Abstract
Digital learning tools are increasingly prevalent in classrooms, yet too often technology integration efforts by educators replicate rather than transform traditional instructional practices. Opportunities to take advantage of the new affordances that technologies bring to the learning environment thus become forfeit. Administrators’ use of a targeted discussion protocol can be helpful for facilitating analysis and revision of educators’ technology-infused lessons and units. This article describes how administrators in schools and preservice preparation programs can utilize such a protocol to enhance their instructional leadership and foster the success of their schools’ technology integration and implementation efforts.
Keywords
Calls for school administrators to be technology leaders in their schools and districts have existed for a long while. For instance, a decade and a half ago, Byrom and Bingham (2001) stated that school administrators were the “single most important factor affecting schools’ successful integration of technology” (p. 4). Similarly, in a national study of nearly 1,000 schools that gave their students laptops for use both at school and at home (so-called “1:1 computing” initiatives”), Greaves, Hayes, Wilson, Gielniak, and Peterson (2012) found that principal training and change management leadership by principals were two of nine key implementation factors in successful technology-rich learning environments. Researchers such as Anderson and Dexter (2005); Machado and Chung (2015); McLeod, Richardson, and Sauers (2015); and Piper and Hardesty (2005) have noted the vital importance of administrators’ technology-oriented leadership, as have practitioner-oriented organizations such as the International Society for Technology in Education (2015), the Consortium for School Networking (Kellogg & Vockley, 2008), and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2006).
Unfortunately, despite the calls for greater digital leadership and the increasing prevalence of learning technologies in classrooms, we often find that educators’ technology integration efforts remain mostly replicative rather than transformative. In school after school, we see students and teachers doing the same things that they used to do in analog classrooms—but with more expensive tools—rather than taking advantage of the new affordances that the technologies bring to the learning environment. Even in schools that have adequate Internet bandwidth and numerous student computing devices, we regularly see little change in student, teacher, or administrator practice.
The educational leadership research literature has not helped much. Despite three decades of learning technologies in classrooms and management technologies in school systems, the extant body of research on school administrators’ digital leadership remains quite sparse (McLeod & Richardson, 2011). We do know more broadly, however, that administrators’ instructional leadership is critical to the success of initiatives intended to positively affect classroom learning and teaching (see, for example, Blase & Blase, 1998; Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). If we wish to see learning benefits from the digital tools in our school systems, we must begin to map existing understandings and practices from other instructional leadership areas into technology-related domains.
One such high-impact instructional practice may be the use of protocols. Like in other professional fields such as medicine and venture capital (see, for example, Gawande, 2009), protocols in education have been found to be useful for a variety of tasks, including examining student work (Easton, 2009), observing classrooms (Annenberg Institute for School Reform, 2004), and facilitating educators’ professional dialogue (McDonald, Mohr, Dichter, & McDonald, 2007). When it comes to students’ and teachers’ technology integration, administrative use of a discussion protocol can be particularly helpful for facilitating analysis and revision of educators’ lessons and units. The Technology-Rich Unit Design and Classroom Observation Template (trudacot) was created to help administrators and teachers have robust conversations that move classroom technology integration efforts beyond replication (McLeod & Graber, 2015).
Beyond Replication
At the heart of the trudacot template is the idea that technology integration should be purposeful. When students and educators use digital technologies for learning and teaching, those uses should be intentional and targeted, not simply “technology for technology’s sake.” In other words, educators should be able to answer the question “Technology for the purpose of what?” The trudacot template contains sets of questions that allow educators to think critically and purposefully about their technology integration. These question sets emphasize four key desired instructional outcomes: deeper learning, greater student agency, more authentic work, and richer technology integration that facilitates the other three outcomes.
For example, if a class activity was using learning technologies for the purposes of enhancing personalization or enabling greater student agency and choice, the types of questions that teachers and administrators could ask to see whether those purposes were being accomplished might include the following:
Learning Goals: Who selected what is being learned?
Learning Activity: Who selected how it is being learned?
Assessment of Learning: Who selected how students demonstrate their knowledge and skills and how that will be assessed?
Initiative: Do students have the opportunity to initiate, be entrepreneurial, be self-directed, and/or go beyond given parameters of the learning task or environment?
Technology Usage: Who is the primary user of the technology?
In contrast, if teachers and administrators wanted students to use digital technologies for the purpose of enabling them to do more authentic, real-world work, the types of questions that educators would ask to see whether those purposes were being accomplished would be different from those previously mentioned and might include the following:
Real or Fake: Is student work authentic and reflective of that done by real people outside of school?
Domain Knowledge: Are students learning discipline-specific and -relevant knowledge, skills, and dispositions? If yes, is student work focused around big, important themes and concepts that are central to the discipline rather than isolated topics, trivia, or minutiae?
Domain Technologies: Are students utilizing discipline-specific and -relevant tools and technologies? (e.g., using the real tools that historians, scientists, writers, artists, business professionals, and so on use)
Contribution: Does student work make a contribution to an audience beyond the classroom walls to the outside world?
Similarly, if a lesson or unit integrated learning technologies for the purposes of facilitating students’ deeper thinking, creativity, or metacognition, the types of questions that administrators and teachers would ask to see whether those purposes were being accomplished might include the following:
Deeper Thinking: Do learning activities and assessments allow students to engage in critical thinking and complex, messy (not simple) problem solving?
Creativity: Do students have the opportunity to design, create, make, or otherwise add value that is unique to them?
Metacognition: Do students have the opportunity to reflect on their planning, thinking, work, and/or progress? If yes, can students identify what they are learning, not just what they are doing?
The trudacot discussion protocol is different from TPACK (Koehler & Mishra, 2009), SAMR (Puentedura, 2006), and some of the other dominant but more general technology integration frameworks currently in existence. Although conceptually useful, neither TPACK nor SAMR, for instance, are very detailed when it comes to helping teachers think about what to revise to improve their technology integration efforts. The trudacot template attempts to get at some specific, concrete “look-fors” that can help teachers think about what instructional changes they might make in their lessons or activities. The most powerful usage of the trudacot protocol occurs when administrators and teachers get beyond merely answering the questions in a particular section and instead begin using the questions to help them frame their instructional redesign work. For instance, when a principal or teaching peer asks an educator “What if you wanted the answer to this question to be yes instead of no?” or “What if you wanted the answer to this question to be the student instead of the teacher, how could we get there?”, that can spark powerful conversations that shift teachers’ conceptions about instructional depth and robust technology usage.
Using the Trudacot Protocol for Instructional Redesign
The trudacot template includes annotations, related resources, and tips for usage (McLeod & Graber, 2015). First and foremost, administrators and teachers should focus on just one or two sections of the protocol for a particular lesson or unit. The trudacot protocol is long and complex and can be overwhelming to classroom educators upon initial exposure. It is helpful to view the sections of the trudacot template as experiences that schools would like students to have over the course of their school year and academic program. For instance, most school systems want students to have multiple opportunities to engage in deeper thinking, do authentic work, have greater agency, utilize technology to foster communication and collaboration skills, and so on. For a particular unit or activity, however, a teacher may choose to focus on a single section or even a single question, with the intent of addressing other domains at other times. Administrators should honor the intentionality of teachers’ technology integration decision-making instead of viewing the trudacot template as a long checklist of characteristics that should be present in a teacher’s lesson.
Experience using the trudacot protocol over the past 2 years has shown that it is best used as an up-front brainstorming, idea-generating, and design tool, not as an after-the-fact judgment mechanism. Administrators and teachers should focus their conversations around revision and change, not on evaluation. One suggestion for introducing the trudacot template to educators is to use the resources provided by the Arizona K12 Center (2012a) or Florida Center for Instructional Technology (2011) for initial analysis and discussion. The Arizona Technology Integration Matrix contains 50 grade-level and subject-specific technology-infused lesson plans with accompanying videos. The older Florida Technology Integration Matrix contains another 100 lesson plans and videos. A principal and teachers could, for example, read over the Places People Lived: Houses Then and Now elementary-level lesson plan (Arizona K12 Center, 2012b) and then watch the accompanying video together as a large group. In small groups, teachers then could answer the questions in the Personalization and Agency sections of the trudacot template about the lesson. Once they come to agreement about what they are seeing, teachers then can identify a couple of bullet points that might be good levers for transformation and generate ideas for shifting the lesson so that it is more student-driven rather than teacher-driven. Powerful instructional redesign conversations typically occur when administrators facilitate teacher conversations around the question “If we wanted the answer(s) to these question(s) to be different, how could we redesign this activity or unit to make that desired answer happen instead?” By first using the trudacot template with lessons that are not local, administrators can minimize educators’ defensiveness and model the types of discussions that later should happen with their own lessons and units. Teacher receptivity to technology-related change also is enhanced when the discussion is around accomplishment of desired purposes rather than trying to place themselves at a particular achievement level related to their technology integration (see, for example, Puentedura, 2006).
If school administrators want teachers to meaningfully integrate technology into their instruction, they must grant their educators reasonable time and space to change and evolve their classroom practices. Schools that are finding success with their technology integration efforts are finding that digitally-enhanced learning spaces often require substantial shifts in both mindsets and actions (Lemke & Coughlin, 2009; McLeod, 2014). Classroom teachers deserve an administrative focus on growth over time as they work on areas in which to shift their instructional technology practices and build upon their previous successes. They also deserve targeted supports and conversations that allow them to understand and effectively implement new pedagogical and technological expectations.
It is important for school administrator preparation programs to model these types of instructional technology conversations and supports with preservice school leaders. As noted in this journal several years ago, it is not enough for educational leadership faculty to use digital technologies to teach traditional educational leadership content or to train school administrators to better use digital technologies themselves. Educational leadership programs also must prepare school administrators to be better technology leaders, able to “create and support learning environments for P-12 students that prepare them for the digital, global world in which we now live” (McLeod, Bathon, & Richardson, 2011, p. 292; see also McLeod & Richardson, 2013). Utilizing the trudacot protocol to foster discussions about rich, robust, purposeful integration of learning technologies can help educational leadership faculty and programs accomplish their goal of preparing school leaders who are able to facilitate the success of technology-rich learning environments.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
The trudacot discussion protocol is open source and very much a work in progress. Feel free to use and/or modify it as desired. The more people that we have looking at and working with the protocol, the more useful it can become. Let us know how you are using it and help us make it better.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
">
dangerouslyirrelevant.org
.