After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

Dear Folks,

Our beginning of the year assessments window has closed. Our district requires a battery of assessments at the beginning of the year for all students in a classroom. On my grade level, second, that works out to be six different tests: three in language arts and three in mathematics. That’s a lot of tests. The Dibels Benchmark test and the sight word recognition test require me to do each child individually. Even though the others can be given in a group testing situation, that still calls for a great deal of time to grade them and then record all the scores electronically by hand.

Our district requires that all students be enrolled in Pearson’s SuccessMaker suite of computer guided instruction. Every child has to be enrolled in Math Concepts and Skills 2.  It is left to teacher discretion to enroll students needing reading support in the reading components of SuccessMaker. That’s a lot of computer time on a weekly basis.

Two weeks ago, our annual Parents’ Curriculum Night took place.

Wow! All this had to take place in the first four weeks of school.

It is no wonder teachers in my building don’t take advantage of the professional development programs in technology use and integration that I put in place. It is no wonder that they don’t take advantage of the various professional development opportunities that are available at the various on-line subscription services we have, like Discovery Education. It is no wonder I find it hard to think up creative professional development opportunities that draw the teachers in my building like sweet things draw the hornet population around our school.

I find my “planning” time for technology fractured into very small time periods. Waiting in my doctor’s office, yesterday, I managed to get about 15 minutes of planning done. I got up early this morning to input some of my assessment data on-line. I was efficient in doing that, so now I have a few moments before leaving for work to think and plan again.

The one theme I keep coming back to is that technology should not make my job more difficult. I can’t “sell” that to my teachers who are struggling just as much as I am to complete assessments and to get the data put on line and into a couple of different spreadsheets that administration requires. These requirements are time consuming, tedious, and distracting.

All three of those conditions will kill any initiative, especially learning to integrate technology into everyday instruction. The required assessments and recording of data leaves a “bad taste in the mouth”. The experience generalizes over into teacher attitudes toward technology in general, “Technology means more work for me.”

It is no wonder that I feel like I’m swimming upstream every time I want to provide technology support through professional development opportunities!

I’ve decided that this year, that I’d try to focus more on integrating. We now have projected learning technology, sound systems, document cameras, and projectors, in every classroom. Some classrooms have SMARTboards, also. Instead of opportunities to learn SMART Notebook software or how to search for subject matter on Discovery Education, I want to incorporate all of these tools together so that teachers get a feel for the richness of educational opportunities that they can offer in their own classrooms.

I’ve got my job cut out for me. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do it or where is an appropriate place to begin. I still have to juggle my own second grade classroom, and our K-4 building has a mind boggling array of variables in the needs of the classrooms, grade levels, and technology proficiency levels of the teachers.

What I do have this year is a different focus, “integration”. There won’t be anymore professional development on specific use of whatever. It will all have to be designed towards making technology use simple, enriching, and rewarding. If it makes teaching hard by creating more work or things to have to think about, It won’t be useful.

Technology should and can make our jobs of preparing young minds easier, more successful, and require about as much effort as we put into everyday things, like choosing whether to use your fork or spoon.

Yours,

Lee

One of the most memorable books I’ve read about technology and the change process is The Children’s Machine by Seymour Papert. I’m giving away a hint of my age by admitting to having read this book when it first came out. It wasn’t a book giving “how to” tips or describing the latest tools coming to a monitor screen near you. It is much more timeles considering it was first published in 1993.

Instead, this was a “BIG” ideas book, a philosophical book looking into the benefits of technology to the next generation and examining the change process involved in giving technology to our children.

What has stuck with me over the years has been Papert’s analysis of the change process. Why do so many “good” ideas seem to flourish for a little while only to whither and die? Why do so many teachers cynically say if you teach long enough you’ll see it all come back into vogue again.

In my own district, I’ve watched numerous incentives become the hot topic of the day, lived through a lot of staff development, only to see us move on to something else. Years ago a lot of us were extensively trained in TESA (Teacher Expectations & Student Achievement – here’s a link to a summary of what TESA is http://www.hotchalk.com/mydesk/index.php/math-matters/537-teacher-expectations-student-achievement-). After the push to train us, time, energy, expectations, and resources gradually dwindled away.

The younger teachers in our building have never heard of or know what TESA is. But the new hot topic is a peer observational program called a Walk-Through which bears a remarkable similarity to TESA.

Papert inferred that this kind of change process where “new” ideas are embraced, encouraged, and gradually left to whither and die was like an immunological response to the change process.

Nowhere have I seen this pattern repeated more often than in bringing technology innovation to our children.  Why is this?

I suggest that it is a lack of vision that is the culprit.  People have trouble articulating a cohesive vision as to how technology is more than an add-on to an existing curriculum. It is not visualized as a critical tool for thinking, creating, and learning. It is more like the frosting on a cake in most classrooms.

Some might like to suggest that this is the fault of the Trail-Blazing, Pioneer folk in the building. They aren’t vocal enough to encourage the rest of us to leave our safe, comfy havens that we’ve acquired through years of teaching.

I listened to a number of really intelligent presenters at eTech Ohio talk about publicizing what you do with technology. It is not enough to just “tell” your building administrator. I think you have to push them out of their comfort zone.

If you’ve been around as long as I have, you know that administrators are the real “gate keepers” in a school district. Funding for equipment, software, and supplies is non-existent unless your request somehow fits into the administrator’s idea of where the building should be headed. Sometimes, even small grants from your local PTA or school foundation must be vetted first by the building administrator.

Administrators are also the people who will make or break technology professional development in a building. If technology professional development is not an integral component of whatever the PD plan is for your building or district, it just doesn’t happen expediently in your school.

Administrators are not the only obstacle to technology PD in a building. Let’s face it, teachers own part of this problem. Teachers tend to not attend PD if they are not required to do that. We’re all busy, have too much to do, and keep getting more paperwork required by the state or national government. A teacher’s time is finite, and most of us are not looking for anything else to do.

However, the building and district administrators are responsible for encouraging technology use and for facilitating the professional development that will stimulate integration of existing technology resources into teaching and instruction.

So, how do you effect change in a system that tends to surround technology development with a great deal of “antibodies” waiting to engulf and divert the change process?

Well, I believe it has to begin with the one with a vision, whether that is the local tech guru, a group of teachers who find inspiration working together, or the teacher that just happens to attend some conference and was exposed to an idea that might transform her teaching through the use of the technology currently found in her room. Whoever that is, he or she has to get the word out to the rest of us.

I appreciate DE revising and broadening the idea of what an “event” is that qualifies for Star Educator certification. The changes addressed what is the real secret and power behind the change process, the power of informal communication among the educational staff. The sharing of ideas for technology use over lunch or within the framework of the teachers’ common planning time is a powerful tool in the change process.

It would be an wonderful world where every administrator embraced new ideas and understood how valuable integration of technology is in instruction. I would, indeed, believe I’d died and gone to heaven if technology integration was a permanent part of each professional development session I attended. Real world concerns, however, sometimes makes that impossible. In the pursuit of meeting state and federal mandates, administrators sometimes have to balance between what might be helpful with that which must be done.

 That is what I believe is the real “antibody” that continues to surround the idea of technology becoming an integral part of instruction. My job is to not give up hope but  to continue waging guerrilla warfare on those pressures by finding ways to encourage teachers to confront their comfort zone by providing resources and timely support.

The day of  having a mandatory PD session solely devoted to using technology with students is gone. Instead, new ways to change teaching practices must be explored. Thanks go to DE for recognizing this and allowing its STARS to find their way in their buildings with their administrators.

Sometimes, the change process starts with one individual.