High Tech, High Touch - introduction of new information technology to school personnel

School Administrator, April, 2000 by Walter S. Polka, P. Rudy Mattai, Robert L. Perry

Balancing the district's technology needs with the reality of human fears and frustrations of your professional staff

It's 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon--your first day back in the office after an intensive round of technology training. Energized by what you saw, you decide to log on to your personal computer and put to test your skill retention from the workshop. But after 5 or 10 minutes you're stuck--and no one around is sufficiently skilled in the application to get you over the hump. You and colleagues leave work deflated, your enthusiasm for the new technology sapped.

Or worse yet, you are a central-office administrator or superintendent sitting in on the training your principals and faculty are taking. Slowly you find your excitement turning to uneasiness or even aggravation. The questions being asked by the trainer and the participants raise concerns that suggest, in hindsight, the school district's plans for implementing and assessing its technology failed to consider key people and issues. As a result, the technology purchases and training will be inadequate to match the needs of users.

When these sorts of problems occur on a high-ticket item such as technology, the fallout can be enormous. Employees, parents and taxpayers may become disenchanted. Needless to say, school systems and the students they serve suffer when technology plans fall short of expectations.

Multifaceted Problems

These scenarios point up a truth about the problems of technology implementation to which most school leaders need to devote some thought. Technology implementation is not a single problem. Indeed, it is not simply a classroom problem, a school-level problem or a district-level problem. It is all three of these things at once, intertwined with each other in such a complicated pattern that trouble at one level could well ripple across all levels.

Not surprisingly, ensuring that technology is implemented effectively at all levels requires a multidimensional approach.

We believe educators will witness greater success with technology if they begin their planning with a set of assumptions--what we will refer to in shorthand as the "five Cs." Educational leaders who want technology-literate colleagues will have to consider some human fears and frustrations before expecting great leaps of commitment and creativity.

These five assumptions grow out of the theories of the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow, as well as the observations of such prominent individuals as psychiatrist William Glasser and leadership experts Warren Bennis and Max DePree

Maslow observed that human needs influence our daily energies and decisions and theorized that human needs exist in a hierarchy. He said humans satisfy their more basic survival needs first--those of food, shelter and safety--before moving on to the higher-level needs of creativity and self-actualization. In other words, trying to interest a person in a creative application of technology will not be embraced whole-heartedly, according to Maslow, if the person already feels stressed out by demands on their time to meet all the existing responsibilities.

Too often school leaders mistakenly introduce technology as if it were only asking colleagues to master a new set of mechanical skills--a large task in and of itself. In reality, new technologies often require users to adapt new mindsets. These mindsets or attitudes adjust in tune with personal and professional needs.

Personal Needs

What personal attitudes must be addressed in this process? Our review of the literature and a research study of some 300 educators produced five personal attitudes worthy of special consideration, three of which were considered by respondents as vitally important. These personal needs were: control, creativity and caring. Less vital but still of moderate importance to respondents were the two high-touch personal needs of challenge and commitment.

* Control: individuals must feel personally in control of technological changes in order to use them in a satisfying and productive fashion.

Individuals have a proclivity to believe and to act as if they are in control and can influence the course of their lives. Child psychiatrist William Glasser knew this and has written extensively about every individual's need for control and how our behavior and our choices reflect our needs.

What this means for school leaders is that colleagues need to feel they are in control of technology and not adversely affected by it. Our research showed that people want to be able to select the degree of technological use in teaching and learning situations. They want to be able to say "yes" to some technologies and "no" to others and to control the levels of use of both hardware and software. They want to be able to modify the uses of technology in education. Finally, they want to be able to reconfigure available technologies to suit personal and professional views.

Technology plans that accommodate these desires will fare better than those that skirt or ignore these needs.