May 31: Last day to save $75 on registration for 2012 Annual Conference in Boston More Info June 30: Board of Trustees nomination deadline More Info July 22-25: 2012 Summer Conference in Denver More Info

Using Technology to Improve Teaching and Staff Development: An Interview with Kathleen Fulton

By Dennis Sparks
Journal of Staff Development, Winter 1998 (Vol. 19, No. 1)

(Editor’s note: Kathleen Fulton is associate director of the Center for Learning and Educational Technology in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. A longer bio appears at the end of this interview.)

JSD: The Learning Connection: Schools in the Information Age, a report funded by the Benton Foundation, says ". . . technology alone is no panacea. For it to work well for students and schools, we must build a human infrastructure at the same pace we are installing computers and wiring." We don’t seem to be doing as well with the human infrastructure aspects of technology as we are with installing computers and wiring.

Fulton: I agree completely. That is what was so refreshing about conducting the Teachers and Technology study for Congress in 1995–the fact that the entire focus of that study was on the human infrastructure. In that study, we reported that most school districts spend something less than 15 percent of their technology budgets on teacher training.

We recommended that this percentage should be doubled to reflect something more like a third of expenditures going for training. It’s encouraging to see that this figure has been picked up in the guidelines many states are using in distributing federal funds under the Technology Literacy Challenge Grants and in state and local technology plans and initiatives.

But it’s not just a question of the amount of dollars spent on training. Equally important is expanding our definition of teacher support to encompass more than just training per se. Teacher support must include giving teachers time to experiment, permission to change the way they do things, and even to make some mistakes along the way. It also means providing prompt and dependable technical support that allows the teacher to focus on the pedagogy and not the technology.

Compelling reasons to learn technology

JSD: You mentioned the U.S. Office of Technology’s 1995 study, Teachers & Technology: Making the Connection, that you directed. What did you learn?

Fulton: In addition to our findings regarding the need for more training, we found that while most teachers want to learn about and use technology, they first must have a personally compelling reason to try something as new and complex and intimidating as computers. Teachers typically begin by using technology like other professionals do: to do things they’ve always done–like record keeping and preparation of materials–but more efficiently.

They then move into new areas of work altogether, ones that really use the technology as a basis for new forms of teaching. That takes much more time. Finding the curricular applications that work for them is the most time-consuming and challenging task.

But typically teachers become hooked when they begin to use technology in ways that work within their personal instructional contexts, when they see increased student motivation and students spending more time on technology-based activities, and when they see students who may be able for the first time to understand something because they are using new kinds of media, new methods of getting messages across, and new ways of understanding complex material.

Technology to achieve high standards

JSD: How can technology help teachers meet high standards for student learning?

Fulton: The call for standards and a focus on technological skills have moved along separate but sometimes parallel paths. Increasingly, we see technology as a means toward meeting curriculum standards. A few states, like North Carolina, have separate technology skills standards, but most have embedded them within the discipline content skills.

For instance, in many states, language-arts standards require students to select and use a variety of information resources to draw connections and make analyses of the messages that come through these media. Internet searches are a powerful means of accessing a vast range of information sources. Or, in science, the focus on inquiry-based science requires students to use technology as a data-collection or communication device, just as it’s used by real scientists.

Similarly, students who use graphing calculators are doing math the way mathematicians do, using the tools of the trade. If we want students to learn to think like historians, they need to use the Internet for research and to share document analyses just like scholars and historians do today.

In addition, we may, in fact, be moving beyond traditional content standards–what students need to know about a topic–to second generation standards that focus on what students need to be able to do in the workplace of the future. Most educators believe students will need both disciplinary knowledge and fluency with technology in order to be successful workers and continual learners in a fluid, expanding global economy.

Connecting to student learning

JSD: This brings us to the link between the appropriate use of technology and student learning.

Fulton: There’s quite a body of research now that technology can enhance the achievement of students when, as you say, the appropriate conditions are in place. But if we look only at test scores, we may be missing some of the most important factors.

For example, an important element for student learning is motivation, and that’s an area where technology seems to be particularly promising. When you observe students working in various technology-based activities, you can’t help but be impressed by their concentration, enthusiasm, and eagerness to take on more work. Quantitative measures such as increased time on task, higher rates of attendance, less disruptive behavior, and greater participation in advanced courses are good indicators of this impact.

A second element suggesting the link between technology and student learning is based on new kinds of content that can be presented with the support of technology. Simulations bring answers to "what if" questions. Computational science activities, virtual field trips, tools to study chaos theory–all these make it possible to bring a new level of sophisticated content into the curriculum.

Often technology also makes it possible to bring advanced concepts into the curriculum earlier for all students. In effect, technology provides a kind of scaffolding that assists learning by providing technological support along the way. Young children write stories on computers long before their penmanship skills would have allowed handwritten products. In a research project using a software product called "SimCalc," teachers are introducing calculus concepts to students in middle schools.

Finally, technology provides students an opportunity to learn about and use the tools they will need to thrive in the world beyond the classroom and in the global community of the 21st century. As students become facile with a range of technologies and use them to find and evaluate and share information, conduct research, and work collaboratively with others whom they may never meet face to face, they are learning the skills, content, rules, and behaviors of various disciplines and workplaces they will enter after leaving high school. Ironically, while test scores improve when computers are put in the hands of students, most standardized tests miss these other key learning components.

Goals for technology use

JSD: What’s required if technology is to make a difference in student learning?

Fulton: Several preconditions must be met. First, clear goals must be established for using technology. Rigorous, continuing evaluation should be conducted based on whether those goals are met, with a commitment to making adjustments as needed. There also must be sufficient and convenient access to the technology required to meet those goals.

It’s obviously critical that teachers receive the training and support required for them to guide students in meeting these goals, as we discussed earlier. While these are the conditions that need to be met for any kind of educational change, they are particularly important for technology.

Individualized staff development

JSD: What types of professional development processes or structures support teachers movement along that continuum?

Fulton: We must begin by changing our model of staff development just as we’re changing our models of other parts of the educational environment. That means we need to tailor staff development to individual teachers or small groups of teachers rather than provide a one-size-fits-all generic model–the inservicing event where today everyone learns word processing or spread sheets despite variations in pre-existing skills or likely use of this training. For instance, if I’m a math teacher, I may not need to learn about word processing for my classroom, but I may really want to learn how kids can develop a deeper understanding of geometric concepts through simulations available on some software programs.

The economics and logistics of staff development will continue to push us to train teachers in groups, but we remember that the technology itself allows us to individualize teacher learning and provide support in ways that offer new economies of scale, such as Net courses teachers can take on their own, videos for at-home instruction, one-on-one online mentoring, and other forms of personalized, just-in-time, just-what’s-needed formal and informal instruction.

Technology can also facilitate different forms of follow-up. Follow-up used to mean bringing people together into a common physical place; it can now be done through all the processes I just mentioned. In particular, online follow-up adds greater flexibility to the model. For example, PBS Mathline has small groups of teachers working around common themes using online discussion or mentoring groups. Several of the U.S. Department of Education Technology Challenge Grant projects are adopting this approach for continuing on-line support or small-group

learning clusters.

Technology aiding school improvement

JSD: You’re describing ways in which technology can assist in school improvement by linking educators who don’t normally have face-to-face communication.

Fulton: Yes. Technology can link teachers to experts in universities such as noted scientists, historians, or authors. What is particularly powerful is teachers connecting with other teachers in affinity groups from anywhere in the world, sharing their problems and their successes. For example, a teacher who has developed a special area of expertise in Civil War generals and their battles can share her lesson plans with others who don’t know much about this area. This type of communication can open up whole new areas of interest and collaboration.

Technology as a research tool

JSD: Electronic tools can also be used to access research or other sources of assistance for school improvement.

Fulton: ERIC is one such data base. There needs to be a lot more work done, however, in getting information to people in forms that are useful to them so they can find what they need when they need it. The Maryland State Department of Education has a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement to do just that. Using a relational database built around the Maryland School Performance Outcomes, a local school or district can match its student learning data to best practices that might help make improvements in areas where special attention is needed.

Technology no cure-all

JSD: In the July 1997 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Steven Jobs of Apple was quoted as saying, "What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. . . . You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge on CD-ROM’s. We can put a Web site in every school. None of that is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re done something to solve the problem with education."

Fulton: Anybody knowledgeable about technology recognizes that it’s not the answer to all that ails schools. But I don’t think Jobs is saying that we shouldn’t use technology. Rather, what he is saying is what any thoughtful educator would say: Technology can be a powerful resource if used under conditions that are appropriate.

Technology alone is like a pencil–it all depends on what you do with it. You can put hundreds of pencils in a classroom and nobody may use them. Or they may use them to scribble or doodle–or, with a good teacher, to help them compose a masterpiece, write a brilliant short story, or design a rocket engine.

Technology changes teaching

JSD: In the spring 1996 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, Richard Elmore wrote, "A significant body of circumstantial evidence points to a deep, systemic incapacity of U.S. schools, and the practitioners who work in them, to develop, incorporate, and extend new ideas about teaching and learning in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms." He goes on to say, "The problems of scale in educational innovation can be briefly stated as follows: Innovations that require large changes in the core of educational practice seldom penetrate more than a small fraction of U.S. schools and classrooms, and seldom last for very long when they do. By ‘the core of educational practice,’ I mean how teachers understand the nature of knowledge and the student's role in learning, and how these ideas about knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and classwork."

Is technology a tool that affects the core–for instance, when a teacher uses a technological tool in the classroom that produces a different kind of learning based on a different form of teaching–or is it a tool to be applied once other interventions have affected the core?

Fulton: It’s both. It certainly easier to use technology as a tool once something else has altered the core. Changing our ways of thinking about teaching is a much greater challenge than using technology. The most promising technological applications require–and create– significant changes in teaching.

Teachers who use technology most intensely find that changes at the core are a by-product of that use – different organization of the classroom space and the use of time, more student-centered activities, more opportunities for students to work in small teams.

It’s much easier for teachers to use technology to do what they’ve always done–like automating their grade books–than it is for them to make significant changes in their basic approach to teaching and learning.

Technology key to shifting paradigms

JSD: It sounds like you’re describing a symbiotic relationship between the introduction of technology in the classroom and the mental models which teachers possess about the nature of teaching and learning.

Fulton: Exactly. I’m increasingly hearing that our old "chalk and talk" models of schooling do not develop the kinds of "smart learners" needed for the future needs of society–those whose work tools are their communication skills, thinking skills, and collaborative skills. Reformers talk about changing the paradigm from school-centered, resource-limited classrooms to a rich educational environment that draws on resources from beyond the school.

They believe these environments provide an opportunity to change from whole-class, teacher-centered instruction to pupil-centered, individualized teaching, and information-based coaching. These are indeed substantial changes at the core of educational practice, to use Elmore’s term.

While technology alone will not bring about these changes, it can be a key lever in shifting paradigms because of what it offers in terms of expanded educational resources. Technology also can be a tool for collaborating and sharing what is being learned and for increasing the speed of change in what has been, in the past, a relatively static educational system. While clearly none of this is automatic, and, as they say, the devil is in the details, I do find it an incredibly exciting time to be involved in education. Things are happening out there!

Dennis Sparks is executive director of the National Staff Development Council, 1124 W. Liberty St., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48103, (313) 998-0574, fax (313) 998-0628, (e-mail: dennis.sparks@nsdc.org).

Kathleen Fulton

Job: Associate Director of the Center for Learning and Educational Technology in the College of Education at the University of Maryland.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College in Massachusetts; now working on a master’s degree at the University of Maryland.

Professional history: Before going to Maryland, Fulton was a senior consultant at Issue Dynamics, where she worked with the Illinois State Board of Education, TERC, PBS, NCES, and other clients on technology issues. Prior to that, she spent nine years with the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). She was the project director and principal author of Teachers and Technology: Making the Connection and Education and Technology: Future Visions. Her reports to Congress also addressed adult literacy, testing technologies, and distance learning.

For more information, contact Kathleen Fulton, Associate Director, Center for Learning and Educational Technology, College of Education, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-1171, (301) 405-3605, fax (301) 314-9278, (e-mail: kf63@umail.umd.edu).