Superintendents are constantly bombarded with emails, brochures, and demos from education technology companies while teachers and students are trying to figure out how to make the most of top-down mandates on technology from school and district leaders, writes Priten Soundar-Shah, CEO of PedagogyVentures, which helps organizations integrate technology with proven teaching strategies, in an eSchool News essay.
Who gets to name what the school needs? That answer usually comes from someone outside the classroom, often before a teacher has been asked.
Giving agency to educators does not mean abandoning technology. Teachers are the closest source for identifying what is missing from the classroom, and when school leaders start there rather than at the vendor’s value proposition, the solution space opens in ways that serve schools better.
In K-12 schools, most teachers believe they should be the primary decision-makers regarding classroom technology, but they are often not consulted during the procurement process.
The typical path to technology adoption follows a similar pattern nationally. Often a key decision-maker is made aware of an educational technology solution. The school then attends a demo, checks against its budget and procurement policies, maybe starts with a pilot, and then adopts the tool.
The vendor is largely the center of the conversation: Do we adopt this tool? The vendor explains why schools should, and then schools decide if that meets a need the school has. This process only looks where the vendor tells us to look.
Because decision-making is concentrated with leadership, vendors focus on selling to administrators, not teachers. The buyer and the user are separated by this split, especially when teacher voices are not driving the process.
This is a needs assessment process that runs in reverse: The vendor names the gap, the school confirms it, and stakeholder consultation becomes reactive rather than constitutive.
Imagine you have a group of students and teachers in a room reviewing vendor materials. They are chosen as representatives of the population and not based on enthusiasm for a technology. This group has no predetermined theme or goal to work towards except to share what the biggest problems, struggles, and gaps in the school are. They are just naming what they are observing. This starting point would be very different from the processes we are seeing across schools and universities right now.
This teacher- and student-led needs inventory could become the first document in any edtech RFP, written before any external party is contacted. That document names the gap the school is trying to close in the school’s own language, not the vendor’s. Companies responding to the RFP would then have to contextualize their products against that documented need rather than against a generic value proposition. The conversation changes from “here’s what we sell” to “here’s how we fit what you actually need.”
The same group that writes the inventory should also sit on the evaluation panel. If teachers and students write the criteria up front and weigh in on which response best meets them, the buyer and the user stop being structurally separated.
This is a slow process. But there is no evidence to support moving quickly. Speed is the consequence of steps we are skipping rather than a sign of more efficient processes.
We are also likely to get answers that are not easily solvable with a technology tool, and that too is the reality of genuine problem-solving for our schools. If the honest conclusion is that “we need smaller classes” or “we need an additional counselor,” discovering that early is cheaper than a failed platform rollout that solves the wrong problem.
Vendor-provided frameworks are a kind of cognitive outsourcing which is comfortable and fast but over time subtly corrupts our school culture. The fix is putting the people closest to the classroom at the front of the process, before any vendor is in the room. This is ultimately about whom we cede our agency to and whom we treat as reliable authorities in our classrooms.
eSchool News
