July 2005 — SETDA
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Creating Strategies for Improved Teaching and Learning
Iowa relies on technology to
tackle problems with teacher
quality and student achievement.
“Rural districts faced challenges in meeting student proficiency goals and implementing teacher qualification requirements of [the No Child Left Behind Act] and faced some of them to a greater extent than nonrural districts.”*
Like so many other states, Iowa faces the acute challenge of improving teacher quality. To address this problem, the state has been conducting and procuring a system over the last two years that will move Iowa into compliance with No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requirements in the areas of teacher quality and the core subjects of reading, mathematics, and science.
Building on experiences and lessons learned from previous state efforts, Iowa is now focusing on teaching pedagogy and best practices in the previously mentioned academic areas, teacher technology support, and the creation of learning communities. Specifically, the state is attempting to:
- Address the NCLB requirements within the context of the federal government’s educational entitlement programs as a rural state
- Discuss the problem of evaluating the effectiveness of technology and teacher fidelity in implementing pedagogy in meeting the NCLB requirements
- Develop and evaluate a communication plan and support system in order to disseminate effective strategies and best practices to other schools both within and outside of Iowa
Changing Approaches to Professional Development
The central purpose of Iowa’s efforts has been to focus on the academic needs of students by improving its instructors’ repertoire of teacher strategies so they can reach all students. And because it is difficult for a state to contact individual teachers at the campus level, Iowa relies on the Iowa Area Education Agencies (www.iowaaea.org) to provide services to its local education agencies. In the past, the area education agencies have been instrumental in the area of professional development and in supporting the implementation of teacher strategies.
The problem was that once professional development was conducted, no one monitored or supported the fidelity of implementation of the strategies in the classroom. In many cases, the teachers did not receive follow-up support, or the principal/curriculum director did not completely understand the strategy.
The result was that teachers mutated the strategies, did not use them for the correct duration, or never evaluated them to see if the strategies were having an impact on student achievement. Thus, many strategies were either abandoned because teachers lost faith in their ability to perform them correctly, or strategies that had been proved effective were inadvertently modified.
