June 2002 — Features
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From Black and White to Color: Technology, Professional Development and Changing Practice
Over a two-year period, 25 teachers in each school received 36 hours of professional development both years. These professional development sessions were supplemented by monthly on-site follow-up visits to each teacher's classroom. The sessions were tailored to the needs of individual schools and provided time for sharing ideas, reflecting about challenges and successes, as well as time to hone new teaching and learning skills and strategies. Specifically, there seemed to be three strengths in our professional development model that are worth examination and perhaps emulation:
Comfort vs. Proficiency
By the time the teachers came to our first professional development session in summer 1998, many had undergone some form of district technology training. In one school district, that included 30 hours of skills training in various software applications for 14 of the 25 project teachers, which was far more intensive and concentrated than would be true in the ATRL project. However, baseline teacher technology surveys revealed the minimal to nonexistent use of classroom technology.
Our interviews and discussions with teachers revealed three weaknesses with skills-based technology instruction. First, the training began with some sort of curriculum-related activity as an adjunct. Such training, according to teachers with whom we spoke, cast technology and curriculum as separate entities in teachers' minds. It also did not help in figuring out how to solder together these different components of instruction. Second, by focusing primarily or exclusively on technology manipulation, the sessions had the unintended consequence of conflating proficiency with mastery. Several teachers held to the belief that they needed to be experts, not just in the operation of technology, but also in its instructional implications and in troubleshooting technical issues. Finally, the intensive length of such training sessions - in most cases three to six hours per application - unintentionally conveyed the belief that teachers too, if they were to use technology with students, would need to cede a significant portion of curriculum time to technology training.
In contrast, ATRL professional development focused not on proficiency, but rather on comfort, opting to embed technology within the curriculum activity and stressing minimal proficiency. The typical method of technology training we used involved showing one teacher from each collaborative group no more than five commands for using a piece of software, and then sending that person back to teach the rest of their group. When teachers were confronted with operating challenges, we encouraged the use of intragroup or intergroup problem solving, cheat sheets or a Help menu. Only as a last resort did we intercede to guide them orally to a resolution of their technology issues. In essence, we redefined proficiency to mean not a high degree of fluency with technology operations, but "just enough" skills to impel teachers to let students use technology.
