June 2002 — Features
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
From Black and White to Color: Technology, Professional Development and Changing Practice
This model of peer-based, "just enough" minimal skills cultivation facilitated the teachers' shift toward technology integrated learner-centered approaches. First, it vaulted technology comfort over technology expertise, making teachers feel more comfortable and confident using the application in their classroom. Once they achieved this threshold of comfort, they seemed to regard themselves as more proficient in the application, whether or not that was actually the case. Further, this "just enough" comfort-based approach propelled teachers to allow student use of a technology application even when the teachers themselves had not mastered the application. For example, as Chart 2 indicates (see page 41), reg-ular classroom technology use by students increased significantly in two years.
Second, teachers could reproduce this approach in their classrooms. They didn't want, nor could they devote, much of their time to training students to use applications such as AppleWorks or Excel. But by gathering a group of students together, launching them on an application with no more than five commands and sending them to train their peers, teachers came to realize that the smallest amount of input could yield greatly improved output in terms of the quality of student work. Teachers reported that they began to see immediate improvement in the form and content of students' work once they began using technology.
Consequently and subsequently, teachers became more comfortable in allowing students to teach one another, and in time, to instruct teachers themselves in software use. Eventually, technology became the first area in which teachers ceded some control to students and in which they began to see students as equal, or even superior, in terms of knowledge, often voicing surprise at students' facility with computers. Gradually, teachers began to accord students more control and autonomy in terms of research and expression than would be the case were the technology not available.
Though classroom use of technology increased, teacher technology proficiency remained fairly low. Results from teachers' computer skills self-assessments showed that though comfort and use of individual applications increased over two years, the level of overall technology expertise remained fairly modest. In our data collection we disaggregated teacher technology skills into four clusters: low, medium-low, medium-high and high. By the end of the project, the difference among each of the four clusters was barely discernible. Teachers did not view themselves as particularly proficient with technology, yet were comfortable enough using it with students. Thus, technology comfort had eroded the old anxiety of not using computers until they were experts.
Focus On Classroom Management
Before embarking upon the ATRL project in 1998, we asked teachers about their fears regarding technology. The predominant concern across all campuses was classroom management of limited hardware resources. Their concern spoke to a larger fear: disruption of the natural order of the classroom, with power shifted away from the teacher to the student and the teacher's loosened grip of classroom control.
