Chapter 4.6
Characteristics of Teacher Leaders for Information and Communication Technology
Margaret Riel
SRI International & Pepperdine University
USA
Henry Jay Becker
University of California, Irvine
USA
Abstract :This chapter presents a typology of four dimensions of teacher leadership—a disposition to continually learn from and improve practice, collaboration with peers through critical examination and evolution of each other's teaching, participation in geographically diverse communities of practice, and making professional contributions through speaking, writing, and teaching. Teacher leadership, from this perspective, is inherently grounded in professional engagement, which in turn is linked with constructivist teaching philosophies and teaching practice and exemplary use of computers. The chapter then summarizes several studies of leadership among technology-expert teachers and applies the more general leadership typology to the specific domain of information and communication technologies—adaptive expertise with respect to technology tools and resources; collaboration around technology; interpersonal networking in technology-active communities; and contributions through organizations to share knowledge about how technology is best used in teaching. The chapter concludes by pointing to several ways that technology leadership might be fostered.
Key words: teacher leadership; professional engagement; technology-expert teachers; teacher technology leadership; Teaching, Learning, and Computing: 1998 National Survey (TLC)
Introduction
At about the same time that the idea of teacher leadership was emerging as a professional development strategy, desktop "microcomputers" had begun to have a significant presence in K-12 schools. An increasing number of teachers had become
1 intrigued, and even excited, by the possibilities of improving motivation and learning in their classroom through the use of computers and their software. This led to a rapid growth of teacher networking around computers in education which, in turn, developed into formal educator-based organizations at varying levels of geographic inclusiveness, from regional and state organizations (e.g., Computer-Using Educators) to national and even international organizations (e.g., ISTE, the International Society of Technology in Education). With the development of the World Wide Web in the mid 90's, geographically dispersed teachers began using the communications affordances of the internet to develop informal networks of common professional interest. Through these informal networks and through teachers' involvement in educational computing organizations and conferences, computer-using teachers gained a sense that they belonged to of a community of innovators at the leading edge of change in educational practice.
While some teachers in this new educational computing subculture focused their attention almost exclusively on using technology in their own classroom, a significant number became strong advocates and leaders for establishing a wider role for computers in the instructional practices of their colleagues. In that way, teachers personally excited by the possibilities of computers for their own teaching entered the broader realm of teacher leadership.
In this chapter, we define teacher leadership more precisely as behavior reflecting a high level of engagement with the profession of teaching and with other teachers, both locally and at a distance, who constitute a teacher's professional colleagues. Teachers with minimal professional engagement focus on the routine practice of instruction in their own classroom
—perhaps not ignoring other teachers but at least not attempting to influence their teaching practices. In contrast, teachers with strong professional engagement across a range of activities and domains are the teachers whom we regard as the leaders of their profession.
After reviewing literature on teacher leadership, we present a model of four dimensions of teacher leadership—each reflecting a high level of professional engagement in
2 a particular domain—classroom; school; professional organizations and networks; or the profession as a whole. We summarize U.S. national data which we collected on the extent of teachers' professional engagement and on the content of teacher leaders' teaching philosophies and instructional practices, including their use of computers. We show that teacher leaders, a group defined independently of their teaching philosophy and pedagogical practices, are in fact (a) more constructivist than other teachers of the same subject and level; and (b) use computers substantially more than other teachers do. Then we apply our general model of teacher leadership to technology leadership in particular, showing how one might reasonably expect teacher technology leaders to incorporate ICT into their professional practice in ways that parallel the actions of teacher leaders more generally and thereby foster exemplary practice among other teachers.
Teacher Leadership and Professional Engagement
Paralleling the use of teacher leadership as a strategy for professional development is a substantial research literature that seeks to understand it (York-Barr & Duke, 2004), in a recent Review of Educational Research article, proposed a conceptual model that highlighted three characteristics of teacher leaders (respect among their school peers, an orientation towards their own continuous learning, and a personal capacity to influence others' practices); four characteristics of their leadership work (valued in their school's culture, visible, negotiated, and shared); and four conditions required for teacher leadership to flourish (supportive principal and colleagues, time to engage in collaborative work, resources to do so, and opportunities for improving their understanding of effective practices).
We find it most useful to view teacher leadership primarily in terms of how teachers conceptualize their role—their duties and responsibilities as teachers. Some teachers view their work as taking place solely within their classrooms in what is essentially a private, individual practice. Teachers with a private practice orientation have little time for meetings, conferences, or other forms of professional engagement. They employ the textbooks and
3 other teaching resources which they are given or which they gather themselves, and orchestrate their own instructional practices without significant input from others. They may do this because of perceived disagreements between their own perspective and those of their peers or because of a sense that the norms of their craft do not permit admitting that one needs help from peers in order to do one's work. In either case, their choice is to engage in a private practice. They are content to let educational decisions about curriculum, policies or standards be made by outside experts, and they accept that different teachers choose to teach in ways that they themselves believe are less likely to be effective than other approaches. Instead, they focus on trying to be the best teacher they can be with the students in their own classroom. Of course, all teachers focus on their own practice; but for some it is their only focus.
Other teachers, though, view their responsibilities as extending beyond classroom teaching to include participation in the larger community of educators and administrators.
They see their role as trying to help other teachers be more successful and to influence how teaching occurs in other places. Teachers with this leadership orientation not only work in collaboration with other teachers at their school to improve teaching and learning, they also see their responsibility in terms of the larger community of educational practitioners (Glazer,
1999). Their concern about what happens in other classrooms becomes part of their own definition of being successful. In its most profound manifestation, teacher leaders influence the practice of teaching in the profession as a whole. Over time, a teacher attains the perspective of a teacher leader as a result of taking on increasing responsibility for the success of the teaching enterprise. We see the following set of practices as collectively describing the expertise embedded in teacher leadership, in which a teacher moves from classroom activities to knowledge-building within the larger profession:
(1) Learning from One's Own Teaching: Maintaining a disposition to improve their
teaching, and, in particular, developing innovative "adaptive" pedagogical expertise.
(2) Collaborating and Sharing Responsibility for Student Success: Promoting and
4 employing a public rather than a private practice of teaching; encouraging and
accepting collective responsibility for student learning across their school site.
(3) Participating in Geographically Diverse Communities of Practice: Engaging
actively in regional and national teacher professional organizations and networks and
actively seeking out and using ideas, information, and expertise beyond the
practitioner community.
(4) Making Personal Contributions to the Teaching Profession: Communicating their
learning to peers through conference presentations, university teaching, and
publishing.
Although we describe each of these domains of teacher leadership separately, they represent overlapping and interrelated practices. Just as the underlying dimensions of professional engagement are multi-dimensional, teacher leadership is manifested in different forms, varying both by breadth of engagement across these four domains and by extensiveness of involvement in any one domain. Referring to someone as a "teacher leader" is a shorthand way of saying that, relative to most other teachers, this individual engages significantly in some combination of the four domains of leadership listed above. As discussed in the next section, the four domains can be seen in developmental terms, in which engagement in one domain would typically, but not necessarily, precede engagement in the succeeding domains. Finally, while we recognize that principals and other administrators play a central role in creating the conditions that either foster or inhibit the development of teacher expertise and leadership, our focus in this description is on the actions or practices of teachers.
Describing A Route to Teacher Leadership
1. Learning from One's Own Teaching
When teachers use the context of their own classroom to reflect upon and systematically inquire about the learning that is taking place, they are taking a necessary
5 step for improving their own practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Feiman-Nemser, 2001).
Unfortunately, many teachers do not prioritize their own learning in a way that advances their expertise (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Elmore, 2002). Some teachers use their experiences to perfect a set of routines and strategies that seem to "work" for them—adjustments that can be rapidly and effortlessly employed in the classroom, but which are based on only the narrowest criteria of "improvement." For example, these teachers may not attend to the variety of ways that different students think about the same presentation of ideas, or be alert to how new tools might reshape practice. For these teachers, skill at teaching is having taught the same lesson so many times that they can teach it with their eyes closed. In contrast to this habitual approach to teaching, "adaptive expertise" describes a different approach. Using a specific set of cognitive, metacognitive, and dispositional strategies
(Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000), teachers employing adaptive expertise engage in a process of progressive problem solving which enables them to continually learn from practice. Adaptive expert teachers also reuse lessons, but they continue to be attuned to the nuances of context with a readiness to experiment and innovate with new content, tools and strategies (e.g., see Tsui, 2003).
Adaptive expertise involves a purposeful and attentive orientation to novelty (Chi,
Glaser & Farr, 1988). This form of expertise evolves from a process of progressively transforming problems of practice into questions, using these questions to shape action, and reflecting on the results to frame new questions (Allen & Calhoun, 1998; Coghlan & Brannick,
2005). Teachers who learn from practice in this way often move into positions of teacher leadership when they share what they are learning with their peers.
2. Collaborating and Sharing Responsibility for Student Success
Teacher leaders not only learn from teaching, but they redefine teaching as a public act inviting others to observe, participate, and discuss teaching practices. In many schools, norms—informal expectations and sanctions—governing conversation strongly discourage substantive discourse about teaching methods during lunch or in the teacher lounge (e.g.,
6 see Little, 1990; Wasley, 1991). Public teaching involves changing the pervasive norms of privacy and autonomy so that teachers actively engage their colleagues in dialogue, formally and informally, about the practice of teaching (Meier, 1995). In Lortie’s (1975) classic study of the vertical and horizontal isolation of teachers, he highlighted schools' unmet need for
“greater adaptability, more effective colleague relationships and more sharing in the issues of knowledge and expertise” (Lortie, 1975, p. 221).
Teacher leaders strive to make teaching more public by encouraging their colleagues to engage in activities that examine and critique different approaches to teaching. These include “cycles of inquiry” about teaching (McLaughlin, 2004), lesson study (e.g., see
Fernandez, 2002), collective analysis of video-recorded lesson examples (van Es & Sherin, in press), collaborative unit design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998), mentoring and coaching
(e.g., see Carroll, 2005) and collaborative forms of evaluating student work (Blythe, Allen, &
Powell, 1999). What is common to these different types of activities is that all engage teachers in making their everyday work public and the focus of dialogue (Little, 1982;
DiPardo, 1999). Although many of these approaches were organized by outside educators and researchers, effective implementation often involves developing informal teacher leaders who help develop and refine the techniques for the local context and in doing so sometimes move into more formal leadership positions.
Teacher leaders use public teaching as a means to build a community orientation to teaching in a school and for developing a sense of trust and collective responsibility for student learning in schools ( e.g., see Riel & Fulton, 2001). The notion of teacher professional community (e.g., see Riel & Fulton, 2001; Westheimer, 1998) suggests a concern with developing not just collaborations among a few teachers but of teachers taking on shared responsibilities for success of all students in the school. Frank (in press) suggests that a strong identification with a larger collective, can result in the formation of "quasi-tie" which increases the tendency of members to share resources with others in the community even where there is no close personal tie. These weak ties (Granovetter, 1973) are often the
7 way new information travels from one subgroup to another.
In one sense, teacher leadership is a partial usurpation of the traditional responsibilities of school administrators. However, Spillane, Halverson and Diamond (2001) refers to this development not as usurpation but as "distributed leadership"—a fluid and empowering concept akin to the earlier term "shared decision-making," a feature of earlier efforts to engage teachers in leadership roles within the school (e.g., see Weiss, 1993). In this newer formulation, teacher leadership is thought to be primary in areas related to pedagogy and implementation of instruction while administrators' responsibilities are focused on strategic planning and external relations (Crowther, Kaagen, Ferguson, & Hann, 2002).
The ideas of professional communities and teacher leadership are joined by the recognition that professional communities cannot develop by fiat from above but require indigenous intellectual leadership to emerge within the teaching staff (Grossman, Wineburg &
Woolworth, 2001; Hargreaves, 1994; Westheimer, 1998).
Strong collegial relationships allow for more frequent interaction about ideas and thus promote critical reflection and deep learning about practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999;
Grossman, Wineburg & Woolworth, 2000; Little, 1990; Westheimer, 1998). Teacher leaders actively foster the continuing intellectual development of teachers and work collectively with shared responsibility and commitment (Grossman et al., 2001; Darling-Hammond &
Bransford, 2005).
3. Participating in Geographically Diverse Communities of Practice
Schools vary in terms of the norms and social structure for supporting the flow of ideas from outside of the school building. Teacher leaders not only a play a role in sharing problems of practice, and learning from each others' experiences and ideas at the school level, but they are often the conduits for the movement of new ideas between schools. They do this by joining professional organizations, attending conferences and participating in
"communities of practice" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) with teachers in distant places. This type of professional engagement with networks of other teachers beyond the local context can bring
8 value to a teacher's own school culture by invigorating the school conversation with important new ideas and expertise (DiPardo, 1999; Little, 2003).
Teacher leaders serve this role by pursuing connections to university professors and researchers, attending professional conferences and actively searching for published educational materials, software tools and application, and making use of the internet to bring to the internal conversation information and scholarship that might otherwise be missing. It is true that outside information can increase conflict among ideas circulating in a school building, but teacher leaders can play a valuable role in resolving this conflict in productive ways (Achinstein, 2002). In this way, teacher leaders broker knowledge. They serve to help bring expertise and resource from the district, network communities, or professional organizations and conference back to the school, and in doing so increase the social capital of the school (Penuel, Riel, Krause & Frank, in press).
4. Making Personal Contributions to the Teaching Profession
Thus far, we have been talking about the role that teacher leaders play at the building level in working collaboratively with peers and bringing new ideas from the world of research and professional writing to bear on teaching in their common setting. But leadership involves going beyond improving understanding to actually influencing common understandings held in the professional community writ large—i.e., the knowledge base of teaching. As teachers' skills and abilities develop, they may contribute to this knowledge building activity as professional developers, authors of articles or books for educators, or designers or evaluators of curriculum or software. Their contributions shape the professional dialogue for others in distant contexts. Schön (1983) hoped that reflective practice of the form we have been describing could lead the way to a new epistemology of practice. Action research advocates also look to deep contextual knowledge of practice to provide the insights that will lead to more general understanding of pedagogy through praxis (Allen & Calhoun, 1998;
Coghlan & Brannick, 2005).
A number of publications, such as the National Writing Project Quarterly, have
9 evolved to support national efforts at teacher knowledge building. In the American
Educational Research Association, special interest groups (SIGs) have formed around
Teacher as Researcher and Action Research to encourage teacher leaders to participate in shaping the knowledge base for learning and teaching. Ultimately, this form of teacher leadership challenges traditional roles and power relationships and argues for a stronger relationship between teaching and research, theory and practice (Bereiter, 2002).
Teachers Leaders Represent the Highest Level of Professional Engagement
Bass (1981, cited in Wasley, 1991) suggested that the essential characteristic of teacher leaders is that they "enable their colleagues to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do on their own to improve their professional practice." If that is so, then these four processes of engagement in the profession— 1) an intellectual approach favoring innovation and divergent thinking; 2) the move of teaching from a private to a more shared space and shared professional commitments in the workplace; 3) access to important sources of ideas and resources through teacher networks, academia, and elsewhere; 4) and participation in knowledge-building in the profession as a whole by taking on roles of presenter, teacher, and author—represent the kinds of leadership acts that seem likely to result in the outcomes suggested by Bass. As shown in Figure 1, we see these practices as forming a pyramid of the growth of teacher leadership. Informal teacher leadership operates at the base and as teachers increase their expertise in each of these practices—employing adaptive expertise in their teaching, providing support to their same-school colleagues, participating in professional communities and networks, and contributing to the knowledge base of the profession—they are more likely to move into more formal leadership roles.
10 Publish
Prof. Networking
Local Collaboration
Learning from Adaptive Practice
Figure 1
Teacher Leadership Practices
Variation in Professional Engagement: Findings from the TLC Study
The distribution of levels of teacher professional engagement across a broad national sample of teachers was measured by the authors of this chapter in a national survey of U.S. teachers (Becker & Riel, 2000). Findings from that study, known as the Teaching, Learning, and Computing:1998 National Survey, or "TLC" for short, have been published in a number of venues, but we concentrate here on findings about teacher professional engagement. See also http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC.
In the TLC study, Professional Engagement was measured from answers to three survey questions, comprising a total of 15 separate response opportunities. One question measured the frequency of six types of teacher collaboration and collective responsibility for teaching in their school (four types of substantive discussions and two items about mutual observation of classroom teaching). A second question measured the frequency of three types of participation in communities of practice beyond the school (workshops, committees, and electronic mail). The third question obtained information about the teacher's involvement in six types of leadership activities including mentoring, speaking at workshops, college-level
11 teaching, and publishing articles for a teacher audience. For each of the three survey questions, criteria were defined to indicate "high" and "medium" levels of engagement in that particular area. For example, a "high" level of within-school interaction was indicated by an average frequency midway between "several per month" and "one to three times per week" for the six types of discussions and classroom observations (e.g., discussions about how to teach a particular concept; or visits to another teacher's classroom to observe teaching).
Teachers who scored "high" in all three areas (within-school, beyond-school, and leadership) we designated as "Teacher Leaders." Those who had scores of at least "medium" in each area we designated "Teacher Professionals." The remaining teachers were designated either
"Interactive Teachers" or "Private Practice Teachers" based on their combined score on the three indices.
Overall, 13% of 4th through 12th grade teachers in the nationally representative sample met the "high" within-school interaction criterion and 27% others met the less rigorous
"medium" criterion. However, because teachers who collaborate within their school don't necessarily collaborate beyond their school and don't necessarily engage in leadership activities, only a small minority (16%) of teachers who met the "high" criterion for Within-
School Interaction also met parallel standards on the other two aspects of teacher professional engagement and thus became classified as Teacher Leaders. Similarly, only about one-fourth of those who met the less rigorous "medium" standard in terms of their
Within-School Interactions also met at least a medium standard in both of the other two aspects of professional engagement. The percentages of teachers responding in particular ways to each of the 15 survey responses are omitted here for lack of space but can be found in Becker & Riel (2000).
Using these three sets of questions to create a high standard for leadership, we found that in the representative sample of teachers, only 2% were "Teacher Leaders," with another
10% classified as "Teacher Professionals." These two groups of teachers represent a range of teacher leadership skills and together we refer to them as "Professionally Engaged
Teachers." The majority of teachers (58%) were classified as representing the traditional
12 norms of limited interaction with other teachers; that is, "Private Practice Teachers." An intermediate category, "Interactive Teachers" (29%), represent teachers who collaborated with their peers either in their school (for example, by engaging in substantive discussions or by mentoring younger teachers) or beyond (e.g., attending workshops), but did not meet the moderate standards on all three dimensions—in-school, beyond-school, and leadership activities.
As a group, Professionally Engaged Teachers were somewhat more experienced than Private Practice Teachers, with about 5 years more teaching experience. However, more significant than their slightly greater teaching experience was that Professionally
Engaged Teachers had been distinctly more invested in their own education with nearly twice as many reporting college grades above 3.5 on a 4 point scale (50% vs. 28%) and half-again as many having a masters degree (64% vs. 42%).
Teacher Leaders' Beliefs about Teaching and Learning
If teachers are to lead other teachers in changing practice to improve student learning, it is important that teacher leaders' educational beliefs be consistent with the best ideas for educating children. What beliefs do Teacher Leaders hold, and in what direction might they lead other teachers?
As a group, Professionally Engaged Teachers were philosophically in a different place than Private Practice Teachers. Teachers' responses to individual TLC survey questions suggested that they were more likely than other teachers to see good teaching in terms of facilitating student inquiry rather than directly transmitting knowledge. They were more likely to emphasize student engagement in learning and the "meaningfulness" of content than to be concerned about disseminating a specific externally mandated curriculum to unmotivated students.
The TLC study's measure of teaching philosophy came from three survey questions, incorporating 13 individual prompts. In one question, teachers were asked to compare the likely effects on student learning of two teachers’ contrasting approaches to classroom
13 discussion. One approach represented traditional teacher-directed questioning based on prior reading; the other represented teacher-led discussion that provoked questions from the students themselves which the teacher then reflected back to them for further research. A second set of four questions presented paired comparisons of contrasting teaching philosophies. Each item presented a hypothetical personal statement of beliefs around issues such as curriculum coverage versus "meaning-making" and alternative classroom activity patterns (i.e., teacher-directed versus varying group activities). The third question involved seven agree vs. disagree statements (6-point scales) about, for example, whether the need for direct instruction can be justified by the importance of providing students with background knowledge; or how important was building instruction around problems with
"clear, correct answers and…ideas that most students can grasp quickly"; or how valuable was student freedom of movement in the classroom for facilitating student initiative to learn.
An index was created by taking the mean of these 13 prompts, after equalizing item standard deviations (effectively creating standard scores for items). The alpha reliability for this index was .83, suggesting that a strong single dimension underlay these specific beliefs about good teaching. We term that dimension a "teaching philosophy," and the contrast represented by the scale being one between a "transmission" view of good teaching (direct instruction and repetitive skills practice around a fixed curriculum) and a "constructivist" view
(knowledge construction through collaborative projects, and problem solving tasks.). The index was divided roughly into quartiles, with teachers in the lowest quartile classified as
"most transmission-oriented" and those in the highest quartile as "most constructivist."
Table 1 shows the percent of teachers at each level of Professional Engagement who fell into each quartile in terms of teaching philosophy. Only 3% of the Teacher Leaders were in the most transmission-oriented quartile compared to 32% of the Private Practice Teachers.
In contrast, 58% of the Teacher Leaders defined their overall beliefs about good teaching in ways that suggest a strongly constructivist philosophy compared to only 20% of Private
Practice Teachers. These are striking differences, suggesting that to the degree that professionally engaged teachers influence other teachers, either through dialogue or by
14 modeling these beliefs in the teaching practices that they discuss, the impact of Teacher
Leaders would be to move other teachers in a more constructivist direction.
Table 1
Teaching Philosophy by Professional Engagement
% Most
Professional Transmissio % 2nd % 3rd. % Most
Engagement n-Oriented Quartile Quartile Constructivi % Total
st Teacher Leaders 3 9 30 58 100 Teacher 14 20 26 40 100
Professionals Interactive 19 24 24 32 100
Teachers Private Practice 32 25 23 20 100 All Teachers 25 24 24 27 100 Sample: Probability and purposive samples.
Leadership-Inspired Instruction
Of course, if teacher leaders influence other teachers through their practice, their practice would need to reflect their teaching philosophy to begin with. It is well understood that teaching from a constructivist perspective is more demanding on teachers; perhaps there are no actual differences between Teacher Leaders and other teachers in classroom practices—only in espoused beliefs.
The TLC study investigated that question as well. First, some illustrative findings drawn from the TLC report on teacher leaders (Becker & Riel, 2000) that highlight the kinds of instructional practices most relevant to teaching in specific subject areas.
Professionally Engaged Teachers of English were more than twice as likely as Private
Practice English teachers to have students work in teams to complete assignments (78% vs.
36%). They were also much more likely to have students write in a journal on at least a weekly basis (67% vs. 45%), and they were somewhat less likely to introduce a new unit by
15 having students do introductory drills on background facts or skills. Among social studies teachers, Professionally Engaged Teachers were much more likely than Private Practice
Teachers to have students work on long projects (72% vs. 33%) and to do meta-cognitive assessments of their own work (61% vs. 23%), while they were much less likely to lead their class in frequent whole-class recitation activities (27% vs. 61%) or to ask their students questions for the purpose of seeing if their students knew the correct answer (22% vs. 61%).
Professionally Engaged science teachers were almost twice as likely as Private
Practice science teachers to ask students questions in order to get students to relate their school work to their own personal experiences (74% vs. 40%) and they were more than twice as likely to have students work in small groups on a weekly basis to collectively solve a problem (66% vs. 28%). Secondary math teachers falling into the Professionally Engaged group were more likely than Private Practice math teachers to report that they had students work on problems with no obvious solution (54% vs. 35%). Professionally Engaged elementary teachers (grades 4-6) were substantially more likely to have students decide on procedures for solving problems and more likely to introduce their current unit by having students discuss the topic in small groups.
All of these differences suggest that, consistent with differences in their teaching philosophies, Professionally Engaged Teachers were more likely than other teachers to emphasize teaching towards higher cognitive processes, to use active learning strategies like projects and group work, and were less likely to use direct instruction and skills-practice strategies. This was confirmed by analysis of an index of the entire group of 27 item prompts about teaching practices contained in the survey, an index with an alpha reliability of .86.
Divided into quartiles, just as with the teaching philosophy index, a clear majority (57%) of the Teacher Leaders fell in the quartile that most reflects a knowledge construction approach to teaching while only 2% of the Teacher Leaders were located in the direct instruction quartile. In contrast, among Private Practice Teachers, twice as many fell into the most direct-instruction-oriented quartile as fell into the most knowledge-construction-oriented quartile. (See Table 2.)
16 Table 2
Constructivist PEDAGOGY by Professional Engagement
% Direct % 2nd % 3rd %
Professional Instruction Quartile Quartile Knowledge % Total
Engagement Constructio
n Teacher Leaders 2 16 25 57 100 Teacher Professionals 11 20 23 47 100 Interactive Teachers 16 22 29 33 100 Private Practice 33 28 23 16 100 All Teachers 24 25 25 26 100 Sample: Probability and purposive samples.
The relationship between Professional Engagement and constructivist teaching practice was quite strong across teachers of every subject-matter category analyzed in the
TLC survey. For all seven subject-matter categories, the scores for Professionally Engaged
Teachers were more than two-thirds of a standard deviation higher, suggesting that they were far more constructivist in their teaching than were Private Practice Teachers of the same subject. The largest difference was in the field of social studies, where Professionally
Engaged Teachers scored an average of 1.35 standard deviations higher in the direction of constructivist practice than did Private Practice Teachers.
Teacher Leaders' Use of Computers: TLC Study Findings
We turn now to a discussion of teacher leaders' use of computers. Using the TLC data, we address the question of whether teachers who are professionally engaged use computers more frequently than other teachers, and whether they use computers in ways that reflect their more constructivist orientation. Our main focus in this section is on instructional use by students during class time—how frequently teachers ask students to use computers and what types of software they have students use—but we also would want to consider teachers' own professional uses of computers and their expertise in doing so.
17 In nearly every subject-area of instruction, Teacher Leaders and Teacher
Professionals were more likely to have their students use computers on a regular (i.e., weekly) basis during class time than were Private Practice Teachers. This was especially true for math teachers (five times as likely), but was also true for English and science teachers. Also, Professionally Engaged Teachers had their students use every type of software asked about in the survey more than Private Practice Teachers, even when the comparison was limited only to teachers who used computers. The greatest differences between Professionally Engaged Teachers and Private Practice teachers were in students' use of electronic mail, multimedia authoring software, and presentation software, where computer-using Professionally Engaged Teachers employed these resources 3 to 4 times as much as computer-using Private Practice teachers, but it was also true to a lesser degree for word processing software, CD-ROMs, and even drill-oriented game software.
Another analysis was about a type of teacher we called an "Exemplary Computer-
User." This construct was measured by combining information about teachers' instructional and professional uses of computers and their technical expertise in ICT, including self- reported changes in the role of computers in their teaching practice over the previous several years. Professional use, for example, included such activities as accessing lesson materials from the internet, using digital cameras for lesson preparation, corresponding with parents, and posting student work on the Web. Technical expertise concerned both specific computer skills (self-reported) and experience with both Mac and Windows platforms. An index construction process (involving three sub-scales and described in more detail in Becker &
Riel, 2000) produced a measure on which 10% of all teachers were judged to be "exemplary" computer-using teachers. Similar percentages (9% to 12%) at each school level (elementary, middle, and high school) and in subject-areas (other than computer and business education) were identified as exemplary.
Yet when we disaggregated teachers according to their level of Professional
Engagement, rather remarkable differences appeared. In particular, Teacher Leaders were
10 times as likely as Private Practice Teachers to be designated as Exemplary Computer
18 Users. Forty percent (40%) of Teacher Leaders were classed as Exemplary Users, compared to only 4% of Private Practice Teachers. About one-fourth of Teacher
Professionals were classed as Exemplary, six times as many as among Private Practice
Teachers. Of the three component factors of this measure, Teacher Leaders were most different from other teachers in having students use constructivist-oriented tool software
(mean z-score of +.88), and least different from other teachers in terms of frequent use of simple software (still more than one-half standard deviation higher than average, z=+.52). On
Professional Use and Expertise, their superiority was extremely high (z=+.67), but not as high as on Constructivist Instructional Use.
Of all of the ways in which Professionally Engaged and Private Practice teachers might differ—in their backgrounds, teaching responsibilities, teaching philosophies, and teaching practices—none of them produced differences on the order of the magnitude of this measure of Exemplary Computer Use. This suggests that there is a very strong connection between teacher leadership and sophisticated use of computers, in both teaching and professional life. Teacher Leaders are much more likely than the typical teacher to have incorporated a wide variety of computer applications into their instructional practice and they are much more likely to have become competent users of computers themselves.
The magnitude of this association suggests that several different causal forces are operating—that teachers who act in professional ways are more motivated to master new technologies and more easily see the utility of computers in their work; that accomplishment in using technology in student lessons and in class preparation motivates teachers into sharing with peers their new skills; and, in a complementary way, that teachers seeking to learn to exploit computers in their work also seek out professional contacts as a means of attaining those skills. The huge association between computer expertise and professional leadership among teachers also helps to explain why the excitement about using computers one sees at professional meetings of teachers does not translate into widespread improvement across-the-board in teachers' use of technology: The participants at such
19 conferences are professionals who are exploiting computers in their work, but they are an unrepresentative subset of purveyors of their craft. The real challenge for such technology experts is to transfer their excitement and expertise to their peers who lack the same interest for involving themselves either in professional activities or in learning to master the application of computer resources to their instructional and work tasks.
Studies of Teacher Leadership Among Technology-Expert Teachers
The Teaching, Learning, and Computing survey did not specifically focus on technology leadership among teacher leaders. Instead, the findings we cited here dealt with the technology proficiency of teacher leaders in general. However, there have been a number of other studies whose focus was on technology-specific leadership and the ability of technology-utilizing reform efforts to change schooling and teaching more generally.
Perhaps the most influential research on reforming teaching through technology has been Sandholtz, Ringstaff, and Dwyer's (1997) study of the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow
(ACOT) project. That study is most well known for its typology of stages of developing teacher expertise around technology—from entry to adoption to adaptation to appropriation to invention. Other researchers have produced similar stage models of expertise development, and with some of these models, "technology leadership" is presented as a final stage in personal development (e.g., see Sherry & Gibson, 2002).
The ACOT researchers devoted a substantial part of their book to discussing collaboration among technology-using teachers and diffusion of computer use. They reported a bi-directional influence between the level of teacher collaboration in a school and the extent of diffusion of technology applications. In other words, pre-existing levels of collaboration influenced the amount of technology diffusion, but also the relatively dense infusion of technology itself led to more collaboration among teachers. They suggested that over time, collegial sharing around technology moved from emotional support (e.g., sharing frustrations and successes and providing encouragement) to technical assistance, to sharing ideas around instruction (including observing the use of computers in other classrooms), and then
20 to what they called "team teaching" (e.g., joint planning and curriculum development; and interdisciplinary alignment of instructional lessons and projects).
A later development within the ACOT project was the implementation of a constructivist-oriented program of summer institutes for selected teachers at non-ACOT schools (that is, schools without the technology infrastructure provided by Apple in ACOT schools) who were expected to go back to their schools and provide technology leadership.
The researchers found that several problems were endemic to these newly trained teachers providing effective leadership—e.g., a density of technology too low to be practical for teachers, insufficient technical support for what they did have, and not enough free time to provide peer leadership. What did change was the teaching of the participants in the summer institutes—their own pedagogy became more constructivist and their own use of technology became more innovative. Anecdotal evidence did suggest that "some" of the workshop participants were effective in getting broader participation in technology use among their peers and in taking on a leadership role with respect to technology at their school. It is difficult to say how broad this outcome was since the researchers' orientation to this study was qualitative and illustrative rather than statistical, even to the extent of failing to provide descriptive statistics about the frequency that various outcomes characterized individual teacher-participants.
A second program of research on teacher technology leadership identifies teacher technology leaders as those who became "active researchers who carefully observed their own practice, collected data, shared their improvements in practice with their peers, and taught new members of their virtual learning community" (Sherry & Gibson, 2002, p. 182).
The challenges identified for the successful promulgation of this role included the fact that teacher leaders with formal peer-leadership responsibilities often lost the release time that had been granted to them, and, over time, experienced reduced support from school and district administration for their own continued professional growth (e.g., attendance at technology conferences, etc.). In fact, Sherry argues that from a systems theory point of view, the principal impediment to maintaining the momentum of teacher leadership around
21 technology is that three "critical processes" must all be present:
- "Convergence": Resources for technology must be dense enough at the classroom level
for practical use.
- "Mutuality": Benefits for technology investment must be perceived both by the user of
these resources and the administrators responsible for funding and providing them.
- "Extensiveness": A high density of technology must be present throughout a school
building, enabling both broader administrative support and backup expertise in the
likelihood of a technology leader taking their own expertise with them when others entice
them with new career opportunities.
This suggests that there is a high bar in terms of local resources and support before teacher technology leadership will have staying power in any school.
One other study of technology leadership identified here focused specifically on technology expert teachers, and essentially turns the presumed temporal direction—from expert use of technology in teaching to technology leadership—on its head. This is a recent study of technology use in teacher education (i.e., in tertiary rather than primary or secondary education). Drent and Meelissen (2006) asked how we can account for innovative ICT practices among teacher educators. They identified "personal entrepreneurship" as a significant trait in influencing innovative use. Personal entrepreneurship was defined in this study to refer to the number of contacts, both inside and outside their own university, that the teacher educator maintained to assist in her own professional understanding of ICT. It was measured by several indicators of the strength of external networking—ties to organizations and individuals—that the teacher educator maintained; and the frequency of contacts with colleagues around ICT issues. By using path analysis software the authors identified personal entrepreneurship as a critical factor—existing very early in the chain of variables influencing innovative ICT use, not only having a direct influence on innovative ICT use, but also affecting the teacher educator's ICT attitudes and their ICT competence which in turn also affected their propensity to innovate with technology.
22 Dimensions of Teacher Technology Leadership
Innovative or exemplary use of technology in a teacher's own teaching practice is one of only a number of conditions that would qualify someone as a technology leader. Applying the model of teacher leadership proposed in the first section of this chapter, teacher technology leaders are conceptualized here as incorporating a parallel set of activities into their professional practice:
1. Teachers Learning with Technology: Technology leadership evolves from an interest
in and ability to incorporate new tools in innovative ways coupled with a highly reflective
and analytic focus on the relative merits of the technology. These teachers constantly
explore and refine new ways of making technology useful to their teaching and their
students' learning.
2. Teachers Collaborating Around Technology: Technology leadership involves frequent
exchanges of ideas about educational applications of ICT with other teachers at their
school through formal and informal mentoring and coaching and other informal leadership
activities.
3. Teachers Networking in Technology-Active Communities: Technology leaders
participate in networks of technology-using teachers around their district, region, state,
and nation, particularly around innovative ways to use technology resources and tools
and would have links to sources of expertise about educational technology through their
reading and through personal associations with researchers and developers of
educational technology products.
4. Teachers Contributing to Knowledge About Educational Technology: Finally,
technology leadership implies taking an active role in organizations to share knowledge
formally through presenting, teaching, and publishing on educational technology issues.
Here we briefly illustrate how these interrelated and overlapping practices around the
23 use of technology collectively describe a form of teacher leadership in the use of technology.
1. Teachers Learning with Technology
To assume the role of leader and affect the technology use of others, teachers need to be able to learn to use technology in a generative manner and engage in a process of continual learning in and through practice. Technology changes so rapidly that efforts to create a stable set of lessons which relies on computer tools is challenging. Shifts in platforms, software versions and peripheral tools will frustrate anyone who is not looking to continually adapt practice. So it is likely that teachers who are attracted to working with technology are more like to be teachers who approach teaching from an adaptive stance.
This high level of need for continual learning is likely to explain the high correlation between teacher leadership and innovative computer use (Becker & Riel, 2000). Teachers who focus only on how to teach, to the exclusion of the adaptive inquiry process, are less likely to become involved with technology because by its nature, use of technology requires a high commitment to continual learning.
2. Teachers Collaborating Around Technology
In order for expertise of technology-proficient teachers to be shared with other teachers, there has to be motivation on both sides—expert teachers have to want to share their knowledge and other teachers have to want to receive it. Expectations, social processes, school networks, principal leadership and communication technology all help shape the way in which teacher technology leaders influence the practice of others.
One element that may have made leadership in this area promising, and yet difficult at the same time, is that for many years educators have felt pressured to use computers in their teaching, even before computers were widely accepted as valuable instructional tools.
For example, Zhao and Frank (2003) found that more than 80% of the teachers in their
Michigan sample believed that "others in this school expect me to use computers." More than
70% reported that "I need to use computers to keep up in this school." High expectations
24 might result in a level of tension that would make sharing of expertise difficult. But at the same time, such a climate could be thought of as an inducement for teachers to be open to peer expertise. On balance, Zhao and Frank found that the more that teachers reported high expectations for their use of computers the greater was teacher use of computers.
Further study by these researchers suggested that technology use within a school was promoted primarily by "help and talk"—social processes by which effective leadership is manifested. It is through these mechanisms that the social capital of technical expertise is made useful (Frank, Zhao & Borman, 2004). "Help and talk" can involve sharing personal experience with similar technologies, software, websites, and teaching strategies or it can be based on wider knowledge about how information and communication technology has been successfully used in other places. It can be pedagogically focused or it can involve technical troubleshooting. But two key points are that the communication has to be based on actual expertise and that it must be relevant to the specific needs and instructional context of the technology leader's peers. However, even that may not be enough. Frank and his colleagues concluded that for technology leaders' expertise to be broadly influential, the sociometric pattern of communication among teachers in a school was critical. "The distribution of technology implementation is very much a function of the distribution of social relations within the school" (Zhao & Frank, 2003, p. 830).
3. Teachers Networking in Technology-Active Communities
The importance of teacher technology expertise extends well beyond providing leadership among the peers with whom that expert has potential day-to-day in-person contact by virtue of working in the same school. Technology leadership is also manifested in a variety of on-line, at-a-distance, and in-person episodic encounters. The internet has made it possible for teachers to exchange expertise with other through social ties of online communities. The largest and longest-standing online global communities of teachers sharing of expertise around technology— International and Education Resource Network
25 (IEARN) (http://www.iearn.org) and Global SchoolNet (www.globalschoolnet.org )—were both started by teacher leaders in technology. Teachers assume a high degree of responsibility in the distributed leadership of these organization and in doing so extend the reach of new forms of teaching with technology to peers in developing countries. Technology teacher leaders play central roles in many other internet-based communities including discipline-linked organizations
(e.g., Math Forum, National Writing Project), professional development communities (Tapped
In, Knowledge Loom, Teacher.net, and Teacher Network) and student learning activities
(ThinkQuest and Globe).
4. Teachers Contributing to Knowledge About Educational Technology
Profiles, videos, lessons, and reflections of teacher leaders in technology, both on the
Internet and in print, extend their ability to shape educational practice. Education with New
Technologies at Harvard features five "pictures of practice"
(http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ent/gallery/) highlighting teachers who have published extensive descriptions of how they have used technology tools to reach and adapt their teaching goals.
. On Indiana University's Inquiry Learning Forums (http://ilf.crlt.indiana.edu/), the virtual classroom visits link to dozens of teacher leaders who use technology to share videos of a lesson with extensive analysis and reflections about classroom practice. The George Lucas
Education Foundation has created Edutopia (www.edutopia.org) for publishing the stories of teachers who are using technology in inspirational ways. They feature teacher leaders with technology in videos on the Web, which are also included in instructional modules, on compact disks, and in print magazines. Increasingly teachers publish their work on the web and in teacher magazines, professional journals.
Other means for extending the reach of teachers' knowledge, expertise, and leadership come from opportunities to present at annual conferences such as, in the United
States, the National Educational Computer Conference (NECC) and many state-sponsored
Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conferences. Journals such as Learning and Leading with
Technology and Technology and Learning (and its online companion,
26 www.techlearning.com) search out and feature innovative teacher leaders, and in doing so create bridges that extend the reach of innovation with technology.
Toward a Culture of Teacher Leadership with Technology
In this chapter we have suggested that teachers who become leaders—either with technology or more generally—approach teaching in a specific way. We have characterized teacher leadership in terms of a path from learning to teach adaptively to contributing to the knowledge-base of the profession. Although clearly the skills that enable one to become a fully expert teacher leader develop over time, we would argue that the disposition to lead may need to be instilled early in a teacher's career. We propose that during pre-service education the cognitive and meta-cognitive skills and dispositions that lead to adaptive expertise ought to become part of a novice teacher's repertoire (e.g. see Bransford et al.,
2000). This process of learning from practice requires teachers to be engaged in acquiring deep knowledge by paying increasing attention to the contextual, situational, and interactive dimensions of teaching (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).
Yet that is only the first step towards teacher leadership. Teachers who develop deep understanding of teaching but who remain isolated in their classrooms will not affect what is taught or learned in other classrooms. Effective leadership requires personal effort to overcome norms within teaching that discourage substantive and productive exchanges of ideas among practitioners. The current structure of schooling inhibits rather than supports teacher leadership. Changes in the structure of work are required to make teaching more public, to give teachers more opportunities to learn from and teach each other. To accomplish this, schools need to develop a structure that supports collective responsibility for student learning and distributed learning opportunities for teachers. A critical aspect of that structure is attention to the social and professional networks that connect teachers to one another and to the resources and expertise embedded in the network. When access to relevant knowledge is severely restricted, the result is that not only is teacher expertise lost to professional practice but teachers who hold that expertise fail to develop as leaders. This
27 is a huge loss of talent and results in lower teacher quality over time. Mentoring, although helpful for novice teachers, is often only a bridge to a disconnected island, helping a new teacher accommodate into a dysfunctional structure. To reach every child will take a structure that develops, not just the technical ICT skills of teachers, but their leadership skills as well. The speed of change in technology makes effective use impossible if each teacher has to learn to use it alone. Without developing and capitalizing on forms of distributed expertise of teacher leadership, schools will simply be unable to cope with the rapid rate of change that is required for the use of technology.
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