Piloting Professional Development of Teachers in Use of IT in the Classroom

──────────────────────────────────────

Contents

──────────────────────

Introduction / 1
Chapter One: Management of the Pilot Project / 5
Chapter Two: The School Selection Process / 9
Chapter Three: The Introductory Course / 13
Chapter Four: Mentor Support / 18
Chapter Five: The Learning Process / 27
Chapter Six: The Course Materials / 36
Chapter Seven: Recommendations / 51
Appendices
Appendix One:Invitation to Attend A SchoolNet Teacher Development Planning Workshop / 55
Appendix Two:Key Players / 57
Appendix Three:Comments on School Selection by Gerald Roos / 59
Appendix Four:Introductory Course Reports / 63
Appendix Five:Introductory Course Schedule / 75
Appendix Six:Mentor Guide / 77
Appendix Seven:Agenda for Information Literacy Materials Workshop / 83
Appendix Eight:Gerald Roos Interview Analysis / 85

Piloting Professional Development of Teachers in Use of IT in the Classroom

Introduction

Background

This document is an evaluation of the pilot of a project run jointly by SCOPE[1] and Schoolnet. The purpose of the pilot was to test approaches to training teachers how to use information and communication technologies (ICTs) effectively in supporting their classroom practice. This teacher development programme adopted a distance education approach, using e-mail mentor support.

The SCOPE programme has the following three focuses:

•Incorporation of Colleges of Education into Higher Education;

•Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Enhanced Learning;

•Introducing Inclusive Education.

The overall objective of the ICT enhanced learning component (the second component above) is to extend and improve learners’ competencies in using ICTs in learning. More specifically, it focuses on enabling learners, educators and managers in the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces to use ICTs in appropriate ways. This component aims to achieve three results during the four years of the SCOPE Project, as follows:

•Result 1: Learner’s competencies in ICT extended and improving

•Result 2: Educators competent in ICT enhanced learning and teaching

•Result 3: Management of ICT improved

In the first result, the focus is on constructive and collaborative approaches in ICT in education, emphasizing communication between learners, teachers, and school administrators. In result two, educators’ competence in ICT enhanced learning will be studied and supported by developing a national framework for teacher development in ICT. On the basis of that framework, national in-service and pre-service courses will be developed. The major idea on the third result is to support managers to develop an ICT plan for provinces.

Schoolnet’s vision is to seek to support educators and learners in transforming education through the application of ICTs by providing leadership, expertise and developing effective partnerships in the areas of:

•Internet connectivity and appropriate technology

•Human Resource Development and capacity building

•Content and curriculum management and development

•Advocacy and marketing

Schoolnet, and its partners, aims to meet the challenge of transforming South Africa’s education system from an industrial to a knowledge-based model, contributing to South Africa’s global competitiveness.

The pilot project being evaluated in this report will be followed by a larger project during 2001, involving over 5000 educators.

Project description

Pilot Project Development

Project development began with a meeting held on 12 July, in Cape Town (see invitation in Appendix One). This first meeting was followed by a four-day workshop involving various course developers and materials writers, including, Alixe Lowenherz, Trudi van Wyk, Jyrki Pulkkinen, Cathy Zandee, Janet Thomson, and Gerald Roos, while others attended intermittently. (The roles of these individuals in the pilot, and others, are defined in Appendix Two.) During this workshop, the nature of the virtual learning environment was discussed extensively, the outcomes were formulated collaboratively, and the materials development process commenced.

The materials development process then continued beyond the workshop with a number of individuals taking part in materials writing and editing. The materials and most of the support resources for the course are contained on a CD-ROM provided to learners. During this time, various schools were selected from Kwazulu-Natal, Western Cape, and the North West Province to participate in the pilot, involving a total of 30 teacher learners.

Introductory course

In early September, three introductory courses were held in each of the three provinces. During these one-day courses, the learners were introduced to the resource CD, the distance education process was explained to them, and learners had to select one of three modules that they wished to pursue.

The Distance Education Component

The distance education component of the pilot project was supported by e-mail and online interaction (using the Internet), which were intended to involve collaborative groups of about ten educators, who had all selected the same learning module. A mentor, who made e-mail contact with the learners, facilitated each module group.

The learners were encouraged to follow a module on the CD, completing the activities described and submitting certain activities to their mentor and the rest of the learner group. The activities on the course encouraged learners to be reflective about what they were doing and also required them to prepare and try out activities in the classroom amongst their learners. After the classroom experience, learners were asked to share their thoughts with their group by e-mail and to enter and save their reflections in an MS Word document that was referred to as a reflective journal. The reflective journal was developed throughout the distance education component and sent to mentors, and was used to assess learners’ progress through modules.

Modules

There were three modules available on the pilot, as follows:

Word Processor - this module concentrated on making learners independent users of the word processor as an educator. It helped learners to look for contexts in their work in which the word processor would be a useful tool.

Questioning Skills - this module helped learners to develop skills in asking questions that make their learners think and that encourage educators to provide situations in class whereby their learners can ask questions. Such enquiry would place the Worldwide Web and its information sources in context as a valuable resource in schools.

Information Search and Evaluation- this module concentrated on the skills required for using search engines on the Internet. It also helped learners to identify and use criteria for evaluating the reliability and value of information that is found on the Internet.

evalution process

Until the SCOPE Project decided to proceed with an external evaluation, Schoolnet had decided to limit the evaluation process to internal evaluation undertaken by Gerald Roos. The decision to incorporate an external evaluation was only executed a considerable time after the start of the pilot project. The evaluation process was conducted over a period of three months following the pilot. This severely limited what the evaluation was able to determine about the efficacy of the educational approaches used (although the internal evaluation work commissioned by Schoolnet did gather much useful data). For example, we have had to rely entirely on secondary sources and interviews in examining the introductory course, as all three had been run before the evaluation began. As this data is largely constitutes the subjective opinions of the organizers and facilitators, it has been very difficult to offer meaningful comment on this component of the evaluation. Likewise, participants in the pilot had largely completed their work before the evaluation began, thus removing opportunities for observing learner engagement with the materials themselves.

Evaluation focused on different elements of the pilot, namely management of the project, school selection, the learning process, introductory course, the mentoring process, and the course materials. Information was gathered on each of these aspects of the course from a variety of sources (the details of these sources for each of the sections are discussed at the start of each of the relevant chapters). However, overall information sources for the analysis included the following:

•Schoolnet documentation, including documents on the Schoolnet Internet site and a Terms of Reference document.

•Notes made by an independent consultant during interviews with various key stakeholders, namely, Janet Thomson, Gerald Roos, Trudi van Wyk, Sandy Zinn, Alixe Lowenherz, Stephen Marquard, and Jyrki Pulkkinen.

•Gerald Roos’s notes on comments made during his interviews with ten participating learners, and his additional commentary on his findings.

•Responses to a short questionnaire compiled and e-mailed to certain stakeholders.

•Gerald Roos’s summary document describing the schools involved in each region, as well as the participants and how they faired on the course.

•Feedback forms (nine) completed by learners and other feedback from learners provided in e-mails.

•Trainer reports on the introductory courses.

•Detailed observer reports on the introductory courses compiled.

•A telephonic interview with one of the introductory course trainers.

•E-mail discussions between the mentors, and between the mentors and learners.

•The resource CD.

•A number of text books on the development and evaluation of instructional materials in distance education.

The analysis was primarily qualitative, with a small amount of quantitative analysis being conducted where possible and appropriate.

Piloting Professional Development of Teachers in Use of IT in the Classroom

CHAPTER ONE

Management of the Pilot Project

Introduction and information sources

This chapter explores issues around the management of the pilot project itself. This section is placed first because management issues affected every other aspect of the pilot project, and thus this section is intended to provide a context for all observations and comments that follow. The information in this chapter is based on interviews with key participants in the pilot project.

Absence of Project Management Structures

Management problems within the pilot project have been discussed at length through various processes revolving around this evaluation. Given this reality and because several problems have already been resolved, this report will not dwell at length on management problems and their effects. However, some aspects of management require raising because they yield important lessons and because they raise the difficulty of separating problems caused by ineffective management from problems caused by design or implementation flaws.

The pilot project suffered significantly from the near-total absence of any effective project management structures. Most notable amongst these was that no formal agreement was ever reached between SCOPE and Schoolnet on the nature and purpose of the collaboration. Although this may seem to be a minor omission on the face of it, it had serious implications throughout the entire pilot project, as it appeared that the motives of the two participating organizations[2] often seemed to contradict each other. This did not reflect any fundamental disagreements, but was rather the result of aggregations of small differences of opinion as to the purpose behind the pilot. Because no agreement had been reached, each organization inevitably pursued its own well-defined organizational agendas rather than a vague collaborative agreement. Establishing this agreement up front would have helped to avoid this problem.

Following on from this omission, there was also no formally constituted project management team and jointly agreed project manager (although various people were informally tasked with various management responsibilities). These omissions had implications for every aspect of the pilot, as has been acknowledged by project participants. For example:

•There was little evidence in the pilot project of risk analysis of the teaching and learning methods selected. The remainder of this evaluation report demonstrates that, while the teaching and learning methods selected for testing during the pilot have undoubted potential, they also carry serious risk of failure. More systematic risk analysis would have avoided some obvious problems that arose during the pilot project (see bullet points below), and is a simple example of a management function.

•Selection of schools was undertaken in a random, unsystematic way (see chapter two) that undermined many aspects of the pilot. The first phase of the Schoolnet Supercentres and Thintana Projects has demonstrated that setting up management structures and tasking individuals with specific management responsibilities significantly enhances processes such as schools selection. The addition of management accountability ensures that criteria for selection are agreed and adhered to during such a process, which would have significantly enhanced the pilot project. It also creates a framework for such activities to take place within timeframes that do not compromise the remaining activities in the project.

•Implementation proceeded in a random and haphazard way. This began with absence of criteria for selecting schools, but had much wider implications. For example, participating teachers did not have the implications of their participation adequately explained to them prior to attending the introductory course. Many appear to have thought that the one-day workshop was the full extent of their involvement, which undermined testing of the e-mail mentoring system. Likewise, there were unacceptable delays between running the introductory course and implementing the distance education component of the programme in the North West and Kwazulu Natal (because the training in the Western Cape was held a week later than in the other prvinces), making it impossible for the pilot to capitalize on the momentum generated by the introductory course.

•Contributors to the project also came into the project in random ways and their roles were often not made clear, either to them or others. This appears, at least in part, to have be related to the absence of a structured working agreement between SCOPE and Schoolnet, which saw individuals making management decisions without reference to a broader management framework. For some contributors, the effect was very alienating, and it also minimized the possibility of benefiting from new inputs. For example, Alixe Lowenherz was invited to an initial course materials development workshop and asked to participate as an editor. When the materials development process overran its deadlines, new deadlines were set without reference to their implications. At least one consequence of deadlines being too tight was that Alixe was not able to perform her editorial role with most materials because there simply was not enough time.

•The absence of effective management structures was most noticeable in the materials development process, where differences of opinion became post problematic. Several personal problems arose, which would have been easily avoidable in a more tightly managed process (particularly as they did not reflect any fundamental underlying conflicts). An identified manager could also easily have mediated and resolved conflicts as they arose, instead of which they were allowed to persist for unacceptably long periods, to the detriment of the pilot project as a whole.

There were other symptoms of this management gap, particularly in the lack of any documentation on the roles of individuals within the team and the activities and deadlines for the materials development process. Where deadlines were set, they often seemed unreasonably tight (a problem throughout the entire pilot). Perhaps most significantly, though, the person tasked with ensuring the conceptual coherence of the materials and indeed the whole learning process (Gerald Roos) also became the de facto manager of the course materials development process. The benefit of hindsight indicates that it would have been better to separate these functions, as often the role of providing conceptual coherence creates tensions within a team, which it is easier for a different, more objective person to mediate.

•The pilot project clearly relied strongly on the commitment and energy of individuals to run. This is not a criticism of the project, or of the people whose commitment led to the pilot actually taking place. Without this commitment and enthusiasm, nothing would have been possible. However, it does run the risk of hindering growth and development, because, for example, when an individual leaves or becomes unmanageably overloaded, the project may not retain the skills and energy contributed by that person. More importantly, it runs the risk of undermining the potential of the project to go to scale in future, as it becomes unclear whether success is a function of the models developed or has worked in spite of the models through the commitment and hard work of a few key people. A key responsibility of effective management should be to ensure that such work becomes part of a sustainable scaleable system.