Like many Americans, I am watching all the candidates and how gracefully they concede or acknowledge their victories. For the South Carolina election, I was impressed by candidate Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” chant. The chant resonated with me on a fundamental level, a half-forgotten memory that calls to me. At least, until I remembered where I had heard it first.

The catchy little tune from Bob the Builder came to mind. “Can we fix it, yes we can!” is not a bad phrase to capture the changes needed in schools today. In fact, Obama hit on a few points in his victory speech that made me think of schools today.

“What we’ve seen in these last weeks is that we’re also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us that we have to think, act and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us.

Yes, in schools today we are up against forces that aren’t the fault of any one organization or group. And, what habits are we feeding in our work in schools that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation?

Yes, I think Barack–all political endorsements aside–does have a point. So, what habits do we want to cultivate so that we can ACT our way into being who we want to be? A research study I re-read recently reminded of those points for administrators.

If you’re a superintendent or principal, I encourage you to take these items to heart. Mitchaell Shuldman shares his research in Superintendent Conceptions of Institutional Conditions that Impact Teacher Technology Integration (Summer, 2004) in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. I’ve pulled the relevant sentences from the study and quote them below as “new habits” we need to cultivate in schools–habits that must be cultivated at the top of the administrator hierarchy FIRST.

1. Active participation on the district’s technology committee, as chair person
2. Engagement in active discussions with tech personnel to smooth out and clarify lines of responsibility, authority, and overlapping interests
3. The creation of site-based technology committees to ensure active engagement by principals
4. Redefinition of technology teacher positions and the creation of technology curriculum coordinator positions
5. Use of the persuasive power of the superintendency to help a tech coordinator evolve middle school reading specialists into full-time technology integrators and to infuse the district tech ed faculty with tech skills
6. Assist in establihment of free evening technology classes for adults
7. Facilitate a project that has middle school students teaching email tech to senior citizens
8. Actively engage other locally elected civic boards into the district tech discussion to build broader community support
9. Expect principals to take the lead in ensuring that all teachers in their building work towards adopting technology.
10. Get principals to make sure that teachers included technology goals in their individual professional development plans.
11. Establish campus instructional technologists.
12. The best hope for tech lies in its use as an asynchronous tool for communication that allows teachers to engage and collaborate with one another within a building and across the district. Encouraging online discussion amongst teachers in study groups is core feature of professional development strategy.

It’s #12 that is most exciting. In reading another research study, it seems that computers are not the catalyst for change. The catalyst is REFLECTION on instructional practice. So, if you want to encourage tech-enhanced change, follow these steps:

1. Practice a hands-on approach, putting into practice the suggestions Shuldman makes above.
2. Foster reflection among teachers, encouraging them to use technology in simple ways such as blogging their reflections on teaching and learning.
3. Model the constructivist instructional use of computers where students use technology as a tool for communication, collaboration, creation of information, as well as accessing, analyzing and organizing information.
4. Make your learning–successes and challenges–transparent by keeping a blog yourself, and encourage others to do so as well by facilitating open-ended conversations such as the ones being had at EduCon 2.0.

Can we fix it? Yes we can!

Subscribe to Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net