It's Not The Technology That Makes The Difference, It's The Pedagogy

This is a follow up to my last post about Google's Gemini 'Guided Learning' tool.

A couple of days ago I posted about feeling a little underwhelmed by the Gemini Guided Learning tool. I commented on how I felt that the study posted on their website was just marketing and observed how easy it was to either get Gemini to tell me the answer, without having to go through a maths problem step by step and how concerned I was about how easy it was to completely distract Gemini into discussing topics away from the focus of the lesson. 

A couple of hours after posting the blog I noticed on my Facebook page, a post from Google for Education which caught my attention.

Clicking through the provided link it looks like teachers will soon be able to provide through Classroom a Guided Learning activity for their learners and interestingly a feature that can apparently lock down the Chromebook (Focus Mode) to stop learners being distracted by other websites. Learner distraction was something that I also wrote about in the post too.

At the beginning of the post we have this paragraph:

"AI has the potential to transform education and create more personalized and accessible pathways to learn through responsibly built tools — but only if done right. When teachers actively guide AI use, the results are clear. We are expanding our teacher-led AI activities in Google Classroom to help educators support their students with relevant, personal, transparent learning experiences...."

So, 'the results are clear'. I'm not going to spend this blog going through the details of the study, but I would recommend you read about how it was carried out and the results. By the way, I am still questioning the learning gain as it is well below the +0.4 to +0.6 range that I mentioned in the last post, so I'm going to have to go away and find out more about this.

What I will say is this. After reading through how the study was implemented, I would argue that the reason for the +0.258 standard deviation gain in learners, was not because of Gemini Guided Learning tool but was because of the heavily structured pedagogy around the tool. I propose that it was the human element, the teacher, that was doing the heavy lifting and that Gemini was basically acting a glorified personalised question generator. I am certainly not saying anything new here. We have known about this outcome of teachers using digital technologies for many years. Basically that  

good teaching with digital technologies gets the same results as good teaching without it. It's not the technology that makes the difference, it's the pedagogy.

I just have a gut feeling that Google will be highlighting the study to schools and teachers, saying look at what Gemini Guided Learning can do for learning, but that the majority of teachers will not end up using it in this very specific way. They will more than likely in the UK, end up deploying it 1:1, in an unmonitored classroom or for individual homework assignments, which is not what the study says 'works'. They would be adopting the technology while discarding the exact human pedagogy that made it work in the first place.

What I think would be a really interesting study is to compare the learning progress of a group of students using Gemini Guided Learning and a non-tech teaching and learning strategy that we also know improves learners standards.