The NASBE Interview: Richard Culatta

Describe the state of education technology today. 

We’re in a very exciting time. It’s also a moment where we need to start looking at some of our technology a little differently. As federal ESSER funds are ending, schools and states are having to make more thoughtful decisions about what technology to invest in.

I think it’s good that we are becoming more thoughtful about the technology we’re putting in front of kids. Recently, seven leading education organizations came together for the first time to agree on the expectations that ed tech products need to meet to be used in schools. We are in alignment on five common indicators, and we are working with tech developers to help get third-party validations on those quality indicators. This has the potential to save a huge amount of time for schools.

There’s an average of 2,590 apps used by each school district in the U.S. It takes an average of 15 hours to review each of those apps, to make sure they’re okay for use by students. That means each school district spends just under 40,000 hours reviewing apps. If you consider that we have around 12,000 school districts in the U.S., that’s almost 500,000 total hours spent reviewing apps. We have to fix that.

By creating common quality indicators, and having trusted validators that can review apps to ensure alignment to those indicators, we can save school districts a tremendous amount of time and still ensure they’re getting quality products.

What examples of technology use in the classroom are making a difference for students? What are the best practices you see? Is there momentum around using technology more effectively in the classroom?

There are some phenomenal examples of how technology is used in ways that really help students. When used well, technology helps students be more creative, design, problem solve, and collaborate. Unfortunately, there are schools where instead of using technology in creative ways, it is being used simply to present content to kids. Presenting content on a screen is the least interesting thing we can do with technology.

When we went through COVID, we reverted to some underwhelming practices when it came to technology use. Maybe that got us through COVID, but we’re not in COVID anymore, and it is not okay to just have a kid clicking “next” on a screen or have a teacher reading off of a slide show in front of the room while kids copy notes. We must shift to help kids use technology to be knowledge constructors and problem solvers—the elements spelled out in the ISTE Standards. When that happens, we see amazing results.

State boards play a major role in making that shift. It’s important that, from the top down, there is a vision and expectation that technology be used to increase engagement and collaboration by students, and not be used just to present content on a screen.

What are the key enablers for effective use of technology in schools and to improve student achievement?

There are two enablers to effective use of technology in school: The first is having leadership that has a vision for the role of technology to transform the learning experience. The second is having educators that have the training they need to use technology in effective ways.

When it comes to preparing educators, ASCD+ISTE offers industry-leading training for educators and our ISTE Certification program provides a deep dive into practicing research-based principles for using technology effectively. We also have a free online community called Connect where educators can share best practices for using technology to support learning. Regardless of the subject, there are basic research-based practices all teachers need to know to effectively use technology for learning.

Some states have made it a priority to get educators through ISTE Certification, and you can see the results quite clearly. Other states are lagging a bit, but we hope they’ll come along soon.

When it comes to leadership, it’s critical that state and local leaders have a vision for using technology in ways that support learning. That starts with having a clear learning goal. When I get a call from a state or district leader wanting help on a tech strategy, my first question is, “What’s your vision for learning?” Do they want learning to be more engaging? More joyful? Do they want every student to feel more ownership of their learning journey? To help leaders formalize their learning vision, ASCD+ISTE recently released the Transformational Learning Principles.[1] The principles outline the most important, research-based, elements for creating effective learning experiences for students. The principles have been endorsed by AASA, The School Superintendents Association and the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Once you have a vision for learning, we make sure technology is being used in service of that vision. State board leaders play a major role in helping ensure the state education teams are implementing technology in ways that align with and support their learning vision and an amazing student experience.

When state leaders ensure technology use is aligned to a learning vision and that all educators have received the training that they need, states will be able to get exponentially increased value out of their infrastructure investments.

Is higher education stepping up to ingrain those practices in the preparation of teachers?

One of the biggest challenges we have right now is that most teacher preparation programs are not preparing new teachers for the reality of how they’re expected to use technology in the classroom. We hear this from districts all the time. They say, “We know we have to get our existing teachers up to speed, but we just don’t have the bandwidth to provide remedial technology training for brand new teachers that arrive with significantly less experience using technology than our veteran teachers.”

Last year, we created a coalition of over 100 educator prep programs from every state in the country to help close this gap. They are coming together to raise the bar for teacher prep programs in this area. As part of the coalition, schools of education sign a pledge of specific commitments to prepare future educators better. We periodically bring them together to help them get their faculty prepared, including by getting the same technology certification as teachers are getting. I’m optimistic, but there are still many teacher education programs that haven’t yet signed the pledge.

It is essential for state boards to know which institutions in their states are preparing new educators and understand what those programs are doing to ensure future educators are ready to use technology in meaningful ways. If state boards make it clear that they expect new educators to be prepared to thrive in a digital classroom, the educator preparation programs will respond. But let’s be clear, that nudge from state leadership is critical.

What states are leading the way getting educators credentialed but also showing leadership at the state level?

A number of states are doing really great work. Utah has been very thoughtful about ensuring all educators have professional learning related to using technology effectively. It’s a requirement. There’s an ed tech endorsement from the state board that all educators in the state of Utah are encouraged to receive. That message, that it’s not just about providing tech infrastructure, it’s about also preparing educators, is powerful.

Another state I look to is North Carolina. They’ve also made it a priority to ensure all educators are prepared to use technology effectively. Every teacher in the state has access to a variety of high-quality professional learning experiences at no cost to them or their district.

States like North Carolina and Utah have shown the importance of prioritizing investment in their teachers in ways that will benefit students in these states for years to come. When states prioritize education training, they can easily double or triple the value of their tech infrastructure investments. That’s the message we want state boards to take away: You have to invest in educators to get the value out of the infrastructure investment.

Let’s say I’m a state board member not in Utah or North Carolina. How might I start? What are the first few things that could help catalyze the change I’d like to see?

First, it’s important to learn from other states that are doing it well. I know this can feel daunting and overwhelming—state board members may not have deep expertise around the use of technology for learning. But that’s ok. There are great examples of effective strategies to follow. No need to reinvent the wheel. Take a minute to learn what other states are doing well and where there might be opportunities to improve.

Second, it’s important that state board members have conversations about the ideal role they want technology to play in their state. This goes back to the importance of a learning vision we talked about before. State board members should empower staff at the state and local level to use technology that aligns with the state’s learning vision. And they should make it clear that supporting teacher training around effective technology use is a priority. Just signaling the priority to support teachers in this area can make a huge difference.

Third, spend time in schools that are using technology well. On a recent visit to Utah I had the opportunity to join state board members visiting schools that were using technology well. We shadowed teachers and observed students in the classroom. Nobody was giving speeches; we were trying to be as unobtrusive as possible—just in learning mode to understand what effective technology use looks like. It was a powerful experience. If you haven’t had a chance to observe a few teachers who are using technology in effective ways, I highly recommend doing that.

Finally, we need to set healthy conditions for students to understand how best to use technology. When I visit schools, I ask to see their acceptable-use policy, which sets up how the students are supposed to use school infrastructure. Most of the time, what I get is legal mumbo-jumbo that a kid could never understand and that appears to be trying to create legal protection for the school. That is not the intent of acceptable-use agreements. Nobody is trying to sue a fourth grader. Many policies are a list of all the things not to do but never articulate how students are supposed to use technology to support their learning. The intent of a good technology-use policy is to give simple, age-appropriate language that a kid can clearly understand and follow when it comes to using technology in their school.

Do you see the U.S. Department of Education’s National Education Technology Plan serving as a guide for states and others in planning for effective technology access and use? 

The national ed tech plan is helpful for establishing a vision of how technology can be used to support learning. It calls attention to some important gaps that we need to close. But the plan isn’t an implementation plan. State leaders need to ensure that the agencies they oversee are putting tangible plans into place to bring the ideas from the national ed tech plan into a reality in their schools.

What is the current state of AI? Where do you see us going?

I’m very excited about the possibilities of AI. It will be as transformational to learning as electricity and the internet were. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. My worry is that some school leaders are too focused on AI tools and not enough on the AI skills we need students and teachers to learn.

All the tools, even the best ones, are still in early stages of development. It’s certainly fine to explore AI tools, but the real conversations we need to be having are what are the AI skills that students need to thrive in the future.

There’s a lot we don’t know about AI, but one thing I can guarantee you is that every student in your state is going to graduate and be working on teams where not all members are human. So how do we prepare young people for a world where they will be coworking with AI? One of the first steps is understanding, what are uniquely human skills? What are the skills that only humans can or should do? I believe those are things like creativity and discernment, judgment, and expertise. Then we need to work on enhancing those human skills and learning how to use AI for support.

For example, AI is good at generating lots of potential solutions. That’s something that humans struggle to do. But AI is bad at picking the right one. Humans are much better at knowing which option is the best choice. If we can understand what uniquely human skills are, we can then teach and model how to use AI to help us be better at being human—and that’s really exciting.

As the largest provider of AI professional development for educators in the U.S., ISTE is entirely focused on helping educators learn how to model healthy AI skills for students. This school year, we will be starting a national campaign to work with every school district in the country to help them shift the narrative away from a tool focus and more to how we help teachers and students gain the skills they need for an AI-infused world.

As more states push to put controls in place around technology, does it make sense to focus on cell phones in classrooms? How does this interface with a broader sense of technology’s usefulness?

There’s a lot of buzz around the role of phones in school and a lot of effort around banning phones in school. Whenever I hear about a school discussing banning devices, I first ask what they have done to create healthy conditions for device use. Usually, they have done very little or nothing. If schools need to temporarily pause device use while they establish healthy conditions, that’s appropriate. But long-term banning of access to devices that kids are going to need to learn, live, and lead is a bad idea.

We need young people—frankly, for the future of our democracy and society—to understand how to use these tools in ways that help them be better learners and collaborators. If we don’t teach that in school, where are they going to learn it? Recently, we released a free curriculum for schools called Digital Citizenship Lessons.[2]

They start from grade 1 and go up through 12th grade, and they offer activities that reinforce healthy tech use, which we believe all schools should be teaching. Some schools are creating their own curriculum to do this. That’s fine. But if you don’t want to do the big lift on your own, please take ours and use it. It’s totally fine to adapt and adjust it to align with state goals.

Is there anything else you want to share?

The main point of my book Digital for Good is if we want young people to use technology in effective ways to support their learning and their future life, we have to model it as adults in the system.[3] As educators, we must model how we’re using technology to problem solve, collaborate, design and fact check. There’s a lot kids learn from what we say, but the most powerful way kids learn is from what we model. From a state board leader all the way down to a teacher in a classroom, we have to make sure we are modeling healthy tech behavior that supports good learning and good humanity.

Notes

[1] ASCD+ISTE, “Transformational Learning Principles” (2024), https://iste.ascd.org/hubfs/TLP.pdf.

[2] ISTE, Digital Citizenship Lessons,” webpage, https://iste.ascd.org/hubfs/TLP.pdf.

[3] Richard Culatta, Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).