I wonder to what extent slower than possible adoption of school based mobile PC learning exists because of teacher hiring inbreeding?
Gina Ruiz warns, in Workforce Management Online (May 2008), that HR inbreeding results in hiring virtual clones of existing employees.
Candidates are usually strong cultural matches with an organization who tend to hit the ground running and have a low likelihood of early departure … It’s simple human nature; people often gravitate toward individuals with similar tendencies and characteristics.
Continuously recruiting clones stifles the flow of fresh talent with new ideas, according to Peter Weddle, CEO of recruiting consultancy Weddle’s.
John Sumser, another recruiting consultant, points out, “If companies are trying to get out of a rut or rehabilitate a dysfunctional workforce, referral programs are going to hamper those efforts because all they will do is produce more of the same type of worker …”
Debates about merits and liabilities of teacher inbreeding in schooling have ebbed and flowed for decades among educators, our supporters, and our distractors. In a broad sense, maintaining the status quo of teacher recruitment, performance, and retention has won the argument to date.
Maintenance exists as a function of teacher preparation programs conducted by teachers (vs. content scholars such as mathematicians and astrophysicists), credentials that verify a teacher’s rite of passage, teacher peer review programs, collaborative curriculum planning groups, and other such functions that encourage agreements rather than uniqueness among teachers.
All of these programs make sense as long as teachers respond promptly to external social dynamics, such as the rapid deployment of mobile learning devices and robust economic changes.
At the same time, some argue that a unique function of education as a social institution, and its organizations such as schools, is to provide social continuity over social change. Therein exists a seed of political discourse about schooling and how learning should occur.
In that context, have schools failed to adopt mobile PC student learning as rapidly as possible because of professional inbreeding?
I think, “Yes, and teachers will likely continue to seek political support to strengthen our control over what happens in classrooms irrespective of data that indicate mobile student learning accelerates learning rates for students who use it.”
Sadly, my response is not unique.
The good news, the computer industry continues to develop new devices and functions to allow users to accelerate their learning even further than reported existing measures. With that reality in our face, I wonder what we as teachers should do about our inbreed ways?
Thanks, CC Holland, for the link.