Minnesota Teacher of the Year

I’ve spent some time in the past week over at Scott McLeod’s Dangerously Irrelevant blog. I’m impressed at the consistently interesting posts he puts up. This week, for example, is Change Week. It focuses on elements of technological change in K-12 education. This post is a good example of the quality of stuff he puts up. It discusses elements of the spread of innovation through a group or organization.

I would argue that one of the biggest obstacles to technological innovation in high schools is the current work conditions in schools. Class sizes have crept to extraordinarily high levels in many schools, putting extreme workloads on many teachers. Based on experience and observation I’d say that the average high school teacher has at most one hour of contract time per day that is free (after responsibilities such as meetings, phone calls, helping students, etc., have been addressed). During this time the teacher must prepare and grade for an average of five classes. With class sizes often exceeding 35 students, an hour is hardly enough time to cover this. This leaves scant time to play with technology, unless the teacher is willing to do so on his or her own time.

The complexity and transience of technology create more obstacles for a teacher. Learning the necessary skills to use a new piece of software and create lessons for it can take a significant investment of time for an already overloaded teacher. Furthermore, this investment is top heavy. It can often take 10-20 hours of work before a teacher will have anything tangible and ready for use in the classroom. Also, good teachers develop units and lessons they can design once and use numerous times. Technology-based units, however, are never finished. Software and websites often change, and change quickly. Maintenance time must be factored into development plans. I’ve seen teachers work hard over the summer building online courses reliant on external websites, only to then see the teachers struggle to put out fires over the course of the school year as websites move, disappear, or change links.

As another example, just this winter I trained a number of teachers on the excellent (and at the time, free of charge) QuizStar program, which is a website that allows teachers to set up class lists online and build online quizzes for them. This is a slick, easy-to-use program that teachers can dig right in and use. Several teachers (myself included) were building libraries of quizzes for use in their courses. Then, this spring QuizStar changed to a fee-based format ($36/year for individual teachers). Argh. Our district didn’t have money to pay the fee. Teachers who weren’t willing to pay out of their pockets felt that their work in learning the program and building up quizzes was largely wasted, as they no longer could access their quizzes without paying the fee.

This doesn’t mean to say that technological change can’t be implemented in schools. It can be done and it is being done. But I think that the strategies to implementing change take careful consideration, and often it is this level where technological innovation in schools goes askew. At some point in the upcoming week, I’ll try to outline some of the strategies and programs that we’ve found effective in implementing technological change at some of our Alternative Learning Centers in Intermediate District 287.

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