Nuestra Tierra: a University/Public School Technology Integration Project

Project Design and Implementation

University faculty worked collaboratively with district administrators and teachers from what turned out to be first-year schools to write the initial grant proposal to the USWEST foundation. As soon as the project was selected for funding, teachers, administrators, and university representatives met to plan for the first year of the project. The district had already invested in technology infrastructure, and this helped make the implementation of this project possible, although fully connecting schools took longer than expected. Principals were asked to select teacher leaders for the project who were innovative and had a reputation for good teaching, regardless of their technology experience. At the high school and middle school, teachers were also selected to represent a cross-disciplinary approach to learning and included those who taught social studies, language arts, science, and technology. Not all of these principal selections turned out to be optimum. We had assumed that since we were working with high minority populations the principals would select more non-Anglos as reflective of the school population, but this was often not the case. Several of the teachers selected were also not held in high regard by other teachers in their school which caused problems later in the project.

No advanced placement or special education classrooms were chosen for participation. However, many of the classrooms, as indicated in Table 1 below, included students for whom English was not their native language. The eighth grade sheltered social studies class at Sierra was chosen because students had consistently scored lowest in the school on the history chapter tests and the project staff felt this group would be especially benefited by the introduction of technology. The Newcomer high school ESL program consisted of students who had been in the United States for less than one year. The district provided 15 computers in this classroom for the 30 students enrolled. This was also an excellent opportunity to see if technology integration could assist language learning. Table 1 shows the schools selected, the lead teachers' classrooms, the number of additional teachers mentored by the lead teachers at each school, and the number of students and community members involved.

Table 1 - Project Participants.
School	Lead Teachers' Classrooms	Additional Teachers Served	Students Served	Community Involvement
Oñate High School	Technology * History English * Science	100 teachers	400 students	30 pre-service teachers, 4 additional volunteers
Sierra Middle School	Technology * Social Studies * English * Science *	50 teachers	160 students	Two parent classes of 40, 5 volunteers, 10 student teachers
Jornada Elementary	3-5 Multiage * 3-5 Multiage 3-5 Multiage Fifth Grade	35 teachers	700 students	20 Parent volunteers, 5 student teachers
Desert Hills	Fifth Grade Fifth Grade * Third Grade First Grade	15 teachers	100 students directly 500 indirectly	4 parent volunteers, 5 student teachers
NewComer High School Program	2 ESL Teachers Monlingual Spanish Program	Inservice for 15 bilingual/ESL	35 students	2 volunteers
Zia Middle School	Social Studies * Mathematics English Technology * Science	15 teachers	-	-
New Mexico State University	Teacher Education Program	15 faculty	Teacher Education Students 100	500 people at conferences

* Classes which were either dual language (Spanish/English) or had a majority of non-native English speakers.

In addition to the university research team described earlier, New Mexico State University (NMSU) provided strong support for this study. Three university departments collaborated on the project. In addition to the Curriculum and Instruction technology program, Nolan Gray, director of the Learning Resource Center (LRC) and Jeanne Gleason, director of the Agricultural Communications Department served as co-principle investigators for the study. The LRC director, with the help of a graduate assistant, set up and maintained the UNIX server which provided electronic connections between the university and the project schools. By the end of the first year, with additional support from the college's Computing and Networking Department, email and web access were provided to all participants. The file server was given to the public schools at the end of the project and still serves as their email manager. The Agriculture Communications Department developed and maintained our web page, provided technical training for project-wide workshops, and documented the project through videotaping.

Nine teachers in three schools, representing an elementary, middle and high school, participated as teacher leaders during the first year. Community volunteers and parents were also recruited to work with staff and teachers in each of the first year schools. Fourteen teacher leaders, representing three additional schools, were added during the second year. The twenty-three teachers selected represented a wide-range of different instructional areas as can be seen in Table 1. Six of the 23 teachers were Latino or Latina. The rest were Anglo. All teachers were paid small monthly stipends and given one day per month of substitute time to work on the project. Teachers were paid for an additional week of curriculum planning in the summer. Professional Development
Managing the project began by assessing: 1) the knowledge of teachers and principals regarding technology integration with teaching, and 2) the technical and human infrastructure at each school. Based on this and project goals, professional development workshops were planned for all participants. During these monthly workshops, constructivist models for using technology for content learning were demonstrated and participants were given extensive opportunities to use and modify these models. Principals and/or assistant principals were asked to attend these workshops with their teachers and attended at least half of the sessions. Workshops in September, October, November, and December of the first year provided teachers and administrators with the basic abilities needed to support teaching with telecommunications, multimedia, and integrated software packages. Software modeled in the workshops, such as Microsoft Works and HyperStudio, were provided to the schools as part of the grant so that what they learned in the workshops supported their development work in the classroom. Extensive follow-up support in the classrooms was provided weekly by the university research team.

None of the workshops focused solely on the technology tools. Rather, the use of technology for learning within a constructivist, culturally-relevant approach was emphasized. The initial workshops were held at New Mexico State University due to the availability of reliable instructional computing labs with Internet connections and multimedia capability. One example which demonstrates the nature of the instruction provided was a water project, a relevant topic for this desert community. Using the world wide web (www), teams of teachers from each school, along with their principals or vice-principals, worked together to research water conservation and then presented the results of their research using a multimedia tool. The multimedia tool had been taught during a previous workshop by guiding participants to develop interactive maps and create time-lines. These types of models worked well and were easily adapted by the participating teachers. In spite of some of our concerns about mixing teachers from primary through high school for project workshops, the teachers consistently reported enjoying the opportunity to learn from each other across the different grade levels and content areas.

The December workshop in the first year ended with the collaborative development by all participants of project objectives for the Spring. Schools were now ready to focus on implementation of the project at their school sites. It was decided that project-wide workshops would be held every other month with school-based workshops held at each site during the alternate months.

Implementation of a Constructivist Approach to Technology Use
One of the most important changes computer technology can bring to a classroom is the opportunity to change the paradigm of instruction and learning from a teacher-centered approach, where information is handed to students, to a student-centered one in which knowledge is discovered and constructed by the students (Gunter, Estes & Schwab, 1990). Dewey noted the value of this type of instruction decades before the advent of the computer in the classroom (Dewey, 1938). Using this approach, students are given the opportunity to construct knowledge for themselves as much as possible and take a greater role in the educational process. In addition, teachers were encouraged to tap student and community experiences as part of their design for learning activities (Moll, Amanti, Neff, &Gonzales, 1992 ). Teachers worked on developing lessons which began with students' experiences and tapped into community resources and problems that might create more meaningful learning opportunities for all. Groups who have been disadvantaged by schools and traditional instructional approaches, such as language minority students, were a special concern for those who developed this study. In response to the increased diversity that will continue to be present in our schools, technology models needed to be developed which worked well for diverse populations. Since Sandin was particularly interested in the development of literacy for ESL students, he decided to collaborate with the teacher of the eighth grade sheltered social studies class to investigate how the students perceived learning social studies after using computers. This study took place during the first half of year two.

Social studies provided a way to organize the teaching of content, although English, Reading, Science, Technology and Spanish were also taught through a social studies focus. Butler & Clouse (1994) note that one of the best results of using technology in social studies classrooms is increased student interest in the subject. It was hypothesized that using interesting technology, such as games, simulations and interactive media, would increase students' interest in social studies . Our project introduced these media into the classroom along with increased opportunities for student choice and participation in the learning of meaningful content.

Initial Observations and Adjustments
These approaches involving constructivist learning and respect for students' experiences differ considerably from the traditional educational practices that had been observed in the classrooms at the beginning of the project, especially at the high school level. Early field notes described teachers who were taking total responsibility for student learning, even while attempting to individualize their instruction and integrate computer activities. The traditional teacher lecture model is strongly embedded at the high-school level, Sandin wrote in his field notes during the early days of the project. Teacher behavior indicated they felt the need to control everything in the learning experiences of their students which made it extremely difficult to implement new computer-based learning. Dwyer, Rngstaff, and Sandholtz in the ACOT studies had reported similar problems as teachers began to integrate technology using traditional management approaches (1992). Even in the multiage classrooms at the elementary school, which we had chosen for their professed innovative pedagogy, the teachers were taking too much responsibility for directing every student at every moment. The problem of lectures only was compounded in those classrooms with large numbers of language minority children. Wiburg and Sandin observed that at the beginning of this project often a third to a half of the class were simply not participating in classroom learning. While these students were mostly quiet and well-behaved, they were not learning any content. We felt that teachers were working too hard to meet each studentÕs individual needs without changing the learning environment in the classroom so that each student would take more responsibility for learning. If the teacher continued to run a teacher-centered classroom, introducing a new way of learning with computers would be difficult.

A teacher-friendly solution to the classroom management problem emerged from the middle-school team. The team leader, Margie Sharp, a veteran of twenty-four years of teaching, had once used centers in her elementary classroom. With her elementary students she had developed a method in which students were guided toward taking responsibility for completing a set of learning tasks. Wiburg worked with Sharp and the other middle-school teachers at Sierra to design and implement what became known as a Òproject-centerÓ approach (Sharp and Parra, 1997). Thematic lessons were designed in which students were asked to complete a variety of tasks, some of which required computer use and others which did not, but all of which centered around problems to be solved. This project approach was integrated into the project professional development workshops and slowly implemented at all three school sites. This model allowed students to work through the tasks at their own pace, evaluating and checking off their own work as they progressed, and meeting periodically with their teacher supervisor for collaborative evaluation. After an initial period of adjustment and hand-holding, project teachers began to see how much more effective teaching with computers and communication technologies could be when students are given the chance to direct their learning experiences and when technology is given an integral role in supporting content learning.

Managing Change
From the beginning, this project had been designed and was shared with participants as a research and development project. Teachers were told that we were attempting to find out what would happen if a university and school team collaborated to provide technical assistance and instructional support to teachers and students in classrooms. A structure had been developed which allowed the various stakeholders to make continuous changes in order to improve their effectiveness in integrating technology. Individual schools were helped to make adjustments to their own unique needs through the support of the university mentors who met weekly with each school team and worked with teachers in classrooms. A management team, consisting of district administrators, university departmental representatives, teachers in first year schools, and the university research team met monthly and were able to quickly reorganize and refine project activities on the basis of school input. This approach supported Fullan's (1996) suggestion that participants must be assisted in recognizing problems and quickly implementing suggested changes to improve practice.

Not all changes came as a result of what teachers and administrators perceived to be their needs. When the university research team first worked in schools, they were initially seen as an outside resource people who were there to "teach the technology". As soon as this problem was noted, Wiburg, Sandin and Saxton met with the teachers and principal at their respective schools to discuss the problem and implement a new team-teaching approach. A university researcher might model a single lesson, but teachers were expected to join in the lesson and take over as quickly as possible. It was soon understood that unless the work was collaborative, the integration strategies and learning activities developed during the project would not become part of the regular curriculum and would disappear when funding ended. Teachers became the leaders in the technology integration effort in their classrooms supported by university staff.

As the project got under way, communication problems also arose between the administrators in the school, the school community, the central office, the teachers and university support people. These communication problems were relatively easy to resolve at each school because of the support structure in place. However, communication problems with the central office were not well resolved as can be seen in the research findings. While two administrators served on the management team, they grew out of favor with top administration as the project progressed and as schools in the project began to move technology integration in a different direction from that traditionally practiced in public schools. This is discussed more fully following the project findings.

Implementation During the Second Year
Three additional school sites and fourteen more teacher leaders were added during the second year. This stretched the university staff and provided a lower level of continuous support to the first year schools and teachers than the one to which they had become accustomed. Our assumption had been that if teachers were provided with continuous support in their classrooms for one year, they would be able to mentor a partner teacher from another school during the second year. Only a few teachers felt comfortable with serving as mentors after one year of integration. In addition, the district was concerned about the number of days project teachers were out of the classroom. A second monthly substitute day for first year teachers to work with new teachers in the second year had been written into the grant. However, we were not able to provide the additional mentoring time due to a district policy which limited substitute days. In order to support twice as many teachers during the second year of the project, three additional undergraduate students were hired who provided frequent day-to-day instructional and technical support to the teachers in all six of the project schools. The university researcher and graduate assistants each mentored two schools during year two of the project and left the details of fixing printers and installing and trouble-shooting software to the undergraduate technical assistants.

While partnering teachers between schools did not work as well as planned, the first year teacher leaders did play a significant role during the second year. They worked with the management team and helped guide the implementation of the second year program. These teachers had made far more progress than is usual in just one year of professional development. Three of the four all-participant workshops during the second year were designed and presented by teams from each of the first year schools. During the first year of the project, university staff had given the workshops, while during the second, the first year teachers became the workshop leaders. These same teachers also provided a series of workshops to all district teachers through the district's professional development program. As can be seen in the survey evaluations related to professional development, teacher leadership of the workshops was very successful.

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