What Makes for Effective Teacher Professional Development in ICT?

Background:
Since 1991, successive Governments and many schools in New Zealand have invested large amounts of money on new computer based information and communications technologies (ICTs). Inspiring this investment seem to have been a widely held public perception that developing technological competence has become an essential component of schooling in the ‘information age’, and a widely held professional perception that such new technologies have an important role to play as tools for teaching and learning across most aspects of the school curriculum.

Through the 1990s, public and private providers, to supply professional development for teachers in this area, let a series of government contracts for various programmes. In 1998, however, most of these various initiatives were given some coherence in the announcement of a new national ‘ICT Strategy for Schools’, and out of this arose the 23 ICTPD (Information and Communication Technology Professional Development) School Clusters project.

The now long-established and highly successful ICTPD programme is aimed at:

• Increasing teachers’ ICT skills and knowledge

• Increasing usage of ICTs for professional and administrative tasks in schools

• Supporting school policy and planning initiatives related to ICTs

• Increasing the frequency and quality of the classroom usage of ICTs to support teaching and learning

This is a summary of the final evaluative report for the period 1999-2001, which involved 23 clusters of schools around New Zealand.

Description:

In evaluating the 23 ICTPD School Clusters programme in the period from mid 1999 to the end of 2001, researchers addressed several questions related to the ‘effects’ and ‘effectiveness’ of such collaborative models of professional development in ICT for schools, for participating teachers and for students in classrooms. The purpose of the evaluation was to outline the effects of the ICTPD cluster initiative as a whole, and not to evaluate specific, individual cluster programmes.

The following research questions guided the evaluation:

• What were the most effective operational characteristics of the various ‘schoolcluster’ PDmodels in meeting stakeholder and participant goals?

• How effective were the ICTPD cluster programmes in terms of promoting administrative efficiency, policy development and strategic planning for ICT in participating schools?

• How effective were the ICTPD cluster programmes in increasing teachers’ skills and knowledge related to the educational applications of ICTs, and in increasing classroom usage of ICTs?

• What has been the educational worth or value to students of the ICT-based learning activities implemented by participating teachers in their classrooms during the course of the ICTPD programme?

Key findings:
While operating within a common ‘model’ of directly funding a cluster of schools to collaboratively provide teacher professional development, the 23 ICTPD clusters nevertheless varied considerably in the ways in which they operationalised and conducted their professional development programmes, and indeed in the particular goals and outcomes they each emphasised in their implementation.

Overall, the cluster models were found to be effective in achieving their stated goals, especially those which related to increasing teachers’ administrative and general professional use of ICTs, to increasing teachers’ competence and confidence as users of a range of ICTs and, where it had been a focus of the programme’s implementation, to increasing their understandings about the place and role of ICTs in teaching and learning. For most of the participating teachers, especially those who were actively engaged in the professional development programmes for an extended period of time, ICTs become a regular part of their pool of teaching/learning strategies and a reasonably frequent aspect of their classroom routines.

At the end of the project many teachers were still concerned that the need for continued professional development was likely to be ongoing, well beyond the programme itself, and many were still coming to grips with a number of issues related to the educational quality or worth of their students’ use of ICTs for learning, and to the complex pedagogical process of turning quantitatively ‘greater’ use also into qualitatively ‘better’ use.

Report link:
The full report can be downloaded from the Ministry of Education website http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/ict