Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 48)

Dennis Harper Harnessing student-led tech support D ennis Harper does not mince words when it comes to the premise of his life’s work. “Kids know more than you do,” he says. That belief has been the guiding principal of GenYES, an organization rooted in an educational model he created in 1995 when he was a technology director in the Olympia, Washington, school district. Initial funding came through a 1995 U.S. Department of Education grant designed to improve technology integration in schools by giving students a key role in the professional-development efforts of K–12 teachers. Over the last twelve years, Harper says, more than “40,000 teachers have been partnered with GenYES kids.” The rationale for the GenYES approach, as Harper explains it, goes like this: Schools are made up of about 92 percent students and 8 percent teachers. The students are at least as tech savvy as the teachers. “You can argue that the kids know more,” he adds, but to make his point, Harper allows, “let’s just say they’re all the same.” Given that assumption, he says, the students possess 92 percent of the tech prowess and skills in school—which makes them the experts, and ideally suited to help teachers get their tech skills up to speed. How do teachers cope with this new balance? Harper makes it a point to always ask teachers whether they prefer learning from students or adults. Ninety-eight percent of the teachers ranked their student partner’s support as being of high quality. They went into teaching, the teachers tell Harper, “because we like to work with kids.” The goal of GenYES is not simply to help schools integrate technology in a collaborative way. Harper believes his organization can facilitate greater equality and access for students of diverse circumstances. “On the Internet, the poorest student in the world has the same resources as Bill Gates’s kids,” Harper says. “Ready access to technology, he adds, is “an equalizer, a leveler—exactly what Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was.” Recently, Harper has taken that dream to the other side of the world, where, in Liberia, he worked with educators and a closely engaged President Ellen Sirleaf to develop the Liberia Renaissance Education Complex, scheduled to begin operations in March 2008. The school’s charter is to provide Liberian children “the twenty-⇒rst-century education necessary to achieve a peaceful future.”In addition to his GenYES position, Harper is executive director of Kijana Voices, the organization that raised $1.1 million and donated thousands of hours of staff time to make the Liberia project a reality. Sirleaf, whom Harper holds in high regard, spoke at the groundbreaking and then stuck around for two hours to enjoy the festivities. “Fourteen years of war, 300,000 kids dying—it’s a pretty sad situation there,” Harper says. “But Sirleaf gets the GenYES model. The kids in the school will actually be part of her effort to help rebuild the country.” Kijana Voices takes on a couple of projects a year, Harper explains. Recently, the nonpro⇒t organization, with funding from Verizon, trained 500 California eighth graders from forty-one school districts in the state’s Central Valley. When their training was complete, the students were made responsible for ensuring that 10,000 seventh graders became tech literate. Then, each of the seventh graders used their newly acquired skills to complete two projects. “That’s 20,000 projects!” Harper exclaims. “It was just a total shock to everybody that that many projects could be done.” What’s more, Harper says, all the projects were assessed—by the eighth graders—to make certain they met national technology standards. “It shows how well we prepare kids to solve the problems,” Harper says proudly, and he quickly adds that his organization also works with one or more adults in each school district. “It does take a good teacher as well,” he says. How does a school successfully incorporate GenYES programs into its curriculum? “They have to trust kids,” Harper says. GenYES does its part by preparing students to support technology and its use in the classroom. That may mean the students aid teachers as they integrate technology into their lessons to improve learning. It could mean, as in the California project, that they support other students in becoming tech literate. It could even be that the students render assistance to the often overworked school IT department by repairing computers or keeping networks operative. Generation YES, GenYES’s parent organization, runs programs to train students in all those areas. The GenYES vision, Harper says, is one of collaboration between students and teachers. The educators, he emphasizes, provide the content and the pedagogy, while the kids are deeply involved in helping instructors employ the classroom technology as a learning tool. When this approach fails, he says, it’s “because we expect teachers to do everything. It always gets me that you have to argue the case that kids should be doing things in schools.” When students and teachers work together to make technology an integral part of the education experience, Harper says, learning is the most effective, and most fun. 48 EDUTOPIA APRIL/MAY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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