Instructional Maturity
In some reading a few weeks back I ran across a phrase that I think might be relevant to this vision piece that I’ve been charged with putting together. The phrase is instructional maturity. The word maturity here refers to quality of a particular context, in this case instruction. There are other contexts relevant to transformation, systemic change and technology—infrastructure maturity; software product maturity; and people maturity. The level of maturity in one area can impact, positively or negatively, the maturity in another.
For each of these, it is possible to develop a maturity model. A model contains features (What does quality instruction look like? What are the goals and methods for teaching?); defined levels/stages for each feature; and a scoring rubric which can be used as a guide for what to work toward.
So it would appear that our goal is this: to increase instructional maturity. The belief is that this can be done effectively through the use of technology.
Some questions that may be worth answering:
1. Do the features of instructional maturity listed in yesterday’s post apply to all core content areas? In other words, are there content areas that would not benefit from a shift to this particular view of classroom instruction?
I think they may not, but within the professional development proposed, we will discover which will apply and which will not. These conclusions need to be driven by the teachers, not imposed from top down.
2. Since one maturity can impact another, what is the impact of infrastructure maturity on instructional maturity?
I suspect that since we are working with teachers in a setting that has access to virtually any technology, this may be less of an issue. The infrastructure is probably robust enough for us to meet our goals using technology in any way we can think of. However, infrastructure may end up being an issue as this seeps out into other areas of the building, even other buidlings within the district. One of the phrases that has been restated has been, “using what we presently have.” This is fine to an extent, but lack of access to equipment, support, and other resources has always been a cry from the ranks, middle level and high school. And this is evident in the Technology Integration Plan.
3. Is it valuable to actually develop some sort of rubric for instructional maturity?
I am not sure on this one. We have developed some generic rubrics, but what I don’t like about those is that they focus on quantity rather than quality. That might be something to revisit.
There were also a few additional things that could be added to the “What are we doing to reach those outcomes?” section of yesterday’s post: (1) There is a flow for this: Institute --> technology enhanced classrooms --> Emmaus High School --> other district buildings. (2) We are doing this within available resources. We aren’t asking for more money in the budget. (3) Along with a new model for the classroom, there needs to be a new model of supervision. Adminstrators will need to learn effective ways of assessing teachers that use technology to reach their classroom goals.
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