A former Dublin teacher now devises 21st-century education strategies for Microsoft

THE ROLE of technology in the classroom will be a hot topic for the Government in 2012, particularly with Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn’s plan to liberate Irish schools from rote learning. For Steven Duggan, worldwide education strategy manager for Microsoft, it’s a change that can’t come soon enough.

“It is recognition that the old ways are bankrupt, that we’re not equipping our students for the life they are going to lead,” he says.

For a multitasking generation that runs its lives through connected devices and social media, the classroom is anachronistic. “Like teaching a blacksmith skills in the age of the car,” says Duggan, “it’s 100 years out of date.”

He’s concerned rather than critical when he describes the system as “broken”. On a personal level, he has a vested interest with six children covering every stage of the Irish schools system. On a professional level, he’s a former teacher with a passion for education tempered by a frustration at the slow pace of change.

Microsoft recognised his passion for fresh ideas, promoting him steadily through its ranks. For one week a month, his new job takes him to the company’s Redmond headquarters in Washington state, where he’s part of a six-strong team devising a vision for 21st-century learning using Microsoft tools.

The rest of the time he works out of his home in Greystones, Co Wicklow, though family life is frequently interrupted by trips abroad. Visits to Pakistan, Singapore and Russia are already on his schedule for 2012. Duggan has come a long way from teaching at Sutton Park, one of Dublin’s most prestigious private schools, where he taught English for 12 years. A chance meeting with some Microsoft recruiters eventually led to a job offer and he became part of the content development team for educational CD-Roms in the 1990s.

Though he instantly doubled his salary, the career change wasn’t all about money. “I loved teaching but the idea of doing the same thing for 30 years wasn’t exciting,” he says.

The experience informed his belief that successful educational transformation must start with the teachers.

“The reality is that the quality of an education system will never exceed the quality of the teaching. So we have got to make sure we have high-level knowledge workers in our classrooms who are supported, rewarded and incentivised with career opportunities and career diversity.”

The problem is that only 11 per cent of Irish teachers think that investing in training would improve their career prospects, according to an OECD survey. Duggan believes they are discouraged by a system that doesn’t provide the continuous assessment and professional development that are vital if Ireland is going to achieve the high standards of countries such as Finland, Korea and Singapore.

“The countries that have seen genuine progress have started by accepting the reality of where they are. In Ireland, we still perceive ourselves as the nation of saints and scholars. The OECD tables tell us something else,” he says.

And the Irish preoccupation with classroom size is largely irrelevant, says Duggan, if the other pieces of the jigsaw are in place.

“In terms of educational performance, we see that most successful countries focus on professional development over classroom size. The classes may be bigger but, if pupils have the best teachers in front of them, it doesn’t matter.”

Doing its bit for professional development is Microsoft’s Partners in Learning programme, which has taught nine million teachers to better engage with 212 million students. As an example of what it has achieved, Duggan describes how a 60-year-old teacher in a small Denver school connected her pupils with classrooms around the world to teach a lesson on the four seasons. Each class was in a different time zone with a different season. Pupils shared their experiences with automatic translation to overcome the language barrier.

Duggan will of course argue that Microsoft technology has a vital part to play but he won’t overstate its importance. It won’t compensate for a bad environment or a bad teacher. What it can do is better prepare pupils for a new world of work.

“In the past, we knew what children would need to learn at school because we knew the kind of jobs they would get. A recent McKinsey report said that two-thirds of the jobs people will be doing at the end of this decade don’t exist today so investing in the same education system makes no sense and will no longer work,” he warns. “But we do know the skills that people will need.”

He rolls off a list that includes analytical and critical thinking as well as problem solving. With much of Microsoft’s recent energy focused on delivering collaboration tools over the web, Duggan argues that they foster skills that will be of real use in the future workplace.

While there’s no doubting Duggan’s personal commitment to education, he’s presumably greeted with some suspicion.

Isn’t a large corporation such as Microsoft more interested in selling software than transforming schools?

“We’re upfront about it. If people use our software in education, they are more likely to use them in the commercial world, but that isn’t the focus.

“It’s about building a knowledge economy and delivering results that society requires. It’s not a big commercial opportunity for us. We typically discount by around 85 per cent in the education sector.”

All things considered, he believes he can achieve more inside a multinational corporation that he could if he was still teaching, partly because of the inertia that grips his old profession.

“The scariest thing is that I’ve been away from teaching for 17 years but could step back into the job tomorrow,” he says. “So little has changed. The same texts are still being taught in much the same way. You wouldn’t trust your children’s future to a doctor with 17-year-old skills, yet somehow that is acceptable in our schools.”