A Systems Change in Technology Use - education

School Administrator, April, 2000 by Mary C. Moffitt

One school district uses a facilitator model to promote "just enough, just in time" support to teachers

Most school districts would tell you they have an initiative in place to integrate technology into their schools. While the definition of "integration" varies from place to place, most say they want to ensure their expensive and ongoing investment in technology truly benefits the students enrolled in their schools.

The process school leaders use to integrate technology into teaching and learning can affect significantly how well school districts achieve their desired ends.

In the scenario planning process used by large businesses and the military, one imagines the situations that might unfold in order to devise plans to address the various possibilities. You carry out this exercise while staying focused on your overall goals.

Integrating technology into our schools is much the same. It is full of uncertainties and possibilities that require strategic thinking. Districts must identify potential obstacles and benefits in order to devise implementation tactics that maximize return on the investment of time, personnel and dollars.

An Appealing Task

About four years ago, I was hired to lead the technology integration initiative for a large suburban school district in Schaumburg, Ill., just outside Chicago. We had 16,000 elementary students (in grades K-8) in 28 schools and more than 1,500 staff members.

The post of learning technologies director was a newly created one and the job description was attractive, even though my work at the time was in a much smaller school district with vastly different demographics. My new position was part of the district's curriculum department, and the major responsibilities were to find the best ways of integrating technology into the curriculum and to guide staff in accomplishing this task.

My first charge was to lead the strategic planning process to create a school district technology plan. A well-crafted plan for integration needs to consider important issues related to technology in the schools while recognizing the voices of different stakeholder groups--the board of education, parents and other community members, school personnel and local business proprietors.

Early on, we decided our plan should focus on what students did with the technology rather than just on acquiring the technology itself. Ours became an information and communication technologies plan with goals identified in the areas of student learning, instructional practices and teacher learning, community involvement and technology deployment.

It was about halfway through the planning process, after we had identified the major goal areas, that one task force member (who also was a school board member) shared his realization with the rest of the group. He noted we were headed toward proposing an instructional model in which students were more actively engaged in their own learning. The role of teacher would need to change substantially for this different type of learning to occur.

He said if we continued with the plan in that direction, we would need to be prepared to ask our entire school community to help us radically change the way teaching and learning occurred in our schools. There was a hush in the room as we all began to feel the pressure of the potential rough ride ahead.

It didn't take long for other task force members to agree that we had to continue in this direction for the sake of our students. We shaped an ongoing process for using technology tools more regularly and effectively in our teaching, learning and work. We knew that creating a great plan is just the beginning. Working through the painful process of effective implementation turned out to be the far more time consuming and ultimately rewarding part.

What We Learned

Having resourcefully traversed the uncertain path from school technology planning through implementation to systems change with more successes than failures, we learned a few lessons worthy of sharing. While not every situation will resemble ours, the key factors in getting entrenched staff comfortable with a new way of using learning technologies may be similar.

* Keep the vision up front. Make sure everyone knows the direction in which you re headed, even those who disagree.

Our vision was to transform systemically the way teaching and learning occurred in our schools to better prepare our students to meet the challenges of participating in the knowledge economy. The focus was to improve learning for all students as well as to improve and integrate the district's systems to facilitate learning.

We wanted everyone to be able to articulate this vision even if they didn't agree with it at first. Luckily, the superintendent, board of education and most of our parent community were in full support of our goals. We spent a lot of time in the first few months marketing our plan to administrators, teachers, district staff and parent groups. We sent out numerous copies of the plan and managed to get local newspaper coverage to share the goals with the community. We also asked each school to create its own plan for implementing the district plan.