Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Technology, page 4

Such radical change requires increased flexibility at the grassroots, but many districts have a centralized bureaucracy that can stifle innovation. That’s what happened in the Detroit district, where voters passed a $1.5 billion school bond issue in 1994 for capital improvements including technology upgrades. Five years later, the district had spent only $100 million—and almost none of that on technology.

Schools and districts also must contend with fears about plagiarism, privacy and pornography. There’s even a federal law (now on appeal to the Supreme Court) that requires software to filter out pornography in every school that receives federal technology funding or discounts.

But perhaps the greatest cultural barrier is the preference of many high school teachers to keep teaching the way they always have. “Not all teachers are comfortable with technology,” says Federspiel. “Especially veteran teachers who didn’t grow up with the Internet; they’re reluctant and don’t see the application of it in their classroom. It’s the old dog, new trick dilemma.”

High school teachers, entrenched in one subject, are usually more hesitant than generalist elementary school teachers to try new things, says Agnes Crawford, assistant executive director for program development for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). As Carnegie Corporation’s Warren says, “Teachers are not, for the most part, natural tech buffs.”

Even if they’re willing, many teachers have little time to learn about integrating technology with their teaching because they have so many demands on them. Foremost among these are the welter of tests accompanying the push for school accountability. To many, they make teaching innovations seem like an unaffordable luxury. Collaborating with two other teachers, Curtis Shavers, a social studies teacher at Sicily Island High School in Sicily Island, Louisiana, used the American Memory Project to teach his ninth-to-twelfth graders a “Dare to Dream” African-American history unit in the spring of 2000. He hasn’t taught it since. Why? “Because we have a lot of content material we need to cover,” he explains. “I don’t have time to do a thing like we did with ‘Dare to Dream.’ We definitely have to cover those state standards.”

Ironically, points out Bailey, that’s exactly what well-designed technology-based curricula can do. “We have to guard and protect ourselves against engaging in the either/or debate,” he says. “You can do both—teach creatively and to the test.”

Training teachers to do just that is crucial if American high schools are going to realize the enormous benefits technology can confer on teaching and learning. As Barbara Stein, National Education Association policy analyst on technology says, “Teachers’ preparation is a key predictor of whether classroom use of technology will improve student achievement.”

To meet this challenge, a new culture of professional development is emerging. Teachers are learning “by doing” more than from classroom lectures, and they are learning from each other. National communities of teachers using technology are emerging in cyberspace.

Kulikowski’s training illustrates the hands-on method. At a Saturday workshop run by PASCO, a company that produces science-oriented educational materials, she and her colleagues did a handful of lab experiments in the field and then hooked up their equipment to laptops, just as their students would do later. Kulikowski can call the company’s 800 number at any time with questions and problems. “At first I wasn’t so comfortable,” she remembers. “But somebody showing me how I can use new programs and technology—and how I can tie them into my regular lessons—that’s the key.”

In Houston, the Annenberg Challenge is helping to infuse technology into courses taken by many future teachers at five local institutions of higher learning. Thus, 125 freshmen in Dagmar Corrigan’s composition classes post portfolios of their work on the Internet and chat with each other online, monitored by Corrigan. They also post comments on a listserv. While the online chatting degenerates without savvy moderating, says Corrigan, the listserv provokes the kind of thoughtful discussion and critical thinking skills that future teachers will want to foster in their students. “Now they’re pondering issues relating to war with Iraq,” says Corrigan, who directs the Writing Center at the University of Houston-Downtown. “We’ve discussed it in class and we’ve given them reading with alternative points of view from the mainstream news.”

Teachers learn how to chat in cyberspace at Tapped In, an online community of educators. A project of the nonprofit SRI International Center for Technology in Learning, Tapped In holds after-school online colloquia that have included several dozen social studies teachers chatting with Ken Burns about the Civil War. Help desk technicians are available to answer teachers’ technological questions. “We don’t do any specific training in online technology, but we help people engage in authentic activities and learn how to use the technologies,” explains Mark Schlager, SRI’s Associate Director of Learning Communities.

Launched with National Science Foundation funding and free to teachers, Tapped In also provides an arena for instructors to share best practices, e-mail web pages to each other, or discuss pedagogy. Another venue where teachers create and disseminate innovation online is the Swarthmore Math Forum, where Fred Carrigg, executive director for academic programs in Union City, New Jersey, put together a peer mentor program in geometry for the school district. Realizing that some of his high school students who had used the Geometer Sketchpad software and the Internet knew more geometry than many elementary school teachers, Carrigg fashioned a plan on the Math Forum to hire Union City high school students to coach local elementary school kids in geometry.

The same kind of learning through collaboration facilitated by the Swarthmore Math Forum and Tapped In takes place at High Tech High, frequently in the hour before classes when teachers meet every morning. Often, one teacher shows student work and the others critique it. “It’s not a conversation,” explains associate principal of academic affairs Ben Daley, an articulate 29-year-old former high school and college physics teacher who sports a large banner of his alma mater, Haverford College, outside his office door. “We have rules about who gets to talk when. At first everyone would say ‘What a great project!’ Now, we’ve gotten better at saying, ‘Well, that’s interesting. What about this? Did you ever think about that?’” Teachers also learn from colleagues at “work days” sprinkled throughout the year, like one at which Jared Schiffman taught Flash technology.

New Technology High School holds similar “Critical Friends” meetings, at which teachers constructively critique their colleagues’ prospective class projects. “As a new teacher last year I thought Critical Friends was the best thing about the school,” says Kevin Gant. Not only did he get “incredible feedback” for his projects, says Gant, but he also learned “tremendously” from critiquing others.

Of course, teacher training still takes place at conferences, workshops and universities, as in a course Michael Federspiel teaches at Central Michigan University. His class first discusses the role of the historian, and then works with American Memory documents as their students eventually will.

But the fastest growing form of teacher training today is online courses, which are proliferating so quickly that ASCD’s Agnes Crawford terms them “a tidal wave.”

Educators pressed for time can usually take online courses according to their own schedules, trying out new techniques in between sessions. Some school districts are beginning to provide online classes. And the Library of Congress web site provides self-directed “workshops” for social studies teachers as well as “live” videoconferences and model teacher training workshops. Online courses can also bring together teachers from far-flung locations, allowing educators in Kansas and California to view the same documents on their screens simultaneously, and discuss them online. It’s a boon, especially to teachers isolated in rural communities.

“I see great potential in online learning—coupled with support groups for teachers using that technology,” says Crawford, who notes, at the same time, that money for such courses is not abundant.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 provided $700.5 million for teacher education in technology for 2002. In addition, the federal Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) initiative allocated $125 million in fiscal year 2001 and $62.5 million in 2002. The administration has not requested any PT3 funding for 2003, saying it duplicated the grants (more than $700 million in 2002) it gives to states annually for integrating technology into the classroom. Congress could still fund PT3, however.

As much funding as federal and state governments are providing, the need for technology training for teachers is still mammoth. Says Warren, “There just is not enough of it.”

Kathy Seal recently coauthored, with Deborah Stipek, Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning (©2001 Henry Holt and Co.; Owl Books), which popularizes the last 30 years of academic research into children’s motivation to learn. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Omni, Family Circle, Educational Leadership, and Columbia Journalism Review. She has also been a frequent commentator on Public Radio International’s Marketplace.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4