This brief paper supported a 2014 AERA presentation called How Teacher Preparation is Being Transformed by Digital Technologies at an Urban Comprehensive College
Technology’s Role in Education
For the past three decades education reformers convinced enough K-12 school administrators that without computers in the classroom, students would not be prepared for well-paying jobs (Cuban, 1993; 2001). So, schools often made purchases without knowing how they would use the technology (Oppenheimer, 2004). This rapid deployment of technology in the United States caused a great deal of confusion for teachers and researchers who struggled to identify technology’s role in the academic lives of children (Finkelstein, Perkins, Adams, & Kohl, 2005; Brantley-Dias & Ertmer, 2013).
Initially, education researchers found that teachers “used the new technology to basically continue what they have always done” (Cuban, 2001, p. 179); they used the technology for administrative tasks such as communicating with parents. School administrators countered this phenomenon with professional development (PD), but in many instances, the PD was ineffective (Zhao & Frank, 2003; Oppenheimer, 2004; Yerrick & Johnson, 2009). Many educators found computers to be unreliable (Kirkpatrick, Peck, & Cuban, 2001) or inappropriate for their students (Cuban 1993; 2001; Cordes & Miller, 2000) and its role in the teaching and learning process were questioned (Ertmer, 2005; Grandgenett, 2008). And in addition to the aforementioned, the evolving concept called the “digital divide” (Compaine, 2001; Valadez & Durán, 2007; Wood & Howley, 2012) continues to provide technology advocates with a challenge. Despite the problems, a voluminous amount of research has identified numerous pedagogical techniques that use technologies in practical ways to teach content.
Education researchers have examined how teachers manage their classrooms with technology (Mehan, 1989; Wang & Carter Ching, 2003; Staarman, Krol, & Meijden, 2005; Yerrick et al., 2009) how computers support knowledge building communities (Scardarnalia & Berieter, 1994; Mistler-Jackson & Songer, 2000) and the effects of Internet technologies (e.g. blogging, computer simulations, wikis and Twitter), on learning (Wells, 2006; Podolefsky, Perkins, & Adams, 2010; Pifarré & Kleine Staarman, 2011; Hunter & Caraway, 2014). These researchers identified places to use technology in curricula, the types of technology to use and how to use it effectively. Even though these findings are promising, those who teach future elementary teachers have difficult problems to solve. They must decide what technology to teach, how to teach with it and combat the residual effects, if there were any, of any ineffective learning experiences with technology that these future teachers may have encountered as students.
Providing the Cultural Tool of TPaCK to Future Teachers
Graduate student teachers enter educational programs with strong preconceptions about how to teach based on their earlier experiences as students in classrooms (Lortie, 1975). It is unlikely that they have experienced learning content with new and emerging technologies (Niess, 2008) like those mentioned earlier. On the other hand, it is very likely that their pedagogical and content knowledge in a variety of elementary subjects is rudimentary at best (Angeli & Valenides, 2008).
In order to develop graduate student teachers’ knowledge of technology, pedagogy and content a “cultural tool” was formed with the hope that it would be used to help students make sense of the world (Lemke, 2001). The term “cultural tools” can be thought of as any tool that humans used to mediate actions (Wertsch, 1993) and solve complex problems (Vygotsky, 1978). Stetsenko (1999) defined them as, “…tools [that] can be and should be viewed not merely as objects (things), but also as embodiments of certain cultural practices, crystallized templates of action, schematized representations of certain ways of doing things in human communities” (pp. 246–247).
The cultural tool that was crafted to help educators learn how to teach with technology is called the Technological, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPaCK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). This framework, a scheme to organize thinking about teaching with technology, describes the intersection of three domains of knowledge: 1.) pedagogical, 2.) content and 3.) technological. These domains of knowledge are required for teachers to integrate technology into teaching and learning in meaningful ways (2006). TPaCK provides teacher educators and teachers with a common language to talk about 1.) where to use technology in the curriculum, 2.) what technology to use and 3.) how to teach with it (McCrory, 2009).
Efforts to prepare graduate students for teaching with technology. There have been a number of methodologies used by teacher educators to develop TPacK in the minds of future teachers. Researchers have found that faculty mentoring, matching future teachers with technology-using teachers in the field and the restructuring of teacher education curricula were correlated with increases in the future teachers’ TPaCK (Polly, Mims, Shepherd, & Inan, 2010; Tondeur, van Braak, Sang, & Voogt, 2012).
Teacher educators can improve a graduate student teacher’s knowledge base by providing them with multiple opportunities to practice teaching with technology without formally evaluating them (Singer and Maher, 2007). Angeli (2005) recommends that graduate student teachers consider using technology as “…a learning tool for enhancing their teaching practices and not just a delivery vehicle for supporting old ones” (p. 385). Graduate student teachers need to be able to take risks during their teaching practice with tools they did not learn with or watch their teachers use without the pressures of being formally evaluated.
Finding opportunities to practice teaching with technology is a challenge when K-12 schools are in session. It follows then, that occasions to practice teaching are even further reduced during the summer months.
Methodology
Pedagogical reasons for using a wiki as a course management tool. A qualitative research design was used to collect a variety of different types of data from 18 graduate students who shared their ideas on a course wiki during two separate online course entitled Advanced Educational Technology for K - 6 Classrooms. A wiki was chosen as a course management tool for three reasons: 1.) the wiki I chose, Wikispaces (https://www.wikispaces.com/), is a FREE, simple, software tool for educators that would help my graduate students develop collaborative skills (Parker & Chao, 2007); 2.) a wiki enables asynchronous collaboration among students and thus provides them with the ability to control the pacing of the instruction (Moreno & Mayer, 2007); and 3.) a wiki supports a constructivist view of learning that enables knowledge to be constructed between individuals and groups (Kimmerle, Moskaliuk, & Cress, 2011).
Data sources and analysis. Three sources of data were collected from each graduate student: 1.) a technology-infused lesson plan that required them to use a video found on the Internet; 2.) a self-reflection of the lesson taught in an asynchronous manner to a teaching partner; and 3.) feedback provided to his or her teaching partner about their lesson using sentence starters to encourage collaborative talk.
The data was analyzed using a sociocultural approach to mind to understand how the mental functioning of the 18 graduate students was related to the historical, cultural and institutional contexts (Wertsch, 1998) of an American classroom. In describing sociocultural research, Wertch (1995) wrote, “The goal of sociocultural research is to understand the relationship between human mental functioning, on the one hand, and cultural, historical, and institutional setting, on the other” (p. 56). The mental functioning of each of the graduate students was determined by the pedagogical actions, contained in the lesson plans, what they described in their teacher reflections and what they chose to comment upon regarding a peer’s lesson.
I specifically looked at the tools and signs (Vygotsky, 1978) they chose to tell me about in their lesson plans, and the “hidden dialogicality” (Wertsch, 1993) contained in their plans that revealed why they planned their lesson using the signs and tools that they did.
Learning sequence. During the second week of an online course, graduate students were required to build a lesson on the course wiki that followed these instructions: “Your task is to: (1) Choose a video from the resources I shared with you earlier in the trail (if you choose Brain Pop, know that you will have 30 days to use it). (2) Determine how your students will access the video (3) How will the students show you they learned? What product will they create? (4) How will you check for understanding? (5) How will THEY be able to check their own understanding.” They were given a lesson plan template and told to: 1.) create a new wikipage on the course wiki, 2.) copy/paste the lesson plan template on to the new wikipage, 3.) fill out the lesson plan template, 4.) write brief directions for a teaching partner who would “complete” the lesson online, 5.) complete a self-reflection based on the “Analyzing the Effectiveness of an Activity or Assignment by Charlotte Danielson” (Danielson, 2007) and 6.) provide feedback to their teaching partner based on the lesson they completed.
Research Questions. Two questions guided this one-year study: 1.) how do graduate students interpret the use of technological tools that have the potential to support pedagogical strategies presented in the context of a university technology course? 2.) in what ways, if any, does the use of a wiki affect the development of a graduate students’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge?
For the past three decades education reformers convinced enough K-12 school administrators that without computers in the classroom, students would not be prepared for well-paying jobs (Cuban, 1993; 2001). So, schools often made purchases without knowing how they would use the technology (Oppenheimer, 2004). This rapid deployment of technology in the United States caused a great deal of confusion for teachers and researchers who struggled to identify technology’s role in the academic lives of children (Finkelstein, Perkins, Adams, & Kohl, 2005; Brantley-Dias & Ertmer, 2013).
Initially, education researchers found that teachers “used the new technology to basically continue what they have always done” (Cuban, 2001, p. 179); they used the technology for administrative tasks such as communicating with parents. School administrators countered this phenomenon with professional development (PD), but in many instances, the PD was ineffective (Zhao & Frank, 2003; Oppenheimer, 2004; Yerrick & Johnson, 2009). Many educators found computers to be unreliable (Kirkpatrick, Peck, & Cuban, 2001) or inappropriate for their students (Cuban 1993; 2001; Cordes & Miller, 2000) and its role in the teaching and learning process were questioned (Ertmer, 2005; Grandgenett, 2008). And in addition to the aforementioned, the evolving concept called the “digital divide” (Compaine, 2001; Valadez & Durán, 2007; Wood & Howley, 2012) continues to provide technology advocates with a challenge. Despite the problems, a voluminous amount of research has identified numerous pedagogical techniques that use technologies in practical ways to teach content.
Education researchers have examined how teachers manage their classrooms with technology (Mehan, 1989; Wang & Carter Ching, 2003; Staarman, Krol, & Meijden, 2005; Yerrick et al., 2009) how computers support knowledge building communities (Scardarnalia & Berieter, 1994; Mistler-Jackson & Songer, 2000) and the effects of Internet technologies (e.g. blogging, computer simulations, wikis and Twitter), on learning (Wells, 2006; Podolefsky, Perkins, & Adams, 2010; Pifarré & Kleine Staarman, 2011; Hunter & Caraway, 2014). These researchers identified places to use technology in curricula, the types of technology to use and how to use it effectively. Even though these findings are promising, those who teach future elementary teachers have difficult problems to solve. They must decide what technology to teach, how to teach with it and combat the residual effects, if there were any, of any ineffective learning experiences with technology that these future teachers may have encountered as students.
Providing the Cultural Tool of TPaCK to Future Teachers
Graduate student teachers enter educational programs with strong preconceptions about how to teach based on their earlier experiences as students in classrooms (Lortie, 1975). It is unlikely that they have experienced learning content with new and emerging technologies (Niess, 2008) like those mentioned earlier. On the other hand, it is very likely that their pedagogical and content knowledge in a variety of elementary subjects is rudimentary at best (Angeli & Valenides, 2008).
In order to develop graduate student teachers’ knowledge of technology, pedagogy and content a “cultural tool” was formed with the hope that it would be used to help students make sense of the world (Lemke, 2001). The term “cultural tools” can be thought of as any tool that humans used to mediate actions (Wertsch, 1993) and solve complex problems (Vygotsky, 1978). Stetsenko (1999) defined them as, “…tools [that] can be and should be viewed not merely as objects (things), but also as embodiments of certain cultural practices, crystallized templates of action, schematized representations of certain ways of doing things in human communities” (pp. 246–247).
The cultural tool that was crafted to help educators learn how to teach with technology is called the Technological, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPaCK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). This framework, a scheme to organize thinking about teaching with technology, describes the intersection of three domains of knowledge: 1.) pedagogical, 2.) content and 3.) technological. These domains of knowledge are required for teachers to integrate technology into teaching and learning in meaningful ways (2006). TPaCK provides teacher educators and teachers with a common language to talk about 1.) where to use technology in the curriculum, 2.) what technology to use and 3.) how to teach with it (McCrory, 2009).
Efforts to prepare graduate students for teaching with technology. There have been a number of methodologies used by teacher educators to develop TPacK in the minds of future teachers. Researchers have found that faculty mentoring, matching future teachers with technology-using teachers in the field and the restructuring of teacher education curricula were correlated with increases in the future teachers’ TPaCK (Polly, Mims, Shepherd, & Inan, 2010; Tondeur, van Braak, Sang, & Voogt, 2012).
Teacher educators can improve a graduate student teacher’s knowledge base by providing them with multiple opportunities to practice teaching with technology without formally evaluating them (Singer and Maher, 2007). Angeli (2005) recommends that graduate student teachers consider using technology as “…a learning tool for enhancing their teaching practices and not just a delivery vehicle for supporting old ones” (p. 385). Graduate student teachers need to be able to take risks during their teaching practice with tools they did not learn with or watch their teachers use without the pressures of being formally evaluated.
Finding opportunities to practice teaching with technology is a challenge when K-12 schools are in session. It follows then, that occasions to practice teaching are even further reduced during the summer months.
Methodology
Pedagogical reasons for using a wiki as a course management tool. A qualitative research design was used to collect a variety of different types of data from 18 graduate students who shared their ideas on a course wiki during two separate online course entitled Advanced Educational Technology for K - 6 Classrooms. A wiki was chosen as a course management tool for three reasons: 1.) the wiki I chose, Wikispaces (https://www.wikispaces.com/), is a FREE, simple, software tool for educators that would help my graduate students develop collaborative skills (Parker & Chao, 2007); 2.) a wiki enables asynchronous collaboration among students and thus provides them with the ability to control the pacing of the instruction (Moreno & Mayer, 2007); and 3.) a wiki supports a constructivist view of learning that enables knowledge to be constructed between individuals and groups (Kimmerle, Moskaliuk, & Cress, 2011).
Data sources and analysis. Three sources of data were collected from each graduate student: 1.) a technology-infused lesson plan that required them to use a video found on the Internet; 2.) a self-reflection of the lesson taught in an asynchronous manner to a teaching partner; and 3.) feedback provided to his or her teaching partner about their lesson using sentence starters to encourage collaborative talk.
The data was analyzed using a sociocultural approach to mind to understand how the mental functioning of the 18 graduate students was related to the historical, cultural and institutional contexts (Wertsch, 1998) of an American classroom. In describing sociocultural research, Wertch (1995) wrote, “The goal of sociocultural research is to understand the relationship between human mental functioning, on the one hand, and cultural, historical, and institutional setting, on the other” (p. 56). The mental functioning of each of the graduate students was determined by the pedagogical actions, contained in the lesson plans, what they described in their teacher reflections and what they chose to comment upon regarding a peer’s lesson.
I specifically looked at the tools and signs (Vygotsky, 1978) they chose to tell me about in their lesson plans, and the “hidden dialogicality” (Wertsch, 1993) contained in their plans that revealed why they planned their lesson using the signs and tools that they did.
Learning sequence. During the second week of an online course, graduate students were required to build a lesson on the course wiki that followed these instructions: “Your task is to: (1) Choose a video from the resources I shared with you earlier in the trail (if you choose Brain Pop, know that you will have 30 days to use it). (2) Determine how your students will access the video (3) How will the students show you they learned? What product will they create? (4) How will you check for understanding? (5) How will THEY be able to check their own understanding.” They were given a lesson plan template and told to: 1.) create a new wikipage on the course wiki, 2.) copy/paste the lesson plan template on to the new wikipage, 3.) fill out the lesson plan template, 4.) write brief directions for a teaching partner who would “complete” the lesson online, 5.) complete a self-reflection based on the “Analyzing the Effectiveness of an Activity or Assignment by Charlotte Danielson” (Danielson, 2007) and 6.) provide feedback to their teaching partner based on the lesson they completed.
Research Questions. Two questions guided this one-year study: 1.) how do graduate students interpret the use of technological tools that have the potential to support pedagogical strategies presented in the context of a university technology course? 2.) in what ways, if any, does the use of a wiki affect the development of a graduate students’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge?
No comments:
Post a Comment