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Volume 1, Issue 2 ISSN 1528-5804
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Becker, H.J. (2000). The "exemplary teacher"
paper—how it arose and how it changed its author's research
program. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher
Education, [Online serial] , 1 (2). Available: http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss2/seminal/article2.htm
The "Exemplary
Teacher" Paper— How It Arose and How It Changed Its Author's
Research Program
HENRY JAY
BECKER
University of California, Irvine
Between 1985 and 1989, the percentage of teachers requiring
their students to use computers during class time doubled, from
roughly 25% of all teachers to 50% of all teachers. This doubling
occurred both among elementary school teachers and secondary
teachers, although it continued to be the case that a much higher
proportion of elementary teachers than secondary teachers had
students use computers during class time (Becker, 1987, 1991).
As the number of computer-using teachers rapidly increased,
researchers began cautioning that (a) all efforts to use computers
with students are not equally defensible, and (b) many years are
required for teachers to become accomplished as computer-using
instructors (Sheingold & Hadley, 1990). Although I regarded
this new attention to differences among teachers as an advance over
simple discussions of the "effects" of using computers (as if these
effects were the same everywhere), I had two concerns about the
conversation occurring among educational computerists at the time.
This conversation was greatly influenced by the study of
"accomplished teachers" conducted by Sheingold and Hadley (1990) at
the Bank Street College of Education.
Conditions That Encourage Effective Use of Computers
First, I was skeptical of the logic that "time" was the main
ingredient to improving teachers' computer use—that
inexperience was the main impediment to exemplary use of computers
(Hadley & Sheingold, 1993). It seemed to me that to use
computers appropriately and successfully with students, teachers
needed to gain certain perspectives about teaching and
learning—perspectives that the simple factor of time could
not assure. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that certain workplace
conditions might influence how well teachers could gain these
pedagogical perspectives—conditions such as the existence of
communication networks among computer-using teachers, formal staff
development opportunities, the full-time presence of a school-based
computer specialist, and school leadership that modeled and
encouraged exemplary uses of computers.
Second, I believed that the primary methodologies being used to
examine how teachers became accomplished
computer-users—narratives of successful teachers and
purposive sampling of teachers reputed to be exemplary —(the
latter, as in Sheingold & Hadley, 1990), was incomplete and
even logically flawed because it lacked comparable data on teachers
not reputed to be accomplished computer-users. To isolate
determinants of exemplary use, one needed to be able to compare the
working conditions and professional backgrounds of teachers whose
practices one could define as "exemplary" with those of other
teachers who were using computers with their students.
It so happened that at the same time Sheingold and Hadley were
collecting questionnaire data from their sample of teachers reputed
to be accomplished computer-users, I was collecting data on a
national probability sample of elementary classroom teachers and
teachers of several secondary subjects. This survey was part of the
International Association for the Evaluation of Educational
Achievement (IEA) study of computers in education, whose purpose
was primarily descriptive rather than explanatory in nature
(Pelgrum & Plomp, 1993). Although my research was not intended
to answer the question, "How do exemplary computer-using teachers
differ from other teachers?" I realized that the kinds of questions
that were in my United States supplement to the IEA survey
were relevant to addressing this issue.
I had asked the teachers questions about their teaching
responsibilities, including the types of students they taught,
questions about their teaching experience and their own expertise
with computers, questions about school policies and practices that
might influence how they would use computers, questions about their
opportunity to learn from other educators—both peers and
technology specialists—and questions about the computer
resources available to them. What was not so clear was how one
might define "exemplary computer-using teacher."
Identifying Exemplary Computer-Using Teachers
We lacked then—and still lack today—strongly
verified knowledge about what kinds of teaching practices with
computers result in students attaining important academic
competencies they otherwise would not attain ( Becker &
Lovitts, 2000 ). So instead I used my own judgment: I examined
my survey questionnaires for practices that, on their face, seemed
to reflect quality teaching practices—for example, having
objectives for computer use that related to higher order competency
development, rather than rewarding students for completing their
other class work. Teachers of different subjects and levels also
would not be expected to use computers in the same way, so it was
clear that distinct definitions of exemplary practice ought to
respect different teaching responsibilities. At the same time, the
database for these decisions was a survey of 516 computer-using
teachers—not 516 in-depth interviews—and so some coding
rule had to be invented to make a judgment that X teachers
were more exemplary than Y teachers of the same subject.
The procedure I used, as discussed further in “How
Exemplary Computer-Using Teachers Differ from Other Teachers”
(Becker, 1994), was to first define a set of core practices that
could be assumed to be exemplary and then to supplement that set
with others for which responses were highly correlated to the
initial set. Thus, with a larger pool of items, a more reliable
judgment could be made about where an individual teacher stood on a
scale of "exemplariness" of their teaching practices with
computers. The final step was classification; that is, given a
continuous index of exemplary teaching, where should the line be
drawn so that one group could be defined as "exemplary." The rule I
came up with—that the teacher passed a bare majority of the
dichotomous criteria (i.e., exemplary practices) used for their
subject—was somewhat arbitrary. However, it was reached by
examining at some length, the survey questionnaires of the teachers
on either side of the “bare majority” cutting
point.
My decision-rule produced a sample of 45 "exemplary
computer-using teachers," which, because of the weighted
probability sampling design that I had used, suggested that 1 out
of 20 (5%) computer-using teachers at the time who taught in the
subjects and levels studied (elementary as well as secondary math,
science, and English) would have met this decision-rule and thus
have been regarded as exemplary computer-using teachers.
School Conditions Associated With Effective Use of Computers
My data analysis, as shown in Becker (1994), did indeed find
workplace conditions that differed between the exemplary
computer-using teachers and other computer-using teachers. I found
that exemplary teachers were more likely to work at a school with
the following characteristics:
-
A full-time computer coordinator, where
many other teachers also used computers and where teacher computer
expertise was above average (suggesting the impact of a local
social network of users).
-
Formal staff development was discipline
specific and included help in using tool-oriented (rather than
skills and knowledge-testing) software.
-
Teachers were given school time and
resources to use computers in class preparation and other
professional activities.
-
There was a pattern at the school of
using computers for “consequential”
activities—for real-world purposes such as occupational
preparation, a school newspaper, and writing in academic classes
(in contrast to skills instruction in word processing).
I also found that exemplary teachers experienced more problems
with their school’s computer infrastructure, suggesting that
they made greater demands on the support and maintenance system
than other teachers did. I found that exemplary teachers were
better educated themselves and were more experienced in using
computers, thus supporting the Sheingold hypothesis about
“time.” And I found, somewhat unexpectedly, that the
exemplary computer-using teachers taught classes with fewer
students than did other computer-using teachers of the same
subjects—classes fully 20% smaller.
Those are a lot of differences. Moreover, they worried me. If it
took all of that to produce exemplary computer use among a few
teachers, what might that cost for a school’s entire teaching
staff to become exemplary in their use of computers? In a
subsequent paper (but one published earlier), I explored that
question by developing a set of assumptions about each of the
elements of the “equation”—for example, the cost
of a full-time computer coordinator for every 20 teachers, the cost
of providing time for teachers to network together and to use
computers for professional purposes, and the cost of giving
teachers smaller classes. I combined that with a model of ongoing
investments in computer infrastructure and maintenance and
developed an estimate for what it would cost a school to become
exemplary school-wide in its use of computers (Becker, 1993).
Although that amount was, in some sense, mind-boggling (nearly
$2,000 per pupil per year; nearly one third of that for smaller
classes), I compared that cost to differences in expenditures
between high- and low-spending districts around the country and to
the cost of undertaking major instructional reform that did not
focus on computer technology. I suggested that large-scale school
improvements are expensive, regardless of whether computers are a
central feature of the reform or not.
Effects of Teaching Philosophy on Technology Use
The model of producing exemplary computer-using teachers that I
employed in Becker (1994) excluded one very important factor. In
the IEA survey, we had not asked teachers about their pedagogical
philosophy—what their central beliefs were about how children
learned and how best to instruct classes to accomplish that
learning. Yet, as I thought about the problem of what would be
required for teachers to use computers successfully, it was
increasingly obvious that all the staff development and technology
support in the world might not be effective if a teacher had
beliefs about teaching and learning that conflicted with the
assumptions of the training and support. Thus, I realized, having
facilitating workplace conditions was only one part of the equation
for producing exemplary computer-using teachers. We needed to
understand more about teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and how
they interacted with workplace opportunities to produce exemplary
teaching practice. It seemed likely, for example, that teachers who
believed that good teaching was a matter of transmitting factual
knowledge to students and having them practice
“textbook” skills without any context of practical use
were not the kind of teachers who would profit from working at a
school that provided large amounts of technology training and
support, smaller class sizes, networking opportunities, and so
forth. At most, the effects of favorable workplace conditions might
be present only to the extent that they impacted teachers’
basic beliefs about learning and teaching and, thereby, affected
their characteristic pedagogy as well.
At the same time, I was beginning to believe that computer
experience itself might change teachers’ understandings of
how children learn best, with a result that their pedagogy itself
would be transformed. In the “Exemplary Teachers”
paper, I had found hints of this pedagogical change. For example, I
had found that exemplary teachers were much more likely to report
changing their curriculum, dropping some content in favor of having
students spend more time on other content, and appearing to focus
more on depth of understanding than on breadth of curriculum
coverage. However, I had not studied specific pedagogical
practices, such as the use of small group project-based
instruction, and whether these had changed more for exemplary
computer-using teachers than for other teachers.
Effects of Technology Use on Teaching Philosophy
The authors of the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow (ACOT) research
had specifically suggested that basic changes in pedagogical
approaches were an outcome of teaching in a computer
resource-intensive environment (Sandholtz, Ringstaff, & Dwyer,
1997). Once again, though, the methodology used for this conclusion
seemed an inadequate basis for it. The ACOT study lacked
comparative data by teachers teaching under different conditions
and following various practices with computers. Yet the ACOT
researchers’ claim seemed to be of critical importance in
understanding whether a large investment into computer technologies
was worth undertaking. Consequently, the question of whether and
under what conditions technology use affects teacher pedagogy
became a second primary research question in my subsequent
work—one complementary to the original question omitted from
the Exemplary Teachers study—that is, how teachers’
beliefs about learning and good teaching affects their ability to
employ technology in an exemplary way.
Along with colleagues Ron Anderson and Sara Dexter of the
University of Minnesota and Margaret Riel and Jason Ravitz of my
own institution (Ravitz is now at SRI International), my research
over the past six years has focused on these two questions linking
computer use practices and experience with teaching philosophy and
changes in pedagogical approach, while our work continues to attend
to issues of workplace determinants of computer-use practices. I
will only briefly mention this work, providing references to
archival and online sources where the reader may go for more
detailed information.
My first opportunity to study the possible effects of computer
use on teachers’ pedagogy came with my participation in the
National School Network (NSN), an National Science Foundation
funded research and community-building project organized by Bolt,
Beranak, and Newman’s educational technology group led by
Beverly Hunter. The NSN schools were somewhat atypical. Although
sociodemographically quite heterogeneous, they were schools on the
leading edge of Internet use, being among the first to have
LAN-based, high-speed Internet connections and linked to each other
through supportive intermediating organizations such as science
museums, university research and development programs, and school
districts with strong technology investment ambitions.
As part of a study of 441 teachers at 153 schools of the NSN,
Jason Ravitz and I found that the teachers who had used computers
with students on a weekly basis for three years were much more
likely than non-computer-using teachers at the same schools to
report having changed their teaching practice over the previous
several years. They were, for example, twice as likely to say they
were more willing than they used to be to include a topic in their
teaching that was new to them and to permit themselves to learn
from their students. They were twice as likely to feel more skilled
at orchestrating multiple simultaneous activities in their
classroom; and they were 50% more likely than non-computer-users to
say they increasingly had students explore a topic on their own,
without giving close procedural directions. On the vast majority of
survey questions, they were more likely to report changes toward a
constructivist, student-centered teaching practice than were
teachers who had not used computers with their students (Becker
& Ravitz, 1999).
But do computers change teachers' basic beliefs or merely help
teachers who are already constructivist in philosophy implement
their pedagogical philosophy in practice? The NSN survey had not
investigated teaching philosophy per se, but only the practices
that teachers engaged in. Our more recent studies have begun
looking specifically at the complex relationships among pedagogical
beliefs, instructional practices, and teachers' use of computers.
In our first effort, a study of 47 teachers who were interviewed
in-depth about their beliefs and practices, we confirmed that
teachers generally see computers as helping them implement changes
to their pedagogy that they wanted to accomplish but which they had
previously been unable to accomplish. However, they did not
attribute changes in their pedagogical beliefs to their use of
computers (Dexter, Anderson, & Becker, 1999).
Teaching, Learning, and Computing
We are currently examining these relationships further using
data we collected from a large, nationally representative sample of
teachers in the spring of 1998. Teaching, Learning, and
Computing—1998 (TLC) is a national study of computer
technologies and instructional reform that was jointly funded by
the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of
Education. Rather than focusing on a comparison between
“exemplary” computer-using teachers and other computer
users, as in the IEA study, and rather than examining effects on
teaching of teachers only in atypical school settings (as in the
National School Network study), a majority of the schools and
teachers in the TLC study are a nationally representative
“probability” sample of U.S.schools (and teachers in
grades 4-12). The remaining schools and teachers were selected
either because they were involved in major instructional reform
efforts (either schoolwide or involving individual teachers) or
because they were at the upper-end of schools investing in computer
technology hardware.
In TLC, teachers’ beliefs and practices were measured in a
number of different ways generally along a scale from a
transmission and skills orientation to a
“constructivist” orientation. Separate measures were
constructed to study teacher beliefs about the value of different
types of instruction and to study concrete practices (e.g., the
extent to which the teacher assigns tasks designed to have students
build on their prior understandings or the frequency that they
assign project-based work to be presented to audiences outside of
their classroom). Teachers report how their teaching practices have
changed over the past several years (as in the NSN study), but also
how their choice of “most valuable” software has
changed over the past few years.
So far, we have reported descriptive data about teachers’
uses of computers ( Becker,
Ravitz, & Wong, 1999 ) and descriptive data on
teachers’ philosophies and teaching practices ( Ravitz,
Becker, & Wong, 2000 ). We have also presented our findings
about the extent to which teachers’ philosophies of teaching
can explain variations in their use of the Internet ( Becker,
1999 ) and related teaching philosophy to how frequently
teachers use computers and to their objectives for computer use
(Becker, 2000). We have shown that teacher leaders—those who
participate in professional activities such as informally
communicating with and mentoring other teachers, and giving
workshops and classes—differ from other teachers, both in
having more constructivist philosophies and in being more active
users of computers in their professional life and in teaching (
Becker & Riel, 1999 ; Riel &
Becker, 2000 ). Exploratory analysis has been presented linking
teachers’ use of computers and changes in their pedagogy over
time, but our current effort is to specify these relationships in
more detail and with greater precision. Future findings will be
presented on the TLC project website: http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC
.
Can Technology Transform Teaching Practice and Student
Learning?
There is much yet to be learned about exemplary computer-using
teachers. Perhaps the most important need is to develop a valid and
reliable measure of exemplary practice using computers –one
that is based on the actual effects that exposure to such teachers
has on students' competencies. In this, the critical problem is
that our range of reliable assessments of student competency is so
narrow and distorted. We have plenty of standardized tests of basic
skills; however, there is no instrument that I am aware of, that
can be reliably used to show whether or not students have gained
complex competencies in writing, critical thinking, and
problem-solving as a result of having had instruction by one
teacher or another. (However, see Becker and Lovitts, 2000, for a
proposed model for project-based assessment aimed at filling in
this gap in our assessment knowledge.) Thus, "exemplariness"
remains a subjective judgment that depends on public articulation
and justification of the standards used in any one application,
such as I attempted to do in Becker (1994).
Substantively, our current TLC study is cross-sectional and,
therefore, limited to correlational analyses—analyses of the
relationship at any one time between teaching philosophy and
computer use practices and between computer use practices and
reported changes in overall pedagogy. Because the survey is not
longitudinal (as of yet), we cannot hope to unambiguously
demonstrate the extent to which exemplary computer use by teachers
is the product of having a particular teaching philosophy,
or leads to changes in a teachers' specific teaching
practices, or changes their underlying approach to teaching.
What is needed are studies that follow a substantial number of
teachers over a several year period—for example, a study
contrasting teachers who have a rich opportunity to use computers
in their teaching with others equally prepared to do so, but who
lack that opportunity; or a study that follows how teachers'
pedagogy changes over time and associates those changes with
opportunities and experiences in using computers in their
teaching.
Both of these types of investigations are
critical—developing reliable measures of student competencies
that are better accomplished through computer-based instruction
than by other instructional approaches (what might be called
"computer-affordanced" competencies) and clarifying how computer
use is limited by teacher beliefs but, in turn, under particular
circumstances helps to change teachers' approaches to instruction
and curriculum and their basic underlying pedagogical beliefs.
Without a fuller range of student outcome measures, our claims that
one group of teachers is "exemplary" in how they use computers will
simply not be believed by those who disagree with the importance of
what any one researcher defines as "exemplary" practices. Without
more reliable understanding about whether computer use practices
actually change teachers in ways that policymakers would like, many
efforts to reform teaching practices will continue to ignore the
possibly valuable role of computers as catalysts for instructional
change. Such is the work yet to be done.
References
Becker, H.J. (1987, February). Using computers for instruction.
Byte Magazine , 12 , 149-162.
Becker, H.J. (1991, November). How computers are used in United
States schools: Basic data from the 1989 I.E.A. Computers in
Education survey. Journal of Educational Computing Research,
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Becker, H.J. (1993, September). A truly empowering
technology-rich education—how much will it cost?
Educational IRM Quarterly, 3 , 31-35.
Becker, H.J. (1994). How exemplary computer-using teachers
differ from other teachers: implications for realizing the
potential of computers in schools" Journal of Research on
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professional use and teacher-directed student use. Teaching,
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technology use in comparison group studies. Paper presented at
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