Academic leaders modeling learning in school reform initiatives

¶ … Technology in Ways That Make a Difference for Student Understanding

Many of the tasks we propose can be accomplished only if academic leaders model, invite, and ultimately demand learning about learning on a regular and formal basis; not only as a formal part of job expectations but also informally through the establishment of rituals, routines, and experiences that are constantly inviting (and expecting) people to learn. A key job of the academic leader is to make clear that the school must be a model learning organization -- and to make it one.

But here, as in most important areas of life, modeling the behavior we seek is a prerequisite. The academic leader must model thoughtful inquiry and learning in the reform process. Rather than jumping to conclusions and quick actions, academic leaders must demonstrate that a careful diagnosis and openness to multiple possible solutions are always preludes to action. Translated: the leader's job is not to pose solutions but to raise questions and demand thoughtful analysis of problems, leading to solutions owned by all parties affected. Too many academic leaders jump to prescriptions for problems the staff didn't even know existed. As a result, we perpetually hear teachers ask (Moon, et al., 2003). So why are we doing curriculum mapping, and how does that relate to Understanding by Design? It doesn't matter if we see the connections as long as teachers do not. And the staff will never understand why we chose the prescription (such as mapping and UbD) if they weren't made privy to deliberations about the weakness of student performance and curriculum framing (the diagnosis).

This is a parallel to the problem of student misconception in teaching: rather than aiming for staff understanding, leaders in their impatience or naivete too often settle for merely informing staff or covering the details of reform. The most effective academic leaders, like the best teachers, resist the impatience to cover because they understand that it is crucial for the staff to truly under- stand the need for reform and thus the wisdom of any particular proposed solution. They ensure that staff members reach a common diagnosis based on understanding. The leader's challenge, then, is to put staff in a position to own. Any diagnosis, so that any later prescription will seem natural and just common sense. In other words, leaders must ensure that they themselves, as well as staff, really learn:

We must, in other words, become adept at learning.

We must become able not only to transform our institutions, in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and develop institutions which are learning systems. That is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation. (Schbn, 1983, p. 28) Exhortation and information will not accomplish this understanding, any more than exhorting students and giving them lots of content enables them to grasp the meaning of their lessons and apply them wisely. So new structures and supportive policies are required to ensure that the new job roles and functions become familiar and habitual. Reforms rarely last beyond the reformer, a fact noted in countless writings on schooling and school change.

Thus, sustainability may best sum up the long-term transfer goal of any leader aiming to implement schooling by design. All of the elements of leadership discussed in this chapter speak to sustainability the long-term viability of a school organized in the ways we have outlined in the book requires clarity about mission; a curriculum and assessment system derived from mission; a results focus with emphasis on gap analysis; hiring, supervising, and training to support mission; structures and policies that put mission into operation; and a culture that reinforces all mission-driven actions. The academic leader's job is not to personally perform all of these tasks (or even know how to), but to ensure that they are accomplished. We do not seek super- human leaders or autocratic managers. Long gone are the days when the headmaster or principal teacher commanded or single-handedly transformed the school. What we seek are academic leaders who understand what jobs need to get done and who figure out ways of involving the staff in helping complete them.

Overview of the STAR.Legacy Software

STAR.Legacy is meant to serve as both a model of instructional design and a design for creating model instruction. It is an easily authored, multimedia software shell that supports development and research on complex sequences of instruction that require students to act on and evaluate their understanding. (the prefix STAR stands for Software Technology for Action and Reflection.) STAR.Legacy has grown from collaborations with teachers, trainers, students, curriculum designers, psychologists, and computer scientists. Its structure helps people organize their thinking about learning, whether they are students learning from a STAR.Legacy or teachers incorporating instructional resources into the Legacy shell. STAR.Legacy has a number of programming features for adding digitized video, audio, pictures, and text, as well as for launching to and downloading from the Web and branching to simulation programs and other types of software (Burns, et al., 2006). These features allow designers and teachers to create or repurpose units of instruction, and it enables students to add their own "Legacy" that future students may consult. In an educational psychology course, for example, students left multimedia essays that taught the next year's cohort about important concepts (Bransford, et al., 2000). The prospect of leaving a Legacy can be very motivating to students, and it can help a Legacy grow and adapt to the interests and resources of the local community. STAR.Legacy is currently being used by professors in college courses ranging from audiology to psychology to business, by middle school teachers who are creating new curricula for their school district, and by instructional designers at the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt.

The main STAR.Legacy interface is an inquiry cycle where each of the icons reflects an often implicit, yet important component of most learning events. We have organized the components into this interface because it is worthwhile for students, teachers, and instructional designers to see where they are in a complex sequence of learning events (Burns, et al., 2006). The interface is a learning map that helps them understand where they should be in their knowledge development, and it helps them see that there are typical activities involved in learning, like first tries and revisions. For each STAR.Legacy inquiry cycle, students receive a challenge that creates a need to know. To meet the challenge, students move through the inquiry cycle using a variety of resources that help them develop, assess, and revise their understanding. The inquiry cycle is not meant to imply that STAR.Legacy is a rigid sequential environment that lock-steps the learner and designer (Borko, 2004). STAR.Legacy is intended as a flexibly structured tool that helps people organize and adapt instruction to their specific content and context. We expect users to navigate through the system depending on their learning needs. They may, for example, go backward in the cycle if they feel the need to review previous components, and they may choose to complete some activities and not others, depending on their knowledge state. To help people determine their learning needs, we have included multiple opportunities for assessment. This is one of the reasons that STAR.Legacy is appropriate for dynamic assessment. It integrates assessment and instruction into a single design model.

A Comment on Authorability

STAR.Legacy has been designed to be a flexible software shell for designing and delivering inquiry-based instruction. It includes a visual interface that presents a user-friendly theory of assessment and instruction. It includes a small set of tools, for building, adapting, or adding material to any program, including the Legacy a student might leave (Bransford, et al., 2000). This same tool set is used to add content to any screen of STAR.Legacy. There is a single tool palette that allows people to add "action objects" and determine their look (a picture, a text field, a drawing, or a sequenced list of other action objects). The dialog window shows the list of actions available for an object: playing a movie, playing a sound file, or launching to additional resources. Each action has its own set of properties that control specific execution (Bransford, et al., 2000). The launch action, for example, can be instantiated in three ways, as shown in the edit window of the dialog box (i.e., launch to an external program like a simulation, launch to a Web browser, or create and launch to a new card within STAR.Legacy). We have found the small set of looks, actions, and action properties to be very accessible and easy to learn. Presumably, reducing the learning and programming overhead will lead more people to use STAR.Legacy and to focus on pedagogical content (Borko, 2004), and this will increase our opportunities for evaluating the integration of instruction and assessment.

Collaborative Learning

The potential of the Web for supporting collaborative learning is unprecedented. Learning communities can now involve students, teachers, and other professionals from any location. Scientists can work on collaborative projects with teachers and students in classrooms without ever leaving their labs. Students can collaborate with students in other schools and other countries as they develop ideas, skills, and products. Students in a class can collaborate outside class without having to meet in person. The theory behind collaborative learning is that the social construction of knowledge leads to deeper processing and understanding than does learning alone (Appalachian Education Laboratory, 2005).

The bulletin board and the chat room have become the backbone of many Web-based learning environments. Sophisticated Web-based collaborative learning environments incorporate not only real-time, text-based conversation, but also audio- and videoconferencing, and shared work spaces, where multiple users can collaboratively work on the same document or application. These multimedia shared work spaces are facilitated by software such as Microsoft's Netmeeting ( http://www. microsoft.com/netmeeting/), Intel's Proshare ( http://www.intel.com/proshare / conferencing/index.htm), and CU-SeeMe ( http://cu-seeme.cornell.edu / ). Multiuser object-oriented (MOO) text-based virtual reality environments now have a Web-based equivalent, WOOs (Web object oriented), which provide browser-based access to virtual rooms for a variety of collaborative text-based and multimedia learning activities (e.g., http:/ / lingua. utdallas.edu:7000/11).

With so many online communication tools, the challenge is to use the tools to facilitate deep and effortful cognitive processing for all of those involved in the collaboration. The rest of this section describes some examples of online collaborative environments that appear to do this by either structuring the collaborative activity or linking the collaboration to situated learning activities. The Knowledge Forum, the Web version of CSILE ( http://kf.oise. utoronto.ca/webcsile/demo.html), uses a bulletin board system to facilitate the collaborative production and use of dynamic knowledge bases. Students post items that are categorized as five "thinking types": Problem, My Theory, Need for Understanding, Plan, and New Learning. A teacher monitors the forum and coaches students toward discovery of expert knowledge (Appalachian Education Laboratory, 2005).

Chapter Two

Literature Review

In 1998, a federal study reported that only 20% of the nation's teachers felt comfortable using modern information technologies in the classroom. Yet federal agencies, states, and school districts were spending billions of dollars a year to equip schools with computers and Internet connections. With this finding, the preparation of technology-proficient educators emerged as a critical goal in the national campaign to use new technologies to improve learning (Scot, 2005). To build the nation's capacity to meet this challenge, the U.S. Department of Education launched a program titled Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology.

This initiative, which quickly became known as PT3, eventually provided $399 million for 466 grants that were awarded in the years 1999 through 2001. The chapters assembled for Integrated Technologies, Innovative Learning: Insights from the PT3 Program provide rich insights into the range of PT3 projects which were created to ensure that future teachers are well prepared to meet the needs of 21?-century students. Producing technology-proficient educators for 21"-century schools requires a fundamental restructuring of today's teacher preparation and professional development system (Goetz & LeCompte, 2004).

Although many school districts are actively engaged in professional development programs to help the existing teacher workforce take advantage of modern learning technologies, no district in the country can meet the demand for technology-proficient educators without a significant commitment to teacher preparation improvement nationwide (Goetz & LeCompte, 2004). College and university presidents and deans, as well as other education leaders, must commit their institutions to transformational change. Adding a new methods course for technology in education or developing a cadre of education technology specialists is not sufficient (Berlin, 2005). The preparation of technology-proficient educators must go beyond training in basic computer skills and standard productivity or presentation applications (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998).

The PT3 grants program called for comprehensive teacher preparation improvements that would infuse technology throughout the full spectrum of future teachers' learning experiences. Any effort to use the potential of technology to change schools faces the same challenges the Wright brothers encountered during the early years of flight (Dewey, 1998). At the time, steam-driven railroads were the dominant mode of cross-country travel. Imagine if someone had walked up to the Wright brothers after they had made the first successful flight and said, that's pretty impressive, but how is it going to improve the railroads?' Although the evolutionary development of the airplane did nothing to improve steam engines, it dramatically transformed transportation. Today, too many of our teachers and students are still working in factory-era schools with stand-alone teachers in isolated classrooms (Boix-Mansilla & Gardner, 2007).

They are limited by a one-size-fits-all curriculum and textbooks that are often obsolete. This educational model, developed to meet the needs of an earlier time, is no longer appropriate for the connected world of the information age. In the last century our public schools were designed to serve a sorting function, preparing students for different roles in the workforce. Academic content was presented to those headed for professions and managerial positions, while those who were not on the academic track were prepared for jobs in mills, forestry, agriculture, mining, and other work not requiring advanced learning. In an industrial economy many jobs were available for students who did not succeed in school (Dewey, 2004). But in today's economy, the vast majority of jobs require knowledge workers, with 21 51-century learning skills. The factory-model school is no longer efficient, effective, or equitable (Brooks & Brooks, 2004).

Too many students are falling behind or dropping out, with no good options. With modern information and communication technologies, we are crossing a threshold that will profoundly transform schools; effective use of these new learning media will lead to a fundamental reorganization of the teaching and learning enterprise. These technologies are transformational because they enable us to do something truly radical: for the first time, we can restructure our schools so that they become true learning communities that have the capacity to help every child meet high expectations, true because they are organized around what research tells us about how people learn (Fogarty, 1991). Future teachers will use these new tools to master instructional approaches that enable their students to become active learners who draw on multiple sources of information to develop knowledge and skills, using real-world collaborative inquiry.

Tomorrow's teachers, active learners themselves, should learn with these technologies integrated into their own education by faculty who are themselves modeling technology-proficient instruction, particularly in those courses where these teachers are taught the content and expertise they will use in the classroom. In addition to strong academic preparation, tomorrow's teachers, and their teacher education faculty, need extensive hands-on learning opportunities in K-12 schools where they can master new instructional strategies appropriate for various content areas and the multiple learning styles of diverse students (Berlin, 2005). Through this clinical experience, teachers should become highly proficient in information technologies used to assess learning and to tailor instruction to individual learning needs. Today's affordable computers, along with handheld devices and wireless connectivity, create the potential for every teacher and student to become a member of a networked learning community.

These new learning communities can reduce the isolation experienced by many novice teachers, who often feel they are thrown sink or swim into challenging assignments with little opportunity to draw on the expertise of their professional colleagues. Participation in these networked professional communities should begin during a teacher's preparatory years. It should extend into the early practice years so that these communities become a bridge of continuous induction and mentoring support. This continuous interaction will break down the time-worn and no longer serviceable distinctions between preservice and in-service teaching experiences. In the past, because of geographic distance and fewer human resources, most schools and districts were limited regarding the induction and mentoring assistance they could offer new teachers. Today's technologies can change that, enabling professional collaboration across the previously daunting barriers of time and distance.

The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) is building on that potential, as well as on the experience of PT3 grantees, by collaborating with several school districts to develop local online networks of teachers who are working in high-needs schools. Research has shown that new teachers are much more likely to stay in their schools and improve their practice when they have collegial support, skilled guidance, time needed to work with their peers, and opportunities provided by an external professional network (Goetz & LeCompte, 2004).

We believe that providing collegial support and skilled guidance in networked communities will help novice teachers become accomplished practitioners more quickly, improve teacher retention rates, and improve student academic achievement. Well-prepared teachers are the most valuable resource a community can provide for its young people. The need for technology-proficient teachers is greatest in low-income communities and rural areas, where students must rely on their schools for access to modern information and communication technologies. To ensure equity, these schools must be staffed with educators who can help students use these powerful learning tools to meet the high academic standards and challenging occupational demands they will face in the new millennium. In schools with well-prepared teachers, these new learning tools are frequently used for complex reasoning and problem solving, but in schools that lack technology-proficient educators, they are more often used for drill and practice. These differences are alarming in light of evidence that classroom technology has little effect on student achievement unless it is used by well-prepared teachers who know how to use technology tools to help students meet high standards.

Despite schools' efforts to equip their class- rooms, students in low-income communities and rural areas will be denied full access to the power of new learning technologies if they do not have teachers who can help them use these tools to engage in challenging learning opportunities. Under the No Child Left behind Act, the nation's educators have been challenged to change this picture. They are expected to establish high standards for their students, and they are being held accountable for ensuring that every student meets those standards. But high standards without increased capacity are not enough. As a matter of public policy it is unacceptable to hold students accountable for meeting standards that their teachers and schools are not prepared to help them meet. Tinkering with factory-era schools that were never designed to meet the learning needs of every child will not provide solutions to today's educational challenges. As modern telecommunications and information technologies become ubiquitous, the question is not whether they can help us improve outdated schools that were designed to meet the needs of yesterday's economy (Dewey, 2004).

The question is whether we can use these new tools to modernize our schools to meet the complex demands of knowledge work in a global economy. In the future, more children will learn better and faster, not because the productivity of factory-era schools has been incrementally improved, but because those schools have been reinvented to become information age learning centers-places that take advantage of the fact that it is now possible to custom tailor learning activities that are adapted to individual needs, engaging students in authentic knowledge work and improving student performance across a full spectrum of skills and abilities. The PT3 program was designed to improve the capacity of educators to engage in this transformational process (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998).

In this age of the global marketplace and growing economic competitiveness, U.S. public schools are becoming increasingly challenged to prepare students to enter the workforce of the 21? century. Basic skills of ' reading, writing, and mathematics are the heart of success, while creativity, communication' and problem solving are the soul that can take ... students beyond menial positions and toward more satisfying futures (Boix-Mansilla & Gardner, 2007). The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) advocates for teachers to help their students become mathematically powerful so that they can meet the challenges and opportunities ahead. Similarly, the International Society for Technology in Education's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) advocate for a vision in which students are technologically powerful-capable of creating, communicating, and problem solving with appropriate technology tools so that they can capitalize on the opportunities that await them. Numerous factors influence the attainment of these goals, but at the core is education (Wiggins, 1993).

Teachers are the catalyst for raising students to their full potential. Technologically powerful teachers have the capacity to create environments for learning in which students are users of tools that help them access information, synthesize multiple forms of data, construct unique and meaningful representations of ideas, and communicate across boundaries. As the National Commission on Teaching for America's Future (2003) points out: Teachers are the ultimate knowledge workers. They are experts whose practice must be repeatedly upgraded as the matter in their field changes, research offers new viewpoints, new technologies become obtainable, and new students enter their classrooms' (Berlin, 2005).

Chapter Three

Standards and Applications

In the midst of this devolved structure, the New York State Department of Education strives to focus and direct education policy for its 7000 schools. And interestingly, the Department is headed by a Commissioner of Education who is an educator - not a politician. The Commissioner is appointed by the New York State Board of Regents, which is a body of 16 members who are elected from high-ranking public positions (such as the chancellor of a university, or the head of a major law firm) and who are responsible for policy-setting in the New York State Department of Education. The current Commissioner taught history in New York City; has a master's and a doctoral degree from a teachers' college; and has just come from the post of Commissioner of Education in the neighboring New England state of Vermont. This does not make him immune to criticism from teachers, academics and administrators, but it does at least ensure that educational decision-making at the state level in New York is founded on something rather more substantial.

However, even when these 'standards' exist, they will have only an advisory function - with no teeth to ensure that they are implemented. It will be up to the states, the districts and the schools to decide whether they wish to do anything with them. At present only two states in the U.S.A. have any compulsory technology curriculum for pupils: New York is the only state with a mandated junior high school technology program; and Maryland has a mandated high school course. It is no surprise that both these examples exist on the north- eastern seaboard of the U.S.A. which is (loosely speaking) the liberal counterpart to the more conservative and fundamentalist South and Midwest (Fogarty, 1991).

Chapter Four

Results, Findings and Conclusions

Metacognition

Whether metacognition is by definition and necessity a conscious effort as theorists such as Moon, et al. (2003). Scot, (2005) and Hacker, et al. (1998) contend; an active control of a hidden process, as suggested by Block (1992), or a broader, more generic kind of knowledge about comprehension that can for example, have an automatic impact on one's processing of text, (Flavell, 1979) -- it is, nonetheless, the essence of the development of a reader. It is certainly an indication that a language user has some idea of how he or she comprehends and of what to do when comprehension is not taking place. Both researchers and educators have begun to take more notice of it.

As researchers have focused on metacognition (Bransford, et al. 2000); strategies for collecting data on the mental processes it employs have been developed as questioning either during or after a text is read (Blumer, 2005). Related techniques have been devised for instruction. "Think-alongs" are running verbal or written stream-of-conscious reports that can be used to gather data on student processing of texts while they read (Borko, 2004). Researchers get students to report aloud about their ongoing reactions to texts by modeling the process for the subjects. This modeling is used not only for research, but primarily as a teaching device in which the teacher reveals what she or he is thinking as a text is read. It invariably demonstrates how background is called up by texts and contributes to the comprehension of it. It reveals problems with diction and language structures. At the same time, the process becomes a model for students to follow. As they think aloud about their reactions and the various thoughts that a text provokes, the experience promotes and develops student metacognition.

Standardized tests have added items that purport to measure metacognition, and basal series offer activities to build it and explanations of how it can be developed to teachers Appalachian Education Laboratory (2005). There are many classifications of reading strategies that suggest metacognitive questions a reader can ask himself or herself, but generally they can be grouped with eight icons that help a reader remember them. This metacognitive checklist is not all-inclusive, and individual teachers and readers may easily think of other questions they want to ask themselves each time they read and write. But the strategic self-questioning prompted by these icons does demonstrate the simplicity and common sense of useful metacognitive behavior.

They can be adapted easily for meaning-making using any kind of communication, including music, motion, and drawing. If young learners were to remember and ask just these, they would be in the practice mode to develop metacognitive strategies that could strengthen their ability to communicate and to comprehend by processing ideas, descriptions, and other information more effectively. Much of the work by researchers on metacognition appears to be on efforts to test theoretical definitions of it, to analyze it in terms of types and types of strategies that it involves to help define it, and to come to grips with it by reviewing the theory and research that have helped create a broader understanding of literacy (Scot, 2005).

Although the clear expectation of PT; was that K-12 students would ultimately be learning in new and more effective ways, the main thrust of the PT' program was to impact future teachers' methods of instruction. What is the best way to achieve that goal? Insightful answers to that question came from PTI projects' failures as well as accomplishments. Wisdom can be found through narratives that tell about establishing learning communities, developing support systems, enhancing field experiences, and managing electronic portfolios (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). An understanding of the process of personal trans- formation can be reached through the chapters' examinations of the experiences of students, teachers, and professors impacted by the projects. Finally, evaluation of PT3 grants takes on many forms and provides a glimpse into the larger context of institutional and individual change.

Prior to success, a number of projects learned valuable lessons from failure. Many PT3 consortia, for example, began with the ?if you build it they will come' approach to professional development. The idea was to offer workshops on a valuable topic, such as Blackboard use or Web site development, and hope the faculty would come and participate. But as a school dean once fondly said of his faculty, efforts to get faculty to come to professional development programs at universities is like herding cats. Needless to say, many faculty did not come to the workshops, so attendance was low. In their chapter, Bowling Green State University project leaders describe their frustration with the inability to achieve systemic integration of technology in their teacher education program even though they conducted extensive training (Boix-Mansilla & Gardner, 2007). Johns Hopkins University project officers explain how structural issues and insufficient time and incentives were primary factors in their faculty's lack of motivation to attend workshops. Purdue University experienced futility when trying to get groups of faculty members to meet and discuss technology integration.

Purdue found, however, that when they surveyed faculty to determine their individual needs for professional development and then catered to those needs, their workshops were well attended. Overall, programs had varying success with workshops as a strategy for professional development. Workshops can sometimes perpetuate isolation among teachers and faculty. They typically attend a workshop, learn a tool, and then retreat back to their classroom or office to attempt to integrate that idea into their instruction. Brooks & Brooks, (2004) sum up the essence of the problem: Nothing has promised so much and has been so frustratingly wasteful as the thousands of workshops and conferences that led to no significant change in practice when the teachers returned to their classrooms' (p. 315). Once back in the routine of their lives, day- to-day pressures often overwhelm teachers' and faculty's earnest intentions to learn and do something new.

In the past decade much research has been conducted concerning professional development in education. The National Staff Development Council (2001) concludes that effective professional development should consist of learning communities, leadership or guidance for instructional improvement, and appropriate resources. It should be data-driven and have evaluation embedded to guide improvement and demonstrate its impact (Scot, 2005). These essential aspects of professional development were intertwined throughout the majority of PT3 projects. In particular, a common thread found through much of the research is the importance of establishing a community of learners as part of a support system to overcome isolation.