TELA: Laptops for Teachers Evaluation—Final Report Years 9-13

6. Sustaining Change in Teacher Laptop Use

6.1 THE PATTERN OF CHANGE

There is some indication from the findings that the pattern of change following the introduction of TELA laptops has followed the sigmoid curve typical of most change processes. After the first year of implementation, there were modest gains in the proportion of teachers using laptops for tasks such as report writing and emailing, and greater gains for tasks such as Internet searching. Across the second and third years, gains were maintained or there was a further smaller gain. Many of the focus group and case study teachers construed the third year as a period of consolidation of their knowledge and practice. In this section we consider how change might be sustained, and perhaps accelerated, across this plateau.

6.2 HOW TO SUSTAIN AND ACCELERATE CHANGE

While clauses in the TELA scheme specifying that schools provide for school-based integration of the laptops with regard to professional development, technical support and technical infrastructure suggest that policymakers were aware of these dimensions, it seems probable that neither they, nor the schools, appreciated the full import of this requirement, or the way it was entangled with a school’s longer term focus on ICT and response to previous policy initiatives. The evaluation findings resemble studies elsewhere that indicate that it is not sufficient to simply provide schools with technology. It is not sufficient to consider professional development, available ICT infrastructure, resources and support, and teacher confidence and expertise in isolation, nor teachers and schools in isolation from the wider context for change in education (Venezky, 2004).

6.2.1 Individual teachers

For individual teachers, it was the convergence of teacher confidence and expertise and perceptions of the usefulness of ICT, professional development, school leadership for laptop use and culture for change, and access to reliable ICT resources that shaped the opportunities and incentives they had to use their laptop. A combination of these contextual factors supported and constrained teacher use of their laptop for a particular task depending on their own knowledge and expertise. For beginners, help to use the laptop, including prompt technical support, is important when they are ‘stuck’. With more experienced and knowledgeable users, attention turns to the development of lesson materials, the knowledge of resources to support this, and the skills to make use of these resources. Once teachers are able to prepare multi-sensory materials, it seems that the focus shifts to the need for ongoing access to a data projector and models of how to use ICT for teaching and learning. Competent teachers who have classroom access to a data projector and the Internet were eager for professional development to extend their knowledge and skills. They were interested in opportunities (and training on how to) to share their enthusiasm and expertise with colleagues. Teachers, irrespective of their self-reported ability, were very interested in developing their laptop use for teaching and learning as Table 7 shows. In all three years, at least half of the questionnaire respondents listed tasks that were related to laptop use in the classroom for teaching and learning as their main goal for further development. In 2005, finding the time to prepare resources on the laptop and the motivation to spend time learning more about laptop uses was of concern to teachers responding to the questionnaire, with 70% reporting that ‘time’ was the most important factor in their being able to do this.

The 2005 focus groups indicated that the shift in focus on professional development towards the use of laptops for teaching and learning had revealed new issues. Infrastructure accessibility issues (for example, access to resources such as data projectors) and environmental issues (layout of classroom, network connections) led to some teachers limiting their professional development. These teachers saw no point in spending time on professional development when they would not be able to implement what they had learned. Case study teachers from all schools raised questions about where and how to access the knowledge and information required for pedagogical innovation with ICT. Case study teachers also highlighted the need for time to explore and experiment with the programs on their laptop and what was available via the Internet and other sources. Time to explore the capabilities of the laptop was seen as particularly beneficial by teachers with less expertise. All teachers wanted the time to consolidate what they learned from others.

6.2.2 The department

The department setting provides the immediate and most salient environment for teacher learning about laptop use for teaching and learning. The value accorded to collegial support and peer mentoring for ICT use in teaching and learning by the focus group and case study teachers highlighted the role of same-subject colleagues. Evidence has been provided that teachers working in the same room shared ideas and materials, and that department-level leadership, either from the head of department or an ICT enthusiast, supported teacher learning about and use of their laptop. The case studies also provided evidence that where there was not a critical mass of laptop users, either because teachers were not able to access a laptop or they did not want to use one, collaborative developments incorporating the laptop were limited. A shift at departmental level was observed in a case study school where one of three technology teachers had accessed a laptop. His two colleagues, seeing his enthusiasm and what he was able to do, joined the scheme. They lobbied the Board of Trustees to upgrade the technology rooms. In 2005 they were interviewed as a group in the technology suite where they described and demonstrated what they were using the laptops for. In 2006, they described the development of a new technology subject that had to be supported by laptop-based research and development. Another teacher, one who had just graduated and who was proficient in ICT, had joined the department and they were looking forward to learning more about how to use ICT from him. The experience of this group of teachers illustrates the interplay of the leadership, access resources and opportunities for professional learning. One of the teachers summed up the situation thus:

We have a new teacher started. He is into laptops and there are four of us and we all share and work in the same resources room. Whenever we have a problem we ask someone else who has done it and … I doubt very much I would be half as far as I am if I had not had collegial support. (2006 case study comment)

6.2.3 The school

School leadership, ICT technological infrastructure, and professional learning opportunities were also found to be influential at the school level, where it was found that rather than ICT catalysing whole-school reform, educational change was most likely when the school culture supported change. The importance of these factors individually, and in interaction with each other was shown most clearly by changes in one of the case study schools. In 2004, only seven teachers at the school had laptops and these teachers tended to work alone. None was making much use of the laptops and they each begrudged having to pay the lease. In 2005, a deputy principal with expertise in, and a vision for ICT was appointed. The Board of Trustees asked him to investigate the introduction of an electronic student absence system. The deputy principal and two other teachers visited another school to see how that school managed this task. They returned and recommended that the school completely upgrade its infrastructure. They argued that the TELA scheme was the most cost-effective way to provide teachers with access to a computer. The Board agreed and funded laptops for all the teachers in the school. In the event, the school became eligible for a government-funded ICT infrastructure upgrade and at the time of the 2006 interviews all of the classrooms in the school were connected. The Board’s action of paying the laptop lease had a “huge impact on teacher morale.” All of the teachers had laptops and ICT literacy had improved showing that a critical mass of expertise and active laptop users was crucial to support and then extend individual teacher, department and whole-school laptop use. Laptops were also proving useful in other school-wide initiatives that utilised technology. Teacher, principal and Board attitude towards teacher laptops and ICT use had completely turned around.

School-wide and departmental leaders in ICT, particularly those from smaller schools need such opportunities to meet with peers and experts from outside their own school to share problems and solutions. Once back at school, there is a need for a mechanism for these teachers to share what they learned with colleagues and for their colleagues to have time to experiment with and explore what has been learned. Principals, Boards of Trustees and school senior management need opportunities to extend their understanding of the potential and possibilities for ICT in their particular school. However, if schools rely solely on collegial help, local good practice opportunities to learn are necessarily distributed in random and ad hoc ways (Dale, Robertson & Shortis, 2004). Teacher access to someone with the pertinent expertise and a willingness and ability to share determines opportunities to learn. That all teachers will have this access cannot be assured without some form of intervention. Added to this, teacher learning may be confined to what is available locally rather than what might be needed. What is needed is a balance between opportunities to share and to grow local knowledge and expertise.

6.2.4 National policy

Differences in school technological infrastructure highlight that government policies are not self-sufficient entities. The cultural, material and knowledge/expertise setting for school/teacher response to a particular policy is shaped in part by antecedent policies and the ways in which these have played out in the local context. School ICT infrastructures reflect the intersection over time of national and local school-based policies. The flow on from the differential value placed on ICT by different schools, in part explains current differences in school organisational, technological and personnel/expertise infrastructure. Schools with better established ICT policies and practices not only had better developed technological infrastructures, but also greater access to on-site expertise, and thus were better able to anticipate and provide for teacher needs arising from access to personal access to a laptop where these needs encompassed access to facilities, professional development, technical support and organisational and administrative systems that allowed teachers to utilise the affordances of teacher use of a TELA laptop.

Teachers across the questionnaires, focus groups and case studies were looking for information and ideas about how they might exploit the affordances of the laptop and ICT in teaching and learning. They were looking to colleagues, recent graduates and the Ministry for advice and guidance, or better still, to models of effective practice for teaching and learning using ICT in the subjects they taught. It is important that there is consistency between different government initiatives such as TELA and the interests of the Education Review Office audits, for example, and their requirement for paper-based planning, attendance and reporting. A small number of teachers, mainly those in management positions, discussed the prominence (and their perception of a lack of prominence of ICT) in the current draft curriculum document (Ministry of Education, 2006). The findings of this study suggest a number of New Zealand secondary teachers and school leaders are looking to the education system as a whole when considering the potential and possibilities for ICT use. This focus is consistent with studies that have shown that any plan for ICT implementation needs to consider how technology will be coordinated with changes in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher professional development and school organisational accountability protocols (Fishman et al., 2004). It converges with recommendations by Venezky (2004) that ICT-based policies and programs need to be consistent across all levels of the education sector and coordinated with those in other areas such as economic development and telecommunication.

6.2.5 The system for change

Fullan (2005) argues that it is only when we adopt a multilevel systems approach to change that we will be able to move past the plateau and onto into sustainable systemic innovation. School leadership and culture for change, technological infrastructure and opportunities for professional learning along with teacher personal factors appear to act to enable and constrain teacher laptops use in the classroom and at the department and whole-school level albeit in different forms. The synergy between these factors is consistent with a systems approach as set out in Section 3. Figure 1 portrays a set of inter-related factors, where the teacher is ‘nested’ within a unique school system with its own characteristics that serve to enable or constrain the teacher’s use of the laptop.

Figure 1 The laptop teacher in context