Becta Research Conference Presentation June 04 How can innovative ICT practice be sustained and extended? Peter Scrimshaw Introduction The history of

Becta Research Conference Presentation June 04
How can innovative ICT practice be sustained and extended?
Peter Scrimshaw
Introduction
The history of new technologies in schools is one of successive promising starts followed by faltering follow-through. This has left successive innovations established well in some locations but generally failing to make the breakthrough into full implementation. Finding better ways to sustain and develop the uses of ICT in all schools and classrooms rarther than just in some is therefore a pressing problem.
These notes discuss four questions:
• What are the barriers to greater teacher use of ICT?
• Why has this innovation generated this particular set of barriers?
• What do we already know that can help us to overcome these barriers?
• What do we still need to find out to achieve this fully?
What are the barriers to greater teacher use of ICT?
A recently published literature review on this (Becta 2004) identifies the following barriers:
• Technical faults (actual or anticipated) with ICT equipment.
• Insufficient ICT equipment available in schools.
• Adequate amounts of equipment but with limited access through inappropriate organisation at school level.
• Lack of technical support.
• Teachers sometimes lacking the time needed to fully prepare and research electronic materials for lessons.
• Teachers sometimes needing more time to become better acquainted with hardware and software.
• Inappropriate training; courses needed both pedagogical and ICT skills training elements.
• Some evidence that male teachers make more use of ICT than female teachers, and that female teachers report greater levels of computer anxiety.
• Teachers lacking the confidence to use ICT more.
• Teachers' unwillingness to change their teaching practices.
• Schools as institutions finding it difficult or impossible to re-organise in ways that facilitate innovative practices involving ICT.
• Teachers not realising the advantages of using technology in their teaching.
The report also looks in detail at the interrelationships between these factors and identifies teacher confidence and access as two central issues.
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Becta Research Conference Presentation June 04
Why has this innovation generated this particular set of barriers?
To me this list suggests an innovation that is being introduced at a rate where the changes in the technology are outstripping, at every level, the provision of the resources and skills needed to make best use of them. There could be at least two underlying factors here.
One is that the new technologies are not a single technological innovation but some thirty quite different and mutually interacting innovations, emerging in three successive waves over the last 20 years. The first was as expansion of the types of software promoted for use in classrooms. The second was the move from standalone to networked computers, while the third is the current expansion in the types of hardware devices available for classroom use. Whereas the expansion of software types was of programs that could largely be adopted or not independently, this will not be the case with the new hardware devices becoming available. These often compete with each other for overlapping classroom roles and most are not (unlike some software types) subject specific. The technological (and therefore the pedagogical) complexity teachers will face is therefore about to increase rather than decrease.
Secondly in England ICT has often been integrally linked with the promotion of a student-led pedagogy, based around supporting group work, and the active construction of their learning by students. For teachers already looking for ways of implementing a student-centred approach this presents ICT as a potential solution to their problems. However for teachers who prefer a more teacher-centred approach the position is very different. As the authors of one article reviewed put it:
'To integrate technology into classroom practice in the manner envisioned by ardent proponents, teachers must make two radical changes- not only must they learn how to use technology, but they must also fundamentally change how they teach."
Given these circumstances it is perhaps not suprising that ICT is not yet universally embedded in schools.
What do we already know that can help us to overcome these barriers?
Studies covered in another recent literature review (Scrimshaw 2004) gives a partial answer to this. They suggest a number of factors which make successful classroom use of ICT more likely. These include:
• Good school leadership.
• Good whole school planning.
• A whole-school approach to accessing and sharing of resources, linked closely to what teachers actually want and need at any given stage.
• Flexible professional development, using a combination of approaches to suit the level of progress that staff individually and as a whole have already reached.
• Reliable and well-coordinated technical support in schools.
More importantly, some of these studies describe in concrete terms how things are organised in schools where ICT is being used successfully. On financing and technical
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support there are other studies presented in an earlier Becta literature review (Scrimshaw 2002) that also offer relevant advice.
The 2004 report also identifies a number of ways in which schools are drawing upon external links to assist them. These include:
• Working more closely with the local community.
• Working with other local schools to identify successful practice and to sustain teachers' motivation.
• Using locally based training, differentiated by teacher expertise and with teacher input to the design.
• Participating in national and local ICT projects and initiatives to gain knowledge from the training and educational experiences they provide.
• Teachers linking with their peers both within and outside their local community, through the use of electronic networks and forums.
Again many of these studies provide specific accounts of how such external support can be used and organised.
Finally, there are models of how schools and teachers move through successive stages of the innovation process, from (for example) using ICT as a supplement to the curriculum, to a stage where it is seen as a reinforcement or enrichment of the curriculum and then in some cases on to viewing it as a facilitator for an emerging curriculum.
In total then there is an existing body of evidence that can be drawn upon in constructing a better understanding of how to sustain and develop innovative ICT practice.
What do we still need to find out?
However as an overall guide to practice and policy the literature reviewed arguably has four main weaknesses:
• Ways of enabling individual teachers and schools to make better use of ICT are largely treated as separate problems.
• The overriding importance given to using ICT to facilitate the emergence of a student-centred curriculum focuses most of the school-level research on the small proportion of schools that are finding ways of doing this successfully. This leaves under-researched the use of ICT to reinforce and enhance the existing curriculum, whether this is viewed as an important step towards assisting the emerging curriculum, or as a possible alternative final destination in its own right.
• By focussing attention upon either the individual teacher or the whole school experiences of successful schools the literature leaves under-researched the circumstances in which the innovation can succeed with groups of staff within schools.
• By focussing largely upon examples of schools already at the most complex level of development as exemplars the literature does not help in understanding how schools make the previous transitions from level to level, or what role ICT might be playing in schools that in more general terms face considerable difficulties.
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Becta Research Conference Presentation June 04
What then are the research questions that we still need to ask? Some possibilities are these:
1. What are the likely indicators that a school is near to making the move from one level of ICT integration to the next? For schools that are at such a transition point what are the key factors that affect whether or not they make the transition successfully?
2. Where only a small minority of staff are innovating with ICT what kinds of support are needed to ensure that they continue to do this? What is needed to enable the innovation to “break out” of this small group and be taken up more widely within the school?
3. What examples are there of highly innovative schools successfully using ICT mainly to reinforce their existing teaching and learning practices rather than to change them? How did they reach this position? In what ways do they maintain their innovativeness and what can other innovative schools learn from their experiences?
4. What positive roles (if any) have ICT-based innovations played within successful strategies for turning round failing schools?
5. In what ways are highly innovative schools cooperating on ICT-based innovation with others that are less far forward in their use of ICT? What difficulties do such partnerships encounter and how are they being overcome?
Sources
Scrimshaw P. (2004) Enabling Teachers to Make Successful Use of ICT Coventry: Becta.
http://www.becta.org.uk/research/display.cfm?section=1, accessed June 9th 2004
Becta (2004) A Review of the Research Literature on Barriers to the Uptake of ICT by Teachers. Coventry: Becta.
http://www.becta.org.uk/research/display.cfm?section=1, accessed June 9th 2004.
Scrimshaw, P. (2002) Total Cost of Ownership: A review of the literature. Coventry: Becta.
http://www.becta.org.uk/research/display.cfm?section=1, accessed June 9th 2004. 4