Appropriating technology to improve student understanding

¶ … 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

Methodology

Development of these potent instructors was the ultimate goal of the initiative Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3). The PT3 program was the largest undertaking ever to address how to best develop future teachers into capable and effective users of technology to increase K-12 students' learning (Dewey, 1998). Beginning in 1999, the U.S. Department of Education's PT3 program supported more than 400 consortia of institutions of higher education, local or state education agencies, K-12 schools, and businesses. These partnerships redesigned undergraduate and graduate curriculum, addressed issues of digital equity, empowered K-12 teachers, and established innovative ways of transforming teacher education through the power of technology. PT3 involved three types of grant programs:

1. capacity building (1-year grants to develop technological capacity),

2. implementation (3-year grants awarded to partnerships), and

3. catalyst (3-year grants for large-scale teacher preparation improvements and systemic reforms led by national, state, or regional consortia) the versatile structure of PT3 grants made it possible for institutions to develop creative strategies to integrate technology into teacher preparation.

All PT3 project officers were solicited for a proposal for a chapter in Integrated Technologies, Innovative Learning: Insights from the PT3 Program. Sixty-four proposals from 33 states were received. Based on the merits of the proposals, 42 chapters were requested and reviewed by a team of 20 reviewers. Of those, 19 were selected for inclusion in the book. This book documents the important insights gained from the PT3 projects that were implemented across the country from 1999 to 2004. These projects have transformed the preparation of teachers to capitalize on the potential of technology in education. Within the following pages are stories of that transformation. From descriptions of institutional change to personal narratives, the project officers who wrote these chapters share their insights about key elements of professional development and support (Boix-Mansilla & Gardner, 2007).

The PT; program's objective was to prepare teachers so that through the power of technology, K-12 students would more fully comprehend core concepts and be better able to access and understand a broader range of ideas. While every institution does not have the resources these grants provided, the experiences accumulated regarding integration of technology into the preparation of teachers can have significant value for any organization involved in that effort. While the book is organized alphabetically by the name of the lead institution in a partnership, multiple themes emerge upon examination of each project's approach. Institutions that contributed to this work are diverse, ranging from small private colleges to universities that serve more than 3,000 teacher education students, and from small rural school districts to large metropolitan school districts (Scot, 2005).

Projects focused upon different dimensions of teacher preparation, from undergraduate classes to field placements of student teachers. Stories are of failure as well as success, of frustration as well as understanding (Dewey, 2004). In the end, they are an accumulation of lessons learned which can help prevent the aggravation that comes with the reinvention of the wheel, as well as help similar programs succeed. Capturing the highlights of these 19 projects was fraught with challenges. Each of these PT3 3 projects was a highly complex, systemic approach to professional development and institutional change. Each project was unique, yet projects often shared similarities with one another. Approaches to the different projects overlapped in multiple ways.

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).