Scaling Up Success - General Thoughts
Most of us would probably agree that there are many pockets of good technology integration within our schools. Regardless of the size of the school, one of the greatest challenges seems to be getting those isolated instance to become the norm rather than the exception. This is a difficulty that many areas of education face, but particularly technology integration.
Scaling Up Success: Lessons from Technology-Based Educational Improvement is a collection of material from a conference sponsored by Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium in 2003. I have only reached the mid-point of the book, but already there are some refreshing nuggets that confirm what I’ve believed for quite some time.
The first chapter examines successes within the Union City, NJ district and how those are being scaled up for statewide implementation. From an analysis of their success with a literacy program, they noticed:
...instruction should take place in small, goal-centered groups, avoiding whole-group instruction except when clearly appropriate for organizational and management activities. Teachers were to organize the time as they saw fit. For the first time, they were asked to provide instruction in accord with individual student needs.
Technology is not neutral where pedagogy is concerned. A rethinking of effective pedagogy is necessary if we are ever to scale up our success with technology integration.
...professional development is a process not an event.
For too long we have focused our technology professional development on skill training - how to operate hardware and navigate around various software interfaces. Rarely has professional development focused on how to move from passive-learner classrooms to active-learner ones. “To mention a well-known case, the one-time workshop rarely budges established patterns of practice out of their rut. Even though teachers may greatly enjoy the experience and emerge from it with an enlarged sense of what they could do, as they return to the familiar environs of their classrooms, old habits, pressures, and other realities quickly reassert themselves.”
Neither policy makers nor practitioners have sufficient cognizance of the other’s...worlds.
When we don’t see the entire system, decisions are made that can have a serious impact on other parts of the system without even realizing it. More attention should be paid to a systems-thinking approach so that scaling up can occur more easily. “...a school is a system made up of interlocking parts that affect each other and that understanding the parts and how they relate to one another is critical to achieveing lasting change.”
More to come…
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