The EdTech Advocate's Guide to Leading Change in Schools

Mark Gura

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781564846471
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Normas de la educación

New and emerging tech coaches and technology leaders will get guidance in making decisions and taking the right steps to effectively manage change in a shifting education landscape. The education field is in the midst of a complete digital transformation. Accordingly, tech coaches and other school leaders must shift from simply bringing technology into schools to identifying how the various elements of this changing landscape fit together to form an improved version of education.These changes affect everyone in the school, and as entire school communities are impacted, informed individuals who can guide the transformation are needed. The problem is that there are not nearly enough certified tech coaches in schools, and those who are in place are not always adequately prepared to handle this new mission.This book aims to address these issues by offering:

• Advice on planning and guiding change in digital age schools.
• Examples of digital age schools and advice from "change agents" in the field.
• Activities, action plans, templates, checklists and other planning tools to help tech coaches and other leaders put what they learn into action.

This book helps tech coaches and school technology leaders embrace their roles and guides them as they make important decisions and take meaningful steps to effectively participate in this education transformation. Audience: Technology coaches, technology directors, educators

CHAPTER 1

Digital Transformation in Education

“We imagine a school in which students and teachers excitedly and joyfully stretch themselves to their limits in pursuit of projects built on their own visions… not one that that merely succeeds in making apathetic students satisfy minimal standards.”—SEYMOUR PAPERT

The following excerpts are taken from former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remarks at the State Educational Technology Directors Association Education Forum. For those of us in the fields of education and educational technology, it was encouraging to learn of the Secretary’s full awareness of the importance, scope, and impending impact of a full-on transformation of our schools from hard copy, brick and mortar, traditional educational institutions to digital learning environments. He opened his talk stating:

We’re at an important transition point. We’re getting ready to move from a predominantly print-based classroom to a digital learning environmen…. We need to leverage technology’s promise to improve learning. I am optimistic because states and districts are starting to lead this transformation. (U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, 2010)

It was a startling speech, offering a clear description of the awesome power of technology to transform education for the better and making a strong case for the necessity to make this happen.

Unfortunately, the change he alluded to hasn’t happened yet, certainly not “to scale,” although, as has long been the case, there are models and pockets of schools that have achieved the state of change he described.

THAT WAS THEN. THIS IS NOW

Duncan’s speech was given in 2010, and today we haven’t come close to realizing the potential to transform education for the better. It’s also true that this wasn’t the first of this sort of speech to be made by a high-level policymaker; other speeches have been made before and since and, in that sense, we might discount this as another one of those statements intended to inspire us with uplifting visions of possible futures—futures that, if they aren’t made this year, well, hopefully we’ll get to them someday. After all, the need and the possibility of fulfilling this vision won’t disappear, even if we carry on with business as usual for a while longer.

But, while schools may be slow to realize the potential that beckons them, the world around them has changed profoundly and continues to do so. We have arrived at a moment when deferring full commitment to this particular change is more than simply unwise.

We live in a world so dominated by technology that, for instance, stores are disappearing as online shopping replaces them; robots of all sorts are appearing in our environment, not as oddities or marvels, but as common tools and machines; and we live in a world in which machines now learn (as they were designed) to track and predict our behavior and to offer us better experiences, including learning. In short, we’ve run out of time. Technology has become so efficient, cost effective, and user friendly that the adoption difficulties that have allowed schools to put off becoming digital learning environments are no longer there. It simply is no longer practical, it no longer makes sense to defer allowing technology to make school a better experience for students and those who support them.

THE WORLD IS DEEPLY INVOLVED IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Consider the work environment of any of our institutions, such as medicine, banking, manufacturing, publishing, sales, and marketing. They all function on a platform composed of resources and practices defined by the technology developed to support them. These technologies are not in place as experiments or solutions to problems; they are in place because they are understood to be the very best way to get things done. This is true for virtually every field, industry, and institution we have except for one notable exception: education.

This lamentable situation has been true for over a decade. I first wrote about it in Saving Technology for Education (Roman and Littlefield, 2004), during a period when not only were educators resisting technologies that clearly promised to improve the field, but there was also serious pushback by naysayers who argued that technology was a negative, at best a waste of time.

This change in schools was further hampered because a great majority of inservice teachers had come of age and taken their place in the classroom before the emergence of common digital technologies for the masses. Consequently, teachers had to first learn how to handle a computer as well as specific instructional resources and understand how they could be used in teaching and learning.

Since then, much more technology has been acquired by schools and is in place, ready to be used by teachers and students. Importantly, the bodies of professional understanding, available instructional and management resources, professional development and support approaches, and so on, have been expanded and refined. The vast majority of what’s needed to transform our classrooms and schools into digital age learning environments has already been developed and made available.

Still, the technology use situation in our schools can be described as partially equipped, partially adopted, and partially understood. While there is much more familiarity and acceptance than before, few have a truly comprehensive understanding, and the body of practice in implementation currently shows that to be the case. Simply stated, we are in a period of transition where much is done and much potential for more remains, although the fully crystallized version of a transformed iteration of education still belongs to the future.

WHAT’S HAPPENING AND WHY?

We are in the middle of a digital revolution in education, or perhaps a better term would be the one Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used: digital transformation of education. It’s happening all around us and, although many educators may not see this dense forest, they are seeing a massive accumulation of trees.

A proliferation of digital learning resources—many of them free and easy to use—have become available. Numerous blogs, websites, and podcasts are dedicated to reviewing and describing how to use them. Record keeping, something that until very recently was paper-driven, is now done digitally. Schools have central digital platforms in which records are kept, annotated, and organized for reference. Administrators, teachers, students and their parents can communicate with one another in ways that enable efficient and effective transmission of information while maintaining student privacy and safety. Still, many educators see only individual resources and tools and not the wonderful interrelated ecosystem that they establish.

Teaching and learning, too, have been transformed. Locating content (books, articles, audio, and video) is much more effective with the use of technology and online sources. The web, the greatest library of human knowledge and expression ever assembled, is available to students through their internet connection. Digital content can be altered to benefit the needs of learners through the use of design, video and presentation tools. Students’ response items—quizzes, essays, or media-rich presentations—are not only better produced digitally, but submitted to teachers without physical challenges and with perfect records of submissions. The isolating walls of classrooms are no longer barriers. Students can establish relationships online with peer learners around the globe and benefit from the knowledge and teaching of experts and teacher specialists outside their school. Many elements of the experience of learning have now been vastly improved and expanded by technology.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR SCHOOLS

This new education environment is inspiring. It fosters exhilaration about school and education, something that hasn’t been seen in many places for a long time. However, in order to bring it into widespread implementation, much has to be done and many decisions have to be made.

While there are many resources with which to establish a digital platform that an entire school (or district) can jointly use to take care of its administrative and managerial functions, once a decision is made on which resource to acquire, the community will develop over time a culture and body of practice to use it.

In the realm of teaching and learning, there is much depth, complexity, and, likely, transformation of goals, methods, and culture. This is so because technology offers the possibility of not just doing things better, but of doing better things, a crucial distinction for technology change agents to grasp and explain to colleagues.

Transformation is not an exaggeration here. Technology allows for students, as they always have, to read (or otherwise gather knowledge from) content items. However, even at this simple level, it is possible for each student to find or be presented with (by the teacher) a content item that is far better suited to his or her individual needs as a learner, which is a transformative change.

Beyond this simple, classic approach to teaching and learning—the distribution of content, reflection and discussion, and proof that one has learned it through quizzes or essays—technology enables other, new types of activities that were previously beyond the reach of teachers and students. These include approaches like project based learning, personalized learning, distance collaboration, and hybrid learning.

An important early “ah ha” in a community’s transition to a digital environment involves tackling the question, “Should schools be teaching about technology, or teaching and fostering learning with technology, or should they be doing both?” Importantly, educators currently are not simply teaching technology as another subject, that is, as a body of discreet skills and information. Rather, they are approaching technology education as part and parcel of the body of new ways that humans engage with information and the world.

This point was discussed in an interview in Education Week magazine with former teacher and edtech expert, Will Richardson. According to Richardson, “Schools need to revolutionize teaching and learning to keep pace with societal changes” (REBORA, 2010).

He went on to say:

I feel like the change [in schools] has been glacial.… [I]t’s a huge culture shift. Education by and large has been a very closed type of profession. “Just let me close my doors and teach”—you hear that refrain all the time.” [T]his change must involve all members of the school community (REBORA, 2010).

Richardson described the transformation of education and what must change. Here are some of the takeaways from the interview:

Teachers must have an online presence. Doing so can model the importance of effective digital portfolios, participation, and positive online footprints for students who will be “searched for on the web—over and over again.”

Without sharing, there is no education. Educators should be willing to share and collaborate while making new connections and working in networks that can really enhance learning.

Network literacy is a key 21st century skill. Students should be encouraged to create their own communities and networks, engage with others around the world and navigate learning opportunities beyond the school walls.

Emphasize learning over knowledge. Instead of looking for the right answer, teaching and assessments should focus on the learning process and how students use creativity and critical thinking to solve problems.

Some things can’t be learned in a workshop. Professional development must change to a learning culture where educators are immersed in digital technologies and allowed to practice. (REBORA, 2010).

THE JOURNEY AHEAD

The road ahead for the field of education, unavoidably, will involve heavy focus on the shift from a traditional, paper-driven, face-to-face platform that supports and stages teaching and learning to one that is based on digital technologies. The practical advantages of digital resources and the way they enable the implementation of long-sought-after practices makes this shift something that will continue to assume greater and greater importance.

As an example, we can think of the approach of personalized learning. Moving beyond the “one size fits all” reality of teaching from a single textbook, assumed to be adequate for all students in a class or school, is truly only possible with the use of technology. The amount of effort required to search out personalized content items that would better suit each and every student’s learning needs and interests, in concert with the demands of distance and access involved in visiting an endless array of libraries required to do so, precludes this from being done, even though educational theorists have been desirous of realizing this ideal for many decades.

And while not all educational policymakers and administrators may prioritize bringing this vision to full realization, there are other implementation factors to be considered. Access to open educational resource (OER) digital content items that make for a personalized experience also allows for a great deal of free content to be acquired. It can be made available without need for storage, archiving, and focused retrieval—all costly and demanding aspects of implementation—or for the continual updating of material in view of relevance and efficacy as instructional materials. These practicalities, particularly when understood as being present in addition to highly improved pedagogical value, ensure that digital resource-based instruction will demand the attention of educators.

The above example is but one of a very large body of impressive improvements and advantages to be had by the shift to a digital platform for education. However, it should be noted that, while the serious investigation and consideration of this sort of change can be convincing and inspiring, the institution of school continues to run in largely traditional mode in many places and ways; so much so that the weight of the traditional, even when viewed through the lens of its dubious efficacy, can easily obscure a vision of how things may be improved by a shift to a digital platform.

Consequently, expending some time and effort to see the new landscape and functioning of educational institutions that digital platforms will support and precipitate is an important aspect of participating in manifesting it as well as in using it. The section that follows offers an understanding of this new learning environment, a vision for how to establish it, and the requisite facets of working and learning there.

CHAPTER 2

The New Classroom

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” —LEWIS CARROLL

When thinking about the digital transformation of education, it’s easy to conjure up visions of a futuristic, Jetson-like school with robot teachers, levitating classrooms, students learning while asleep, and so on. We are fascinated with such fanciful visions for good reason. For while the classroom that is described in novels set in the 19th century is one that no longer truly serves our population, it still, in many ways, continues to define the contemporary school experience.

Such classrooms, no doubt, will give way to newer learning environments, but what will the new classroom be like? Will it be defined by an accumulation of new technology items, or a body of changes to support...