Leading a Whole School ICT Team

Leading a whole school ICT Team

by Tim Manson

Managing the progress and successes in ICT across a school can be a challenging task. In this article I will look at some of the key tips that I have learnt (from leadership theory and actual practice)

Many schools today are suffering from ‘Innovation fatigue’. For years, ICT has been a focus for school leadership and the personal computer became the panacea for school improvement and performance targets, the solution to radically improve GCSE grades and the answer for literacy and numeracy challenges. The number of whiteboards that a school had stapled to walls became a more important (and widely publicised) statistic than examination performance. Money was invested and school leaders sat back to watch the improvements roll in. However, some were quick to realise that unless the school had really sat down to think strategically about the development of ICT within their school, the actual advantages could be quite hard to find.

Futurelab (2006) in a recent Vision magazine pointed out the sceptical viewpoint that does not see any value in computers in education. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Michael Schrage noted that “A quality education has virtually nothing to do with the technological endowment of the school.” Just because a school is fully equipped with the most amazing technical wizardry does not make it a good school. It is up to the teachers to step up and work out the best way to use these ICT tools so that students can learn better.

The big question in schools is who leads this change? The skills that children need to develop in ICT whilst at school are no longer at the innovative end of the scale. They need to be embedded fully into the everyday learning and teaching practice within the school. The unbelievably fast growth in social software means that students are more ‘connected’ outside school than ever before. Some students have difficulty typing reports or designing PowerPoint presentations yet they can download their mobile phone pictures onto flickr and have a very complicated web profile on Bebo or Myspace. Educators need to think carefully how to manage and use these developments to help learning.

Hargreaves and Fink (2006) note that “change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement and extraordinarliry difficult to sustain”.

Strategic leadership: How then does the school manage this change?

Lou Gerstner, the chairman of IBM is quoted in Friedman (2006) as telling students at HarvardBusinessSchool, “Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or urgency . . . no institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive”.

Weindling (1997) writes that ‘strategic planning and leadership is a means for establishing and maintaining a sense of direction when the future has become more and more difficult to predict. It is a continuous process by which the organization is kept on course.’ An effective school needs smart, strategic and systematic leadership. It needs ‘big picture’ thinkers who can envision the path to the future whilst dealing with the minutiae of the present.

The effective use of ICT has become a central focus in improvements in teaching and learning in schools. It can promote and transform the methods used to deliver education and open up the way to a new pedagogy. What steps then should a leader in ICT take to make sure that teachers use this technology to provide opportunities for students to partake in active, constructive, cumulative, goal-orientated and self-regulated tasks that will engage children and build their confidence (Johnston and Barker, 2002).

Thomas Knoster (2001) provides a simple analysis of the key aspects that are needed in a school to manage change. Change cannot happen without each of these elements together. Vision requires skills and incentives and resources structured in a logical and coherent strategic Action Plan for proper change to be able to take place.

Picking the right team

Question 1: What is the purpose of this team?

There are lots of reasons why you might have set up a specialist ICT team. However, it is essential that before the personnel is selected that you have an idea about what exactly it is that you are attempting to achieve. This means that you need to have a solid idea about the Vision that you wish to promote and the path that you intend to take so that you can best choose the right people for the job.

Question 2: Who best fits this purpose?

Sometimes the computer ‘geek’ or the person who manages the computer system is not the right person for the job. The best leader of this team will be someone who knows and likes computers, who sees their educational value as a tool to support learning and who is innovative and creative in their approach. It is someone who can help to develop all subjects across the curriculum and not just their own. The other members of the team need to be like-minded and need to be people who use and develop their own teaching through the use of ICT. It is also a good idea to have a representative from different subjects so that they can help to lead their department through the change.

Question 3: Can innovators also be leaders?

Usually innovators need to be managed carefully. It is essential to have creative teachers on the team and they need to be pushing the boundaries in their subject area. However, they also need to make sure that they can take a lead and complete a project – many innovators are not completer-finishers, so manage them carefully!

Planning the school vision

Every couple of years, it is important that the ICT team help the school community to re-evaluate the vision for ICT. What technologies we will have in our pocket and be using daily in 2 years time is still up for grabs. However, we do need develop, lead and promote the educational uses of the technology that we currently have available to us. John Davitt (2005) notes that “Each school’s vision . . . is uniquely important because that is the place and context in which students and teachers have to live and work.”

Whose vision is it anyway?

The danger of creating a vision is that it goes out of date quickly. Sometimes the best way to approach this is for the ICT team leader to write up what they see as the main vision for ICT in the school over the next few years. They need to then consult with the ICT team and get their modifications and expectations in the Vision. It is then important that the whole school staff also hear the vision and have an opportunity to respond and comment on the plans. Students too, should be able to access the vision and to make their comments and experiences known. Therefore, the vision starts as a small embryonic thought in the mind of the ICT leader but eventually the ICT Vision ideas make it into the collective consciousness of the whole school community. Alan November (2006) writes that ‘technology is not a vision – learning is.’

Organising useful staff training

“Teachers need to be seen as the managers of learning and less as ‘presenters of learning’.” (Brighouse and Woods, 1999) The most important use of staff development time is to make sure that teachers know how to cope with the pedagogic shifts that are taking place. It is essential that teachers are ‘tooled up’ for the job. They need to have an active and comprehensive knowledge of what the computer can do for them to be able to use the computers to develop their learning resources.

If we want to create a ‘technological revolution’ in our teaching and learning we need to invest the time into training the staff. Careful thought needs to go into any whole-school staff ICT training. Over the years teachers have been subject to various programmes that were supposed to raise standards in ICT. However, the reality is that teachers need time and incentives to develop their own skills. In my own school the incentive was that the school decided to give every teacher a laptop and a digital projector in their classroom. The staff were therefore pretty happy to volunteer for training in how to maximise their use of this technology.

For a long time in schools we taught students how to navigate their way through programmes. We created experts in Word, PowerPoint and Publisher but little else. When a student was then handed a different type of computer, with different software it was difficult for them to transfer their knowledge to use that computer. However, if instead, we teach digital literacies and concentrate on the computer and research skills that students need, we create more ‘progression-ready’ users who can deal with the rapid change in software development a lot better than at present.

Teachers need to be constantly challenged to keep up-to-date. They need to be able to share their experiences and to learn about how other people are using the technology. It is a good idea to share our ideas about how we are using ICT in our particular subjects in ‘ideas fairs’ (Davitt, 2005). Each department should be given a few minutes to show how they use ICT to stimulate the creativity of their students.

Further focused staff development programmes can be built to support some of the ideas that come to the forefront in these ‘ideas fairs’. Sometimes it is better to do this in small ‘faculty’ groups rather than in the whole class setting. Departments that are strong in developing their own ICT resources need to be ‘buddies’ with subjects that are weaker.

Using computers and the internet for teaching and learning requires teachers to share their ideas and resources more than any other time in the past. Teachers need to work together in teams and students will benefit, their learning will be improved and this will lead to increased transparency and learning outside school buildings.

Promoting effective learning through ICT

David Warlick (2006) claims that ‘Learning is taking place through conversation and not delivery’. The tools that students need to leave school with are changing. Students need to be proficient users of computers. They need to be able to find, sort and process information quickly and analyse the bias involved in an article. Many of these are high order thinking skills that students need to develop over time.

It is essential that teachers combine the current advances in ICT with accelerated learning and use the Web 2.0 technologies to allow students to engage with ‘Authentic Audiences’ and receive real, genuine and reflective feedback. Students want to be engaged. They want to be able to take part in creative exercises that stimulate their imagination and allow them to have a final product that they can be proud of and present to others.

John Davitt (2005) has produced some excellent resources in relation to thinking about how ICT can be used to promote accelerated learning. He notes that ICT can help to:

• Lower threat and provide second and third chance learning
• Provide different points of access for learners with different learning styles
• Allow teachers to create, store and deploy multimedia resources and activities to work with different visual, auditory and kinaesthetic modalities
• Provide new ways of making connections – allow students to present their understanding in a media over which they have some mastery, for example, a sound file, a scanned picture, animation and hypertext – a tool to make connections and say ‘that links with that’.
• Provide support and scaffolding , safe within the cradle of the ‘undo command’, giving opportunities for second and third chance learning without the fear of failure or the stress of others seeing that ‘you haven’t got it yet.’

Teachers need time to develop their resources and lesson plans. They need support from ICT specialists. They need time to dream up ideas and to brainstorm these with their department members. They need some ‘creative space’.

Keeping the focus

Derek Wise, headteacher at CramlingtonCommunityHigh school (quoted in Davitt, 2005) notes that ‘Too often, it has been assumed that ICT will transform learning. It won’t if it is being incorporated into a traditional teaching structure but its effects are maximised if it goes hand in hand with changes in teaching and learning.’

Leaders for change need to remember their focus at all times. They often have to realign their ideas and attitudes. They need to keep their copies of the vision and the action plan in full view. They need to take stock from time to time to ensure that they are on the right route.

One method that I have used in the past is to highlight a series of small-scale tasks that we have divided up amongst the ICT team. Each member has a development proposal that they have to create and implement an action plan for. A timetable is created for a short amount of time and team members carry out the project and then review their plan and evaluate it accordingly. This can be carried out on things like improvements to reporting and assessment, instigation of creative learning ICT days, analysis of support in ICT suites and in projects to develop language skills through use of podcasts and penpal projects.

Achieving (and celebrating) your successes.

“Leaders are the stewards of organisational energy. They inspire or demoralise others first by how effectively they manage their own energy and next by how well they mobilise, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead.” (Brighouse and Woods)

It is essential that the ICT team monitor and evaluate the different aspects of their action plan carefully. When successes have been reached – it is important to celebrate these successes. Teachers need and deserve incentives just as much as the students do and should be rewarded for hard work. Students should know that their work is special and valuable and should also be celebrated publicly. For example in a recent Creative ICT day that I ran with all the Year 9 students in my school – the most creative team presentations in each class won a special prize. But, the teachers who had also helped to support the learning also got a special prize. These teachers felt valued and as a result were more than willing to help out again.

Finally, always make sure that you complete a full evaluation with the students and staff involved so that you can learn from any challenges so that the next time things will go a little bit smoother!

References

Futurelab (2006) Vision: Looking at the future of learning, issue 03_2006, Futurelab, Bristol

Hargreaves, A and Fink, D (2006) Sustainable Leadership, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Knoster, T (2001) Presentation at TASH conference, WashingtonDC

Friedman, Thomas L (2006) The World is Flat (updated version), Penguin Books, London

Johnston J and Barker, L.T. (Eds) (2002) Assessing the impact of technology in teaching and learning: a sourcebook for evaluators, The Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Davitt, J (2005) New Tools for Learning, Network Educational Press, Stafford

Leigh, A (1994) ‘Change and leadership’ in

Bennett, N; Glatter, R and Levacic, R (1994) Improving Educational management through research and consultancy, Paul Chapman Publishing, London

Warlick D, (2006) quoted in Curtis, D (2006) Online Learning Communities in i.e. magazine, August 2006

Brighouse, T and Woods, D (1999) How to improve your school, Routledge, London

November, A (2006) Education Essentials Checklist for School leaders, November Learning, Marblehead, MA

Tim Manson is the ICT Strategy Leader for SlemishCollege in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. He gained a MEd in Educational Leadership and Management in 2002 and is advancing his leadership skills in the NPQH programme. Check out his blog at