Ideas for stimulating teachers to integrate technology into their teaching

In the last post I mentioned that I will be talking about my ideas to stimulate teachers to think about technology integration in their teaching.

Integrating technology into content and pedagogy is a creative task. A teacher is an education designer at the micro level. She has the context of her school and classroom, she has her audience as children, she has her goals as the standards to be achieved and like a designer and she needs to design a relevant and effective lesson plan which teaches the required concept through and appropriate pedagogy using appropriate technology. It can be just her using it or better, helping her students use it to arrive at an understanding about the topic being taught.

This is no simple task and is a skill learnt over time with practice. It requires creativity, to think differently than the normal and to push oneself into an uncomfortable zone, which teachers usually resist. It means trying out new things, being comfortable with failures and mistakes and learning on the job. i.e.  while teaching.

Why would teachers want to be creative? How can we as educational designers create environments where teachers become more creative and have fun being curious and discovering new things? One of the critical factors is the school environment. Some systems can kill creativity and other ones can foster it. If creativity, innovation, critical thinking is valued, then the members of that system soon learn to adopt it.

Integrating technology can cause chaos in the beginning. Teachers will try different pedagogies and content. They will try to use different activities and in the process accept some and reject some. This can only happen in a school context which accepts that chaos is inevitable, but out of this chaos will come the real semblance of the order. An order which is developed and owned by teachers themselves. So the first idea is a nurturing environment which encourages creativity and exploration!

The second idea seeing is believing. It means that to get conviction into something is difficult if just talked about as a concept. We need a live example, a model or a demonstration that it works. Therefore it can be liberating to show teachers an example of technology integration into teaching. Therefore observations  and site visits of other schools and classrooms doing it is an important way to open minds to re-look at their current way of thinking of teachers and breaking the belief that it is not possible.

Easy access and a repertoire is the basis for stimulating teachers to think about any technology. For example, how a camera, a digi board, a CD rom, a TV can be used. Just letting teachers fidget and explore these technologies can get them thinking of ideas as to when, where and how these can be used.

Another important way of stimulating teachers is talk about technology integration, to dialogue about the issues and challenges and possible solutions. Dialogue helps teachers put into words their fears, apprehensions, constraints and all the barriers they have towards technology. It can be insightful for both teachers and for the education designers – the education designers can know what are the resistance and can address them through dialogue or other interventions.

The fifth idea or strategy is to always start with few enthusiastic teachers. There are always two or three teachers who know and are willing to know technology integration. Once these teachers start doing, slowly a critical mass will develop. These catalysts will talk about the benefits and slowly the other bunch of non doers will be forced to think about it.

Stimulation increases with participation and ownership. Teachers need to feel the need for technology integration. If it is just imposed, technology just might be used, but not integrated. Teachers need to own the process of integration. It might be in making ICT policy at school or making new curriculum with technology or just simply using the technology. They need to be in charge of the process. The others as school administration and management and experts should be on the periphery to provide support as and when needed.

An interesting aspect is of all these ideas/ strategies/ approaches is that one needs to understand where teachers are and what are their barriers and therefore slowly try and address these. Each of these ideas can be used as a part of professional development program, in the organizational structure. A combination of these ideas can definitely help teachers shed their old ways of thinking and being more creative in their use of technology in their classrooms rather than just using them. 

Reflections on process of course design and working with TPACK

Process of designing a course as an education designer and working with TPACK:

In the last leg of this course, we took up the role of an education designer to design a professional development course or a lesson plan based on TPACK in groups of four people. Our group decided to work on teacher professional development program based on TPACK. We had to present it last week  to the class. We also have to write individual reflections on it. This blog post and the next one will be dedicated to my reflections on doing this assignment. This blog post will deal with my reflections on the process of designing the course as an education designer and working with TPACK. The next blog post will deal with my ideas to stimulate teachers to integrate and not just use technology in classrooms.

Designing this course was one of the best parts in the entire course on Pedagogies for flexible learning supported by technology. It challenged me to think and apply all that we have learnt about TPACK, professional development, designing, technology integration etc. It was interesting for me also from a different point of view. I have been co –designing professional development programs in India both for the organization I work and for governmental school principals. However, what I always felt a need for was a frame work for reference, for guidance to make decisions regarding content and pedagogy. There was very little technology used in these programs. I lacked the systematic, scientific way of thinking, designing, measuring etc. This experience was different.  Though the context was a fictitious one, I learnt how theory and frameworks can guide systematic thinking and designing. TPACK being one of them. We borrowed a lot from the course, the reading materials and from the model of TPACK itself. I will talk about this more in the section of ‘working with TPACK’.

A robust analysis of the context, the needs of the learners, the key stakeholders and a good framework for designing and evaluation is half the job done. For me a thorough understanding of the context, the needs are critical to designing relevant and effective programs. Programs which do not address the needs of the learners are not appreciated well. However, I also feel that this was not the real case and therefore I guess we could make a assumptions suited to our design.  For example, we said teachers are sufficiently motivated, but not confident or skilled. It can be both, that because teachers are not confident, they are also not motivated to try. I guess, it would still be a challenge to design a course in a real life situation for a real school!

Of course, the implementation has its own complexities, but a detail planning and thorough design leaves less room for errors. We did pay a lot of attention to the details in the context and found it vital for our design. This also helped us in therefore defining our goals and activities with ease.

While we did refer to the theories and used it in our course design, what I think could be improved was to formulate design principles based on the context (needs analysis) and different theories including TPACK. This would be more helpful to show explicit connections from theory to design to implementation.  

It seems like we made our assignment simple by deleting the motivation issues of the teacher, in retrospect, even tackling self efficacy issues, I think is not simple. I really like that we focused on improving skills and giving positive experiences to teachers to improve their confidence in integrating technology in classrooms. We strongly therefore suggested to begin from whatever technology the teachers knew and to integrate that first and slowly learn other technologies. Small successes give real boost to self confidence and motivation of teachers.

Another interesting aspect was our role as education designer. In our assignment we said that we, education designers were also the instructors. In my work experience, this is the reality. I was an education designer, an instructor or trainer and the manager for implementation all three at the same time. So I designed, then I delivered and simultaneously managed other things like logistics and bringing in experts etc. This was quite challenging and quite stressful. But it can be true. Gradually as the program became more complex, there were experts as instructors and I had a team to manage aspects of logistics.

Evaluation was something which I feel was another area where we made some good design. We thought of instruments which not only measure knowledge on the seven domains of TPACK, but also the attitudes and beliefs. Especially as our design focused on changing the beliefs and self efficacy of teachers towards technology, it was important to measure its progress both in a formative and summative ways.

I really enjoyed the process of working in the group. I think there are new ideas, complementary skills, more creativity when collaborating on an assignment as challenging as this. I enjoyed the process with my classmates and felt as if I added value despite coming from a completely different context.

Working with TPACK:

Working with TPACK as a framework for integrating technology into the professional development course was easy. The ease lies in its simplicity. It is a generic model and therefore makes integration and achieving TPACK looks a lot more simplistic than what is in reality. Being simple and generic has its positives. Almost anybody who works with teachers or is a teacher can understand it and cannot disagree with it.  The model in itself is easy. One can start from any of the circles and one has to ensure that each of the circle and its interrelations are developed to attain TPACK. Yet, the challenge is in the how of reaching TPACK. It’s not as simple as the framework itself. For example, in the course we developed, the C was TPACK, the P was collaborative learning and experiential learning and the T was an online portal with resources. Yet how teachers use it and how they reflect on it is critical to transform their own thinking about the T, the C and the P. The only way to demonstrate the interrelations was to demonstrate it in their own learning process. Even theory says that each of the seven domains can’t be learnt independently. They have to be learnt by doing.  Most teachers are aware that PCK is achieved after a lot of teaching practice and making mistakes. Similarly TCK and TPK would be also achieved through trial and error, experimentation and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t.

The only way therefore to ensure TPACK is to constantly do it and learn it. However this has implications and this is where a supportive context, environment and constant scaffolding are needed. The pre requisite for this experimentation is a secure environment where teachers are not pre occupied to bring results. Yes learning performance is important, but it will come as a result of improving learning process or environment. It’s seen that initially when teachers are learning new things, the learning levels of the children in their classroom dips instead of increasing. The school leadership and management should be able to understand and empathize with this. Once teachers are confident and have learnt new ways, it does bring remarkable differences in the learning environment and learner levels.

Another interesting thing about TPACK is that it’s complimentary to other theories about learning by doing, collaborative learning, and teachers as reflective practioneers. To help teachers build their professional competencies, the content is best taught by collaboration, design, implement, evaluate cycle, plan, enact, and reflect cycle. Collaboration and professional learning communities and their contributions in giving teachers on-going support are well researched and proven. And the use of online portals, blogs, online professional communities and web based tools for planning, evaluation and reflections are examples of how technology can be used to make it more flexible and suited to teacher’s needs. Thus TPACK as a framework helps bring all these components together to design an environment where teachers can see how it is integrated and used for their own learning.

TPACK is achieved as a result of neatly defined processes for tackling beliefs, improving skills, starting from the strengths of where teachers are, creating small successes to increase motivation, all within a supportive, and nurturing environment. This helps teacher to be creative and creativity, as my next blog post will show is really essential to attain TPACK.

Therefore though the model appears simplistic, it is now, after designing a course do I realize that it’s not as simple to attain TPACK. It’s a combination of addressing individual and contextual factors that make attaining TPACK with teachers possible.