音声ブラウザご使用の方向け: SKIP NAVI GOTO NAVI

Using Technology as a Diversity Accommodation Tool: The Berkeley (CA) Teacher Led Technology Challenge in Action

by Harvey Pressman (Creative Director, Teacher Led Technology Challenge, BUSD, 1835 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94703. E-mail: presstoe@aol.com)

Web Posted on: December 12, 1997


The Berkeley Teacher Led Technology Challenge (TLTC) is implementing a five-year, $6.5 million national Technology Challenge grant designed to demonstrate how technology can help transform all regular education classrooms into places where all children can learn. The TLTC seeks to harness new technology tools in the service of improved teaching and learning within the arena where most school learning takes place: the regular, "self-contained" classroom. Teachers in all of Berkeley's regular prekindergarten, elementary, and middle school classrooms are learning how to (1) integrate multimedia instructional materials in core subjects like reading, mathematics, science, and writing, (2) exploit the value of technology tools in accommodating the neglected learning styles and needs of students who "learn differently," (3) harness technology tools to promote "higher order" instructional goals recommended by national curriculum standards groups like NCTM.

Key features of the TLTC strategic design include:

  • The training and development of regular classroom teachers (Pre-K to grade 8) in each school as technology integration leaders within their own building, in a peer-to-peer support model;
  • An incremental, three-stage implementation process that allows teachers in each participating school to join the project when it is most comfortable for them, and to then move forward from whatever level of technology sophistication they bring to the project to higher levels of understanding of ways to integrate technology into regular classroom learning;
  • A major emphasis on the use of multimedia technology tools in developing emergent literacy skills among educationally disadvantaged three, four and five year olds in Berkeley's prekindergarten classrooms;
  • A focus on the utilization of technology tools as 'diversity accommodation tools' that help regular classroom teachers make their classrooms more 'user-friendly' for students with disabilities, learning style differences, and learning problems;
  • A computer loan program that deploys school computers and cutting-edge software into the homes of prekindergarten to grade eight youngsters who are most likely to benefit from increased time on enjoyable learning tasks;
  • An outreach program to family members that makes it easy for them to learn how to use technology to help these youngsters learn more effectively.

We seek to promote the following outcomes:

  • (1) Classroom teachers who learn a great deal more about how to use technology (a) to accommodate a greater range of learning styles and levels, (b) to help all students master the core skills emphasized in our curriculum, and (c) to structure classroom experiences that involve cooperative learning, cross-age tutoring, increased student initiative and higher order thinking;
  • (2) Students who can use available technology tools to gain a deeper understanding of the subjects they study and greater confidence in their own learning abilities, and to demonstrate higher levels of attainment in core basic skill areas;
  • (3) Parents and other family members who learn how to promote enjoyable, classroom-relevant instructional experiences around a computer in the home.

Project Emphasis

The project emphasizes the use of multi-media technologies that can help teachers respond to the diversity of students in their classrooms, those with special needs, those with limited English proficiency those who are educationally disadvantaged, etc. Many of these multi-media technologies are already available and some are under development by our "consortium partners." These consortium partners include private sector technology companies (e.g., Cybertron, Microsoft, Apple, Don Johnston, Inc., Intellitools) who will help us stay at the cutting edge of newly available multimedia materials, university affiliates (e.g., UC Berkeley, Cal. State Hayward, CUNY's National Center for Educational Restructuring and Inclusion, Duke's Center for Literacy and Disability Studies) who will help support teacher training activities and contribute to the dissemination of successful project strategies, and a wide variety of other partners: state education agencies, marketing firms, etc., who will help make sure that the project not only succeeds locally, but achieves the widest possible national dissemination and replication.

Our use of classroom technology is closely tied to our vision of curriculum reform. As Frank Withrow, Technology Director for the Council of Chief State School Officers has said: "It is becoming impossible to envision any meaningful curriculum reform without technology. The problem is that too many of the people who are preaching curriculum reform, devising "new standards," or developing new curricula to meet these new standards have an inadequate understanding of the potential value of technology in helping teachers and students reach new and more sophisticated teaching and learning goals." Our intention is to try to rectify that.

Our "teacher-responsive" design offers to individual classroom teachers the technology tools and skills appropriate to their own individual "entry points" (whether they are already sophisticated technology users or bare beginners; whether they are "technophobes" or "technophiles"; what student outcomes are most important to them; etc.) The design of the project enables us to take the curriculum goals that are already most important to our classroom teachers and make them the goals that they initially pursue through the use of in-classroom technology tools. We then expand beyond that point to get teachers excited about achieving some the student outcomes outlined below. The staff helps develop technology- rich classroom activities tailored to meet each teacher's needs, such as those that are described in the eight-volume HarperCollins series, Integrating Computers in Your Classroom, which was co-authored by the TLTC Project Director.

Just as we want our project to focus on the arena in which most learning takes place in American schools (i.e., self-contained classrooms), so, too, do we want what happens in those classrooms to impact on the "main events" that happen within those classrooms, rather than any of the "sideshows." In the context of a program committed to showing teachers how technology can be used as a tool to help make learning more interesting and exciting across the entire curriculum spectrum, we promote especially those curriculum goals that relate to literacy and numeracy skills.

Desired Outcomes

The main thrust of project activities is to produce classroom learning experiences and at-home learning experiences that promote successful student outcomes in core curriculum areas: a teacher learns how to use WiggleWorks in a first grade classroom to improve reading fluency and provoke more complex and sophisticated written responses to reading activities; a seventh grade math teacher uses the Adventures of Jasper Woodbury to help deepen students' understanding of how to go about solving three step math word problems; a fifth grade teacher learns how to develop a thematic unit on Westward Expansion that incorporates How The West Was One for Math; Oregon Trail for Social Studies, Oregon Trail log writing software for writing, etc., to improve peer writing skills, computational fluency, reading comprehension, etc. while imparting information and ideas about the role of the frontier in American History. The main point of our project is that regular classroom teachers transform the way they use technology in the classroom to pursue their core curriculum objectives, and especially to help the underachievers, students with special needs, and educationally disadvantaged students in their classes.

For these underachieving students, we anticipate the following outcomes:

  • Gains in Individual Test of Academic Skills (ITAS) scores.
  • Strengthening of our students' perceptions of their own cognitive competence.
  • Grade improvements on report cards.
  • Improvements in core literacy and numeracy skills, as demonstrated in both portfolios and ITAS scores.
  • Increased numbers reading at or above grade levels.
  • Improvements in Higher Order Thinking Skills (as measured by Portfolio and Performance Assessments).
  • Significantly improved computer use and computer literacy skills.

Outcomes at the Various Grade Levels

More specific student outcomes expected at various levels, from Early Childhood (Ages 3-5) through Primary (1-3), Intermediate (4-5), and Middle School (6-8) levels, include the following:

Early Childhood: We try to emphasize, at home and at school, those technology activities that promote Emergent Literacy skills in young children, using such materials as Discis books, A to Zap, and Bailey's Book House, which promote these most directly. Emergent literacy is a broader and different term then reading readiness; and we intend it as such. It relates to both reading and writing, and suggests the simultaneous development and mutually reinforcing effects of these two aspects of communication. Literacy development is seen as emerging from children's oral language development and their initial, often unconventional attempts at reading (usually based on pictures) and writing (at first, scribbling) -- hence the term emergent literacy. We want to show our preschool teachers and parents how technology can be used to reinforce and support improvements in the development of emergent literacy skills, such as answering questions about books, beginning to show awareness of sound/symbol relationships, anticipating events or words during repeated readings, labeling drawings, etc..
Primary: Our emphasis here is on improved achievement in reading, writing, and early numeracy skills, which are the outcomes our classroom teachers spend most of their time on at these grade levels. While we are tracking gains in reading achievement and computational skills most carefully, our classroom technology activities are designed to make learning core literacy and numeracy skills more exciting, enjoyable, and effective for all children. Cooperative learning skills, beginning Internet skills, and problem solving also get special attention.
Intermediate: At grades four and five, reading to learn becomes as important as learning to read, writing to communicate becomes as important as knowing how to write, and knowing how to find out becomes especially important. Our approach emphasizes improving student outcomes in the following areas:
  • Reading to Learn (Can the student use an electronic encyclopedia to prepare more detailed and complex reports, as the school year progresses?);
  • The Writing Process (Is the student becoming a more helpful and sophisticated editor of other students' writing?);
  • Solving Math Word Problems (Can students solve a greater number of math word problems over the same allotted time period/Can they solve more complex word problems?),
  • Searching the Internet for Information,
  • Writing Over the Internet,
  • Learning to "Computer Tutor,"
  • Using Cooperative Learning Skills,
  • Understanding Scientific Method,
  • Thinking like a Social Scientist.

These are some of the kinds of improvements that portfolio and performance assessments will be especially helpful in tracking.

Middle: All the desired outcomes listed for intermediate students are relevant to the technology activities we help our middle school teachers devise for their classrooms. But here the emphasis shifts, especially in grades 7 and 8, to subject matter emphasis (Science, American History, Languages, etc.), because we work differently with subject-specific teachers than with teachers who cover a range of subjects. Our emphasis thus turns to helping teachers who spend all their time teaching one or two subjects (Social Studies, for example) to discover ways that technology can enhance and enliven the learning that goes on in their classrooms.

At the Middle School level, we seek student outcomes that relate very specifically to some of the curriculum reforms already in place in our schools:

  • helping our students connect subjects that too often seem too theoretical or obscure ("Why do we have to learn this?");
  • helping them understand (and solve) the kinds of problems that real mathematicians or scientists, professional writers, social science scholars, or practicing artists confront on a daily basis;
  • helping them learn more about how to track down information (on or off the Internet) and how to learn about new things (rather than how to commit small pieces of information to memory), etc.

Using the right classroom technologies can make it a great deal easier for our classroom teachers to implement these curriculum reforms seriously and successfully.

For middle school students with learning disabilities, the need is especially strong to help their teachers understand how to use technology as a diversity accommodation tool. A major emphasis for these students is to help them make the kind of "new beginning" that helps them see themselves as more competent learners, as well as to "make up for lost time" in the acquisition of basic skills in which they may still be weak. Students who have not been successful in elementary school, especially if they are from low-income and/or minority backgrounds, may well be facing their last chance at any real kind of educational opportunity. So it becomes that much more important that they learn how to "computer tutor," how to do more of their learning through teaching others, how to become more technology savvy than even some of the "top" students, etc.