Looking toward the future, teachers grapple with technological issues

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Nearly everyone agrees that information technology belongs in the classroom. President Clinton has vowed to connect every school in America to the Information Highway by the year 2000. But what is less clear is how technology fits into the learning process. Will computers and the Internet turbocharge education, or are they just a new set of toys?

From July 6 to 12, 100 teachers and administrators from 40 school districts around the country gathered at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) to discuss these questions. The weeklong Institute -- "Leadership and the New Technologies: Strategies for the Schools of Tomorrow" -- was organized by the GSE and the Education Development Center Inc. (EDC), and underwritten by a grant from AT&T. The Institute combined presentations, panel discussions, and study groups to help educators grapple with the question of how technology can be used to help kids learn.

According to Glenn Kleiman, a lecturer at the GSE, vice president of EDC, and co-chair of the Institute, schools are greatly in need of guidance on these issues.

"There is tremendous energy, pressure, incentive, and demand to incorporate technology for teaching and learning," Kleiman said. "This is good, but there's a risk of hardware being poured into the schools without planning. The questions are not whether to buy Macs or PCs, but what do we think students need to learn? How can technology help them learn? What is the impact of technology on the culture of the classroom?"

The Institute brought together teachers and administrators from rural areas, the suburbs, and the inner cities, from rich school districts and poor. There were districts with success stories to tell and others that were floundering. But all shared a need to grasp the opportunities presented by the new technological advances.

Richard Gore, director of vocational and career education for the Cleveland public schools, felt that one major obstacle to reaping the benefits of information technology is that teachers don't know enough about what is available.

"The tools are out there," he said, "but I don't think the average teacher knows about them."

According to Gore, vocational education has changed greatly in the past few decades and part of that change has resulted from advances in computer technology. For today's vocational students, using mathematics and learning to work with advanced computer technology is more important than ever.

But while Gore chides teachers for remaining computer illiterate, he is hopeful that they will eventually join the technological revolution that is sweeping education.

"People will not change until they reach their threshold, but once you get a teacher turned on, there are no limits to where you can go."

Shirley Thomas, supervisor of the staff development center of the Gary, Ind., school system, identified a similar problem, but was more sympathetic to the plight of older teachers with limited knowledge of technology.

"I feel that because the vast majority of teachers are more experienced, they're not too enthused about bringing in another piece. I think they see it that way rather than seeing technology as something to infuse into what they're doing. They're not as willing to try something they're afraid of," Thomas said.

As supervisor of the staff development center, Thomas realizes that the most important thing for her school district is to get teachers at all levels of technological expertise moving in the same direction.

"What I'm confronted with is how to make this transition within the district. We must have a unified goal, and so far we don't have that. We're going off on tangents. We need to get our focus on where we expect to go, on outcomes."

She said that the Institute was helpful because it allowed her to connect with other educators facing similar problems.

"It's an eye-opener to know that what I thought were problems that only we had are being experienced by others. We're all confronted by the same problems," she said.

Others came seeking cures for school districts beset by crippling social ills.

Robert Barner, administrator of the Jordan/Locke Cluster, a district that includes the Watts area of Los Angeles, said that the 25 schools under his supervision are currently far below average educationally and desperately in need of new direction.

"We have the lowest socioeconomic level in California," Barner said. "We're 99 percent minority, of which 62 percent is Hispanic. We also have some of the lowest test scores in California. Right now the schools are nonfunctional. We're in desperate straits. We're almost at rock bottom. The only way is up."

Barner said that he was looking for strategies to improve test scores. "I'm hoping to develop a plan for the overall district to address this underachievement. Some of what I've heard here seems very promising."

Periodically, the participants split up into smaller study groups to share personal perspectives on the presentations and panel discussions they had heard. In one of these groups, teachers and administrators spoke about the everyday concerns that arose when schools adopted sophisticated technology.

One teacher complained that because he has more computer expertise than most people in his school he gets snowed under with technical demands and doesn't have enough time for teaching.

Another member suggested hiring a technician or network administrator to deal with these demands.

A third person disagreed: "There's a lot of handholding that's necessary to get people started using technology, and I think that job is better done by a teacher who understands what's involved and can empathize than by a technician," she said.

"I think we need to break down the expert/novice dichotomy by sharing what we know," said another participant. "When I fix a problem, I make sure the person understands how I've done it."

Someone mentioned that often students were the ones with the greatest expertise and could be recruited to deal with technological problems, but another group member pointed out that this approach could have serious drawbacks.

"I've heard horror stories about students gaining too much knowledge and abusing their access privileges, breaking into restricted files, changing grades, things like that."

As Kleiman later pointed out, these discussions will continue after the Institute has ended. The opportunity to continue learning from one another's experience is being made available to Institute participants and others through an interactive Website, also funded by AT&T. The site -- http://www.edc.org/LNT/ -- contains many of the presentations and talks that took place during the Institute, along with an ongoing discussion forum and message board.

"The Website will give us an opportunity not only to continue the conversation at a distance, but hopefully to broaden it as well," Kleiman said.