Yes, information can change rapidly and change is difficult to manage. But if you learn a few baseline skills, learn how to associate with your students, and update accordingly, life as a teacher should lean more and more on the side of rewarding than ever before.