Grappling with Technology Accountability

by Bernajean Porter

Is the enormous funding of technology making a significant difference in your schools? The public’s response to the high profile funding of technology is an increasing need to have more communication and more accountability as they grapple with understanding what results they are getting NOT possible without the spending. Are you organized for visible student results?

Accountability is everyone taking responsibility for deciding FIRST what they want to happen for their students (vision and goals) and then using data to direct their technology resources to make the maximum impact possible on those outcomes. Data collection is not a punishment or a challenge of our professional work; it is the system’s assurance of a continuous process in place for all resources and efforts to serve the highest interest of our students. However, in organizing for these results, educators are faced with a much larger conversation with their communities than the simplistic question of a return of investment for technology dollars. Education has arrived at a crossroads of facing whether schools, as they presently exist, are going to work for the future of our kids. As educators across the nation tackle redefining what it means for students to be educated and capable of thriving economically in a changing world, technology is caught in the gap between being used to support schools as we have always known them or being used as a robust vehicle to reshape new cultures of learning for our kids.

Grappling’s MAPPing Tools for NextSteps
If we are going to rescue the benefits of the constructing technology-rich learning environments these last years, school systems will need to become "accountability ready" by intentionally organizing multiple factors: a shared vision, measurable goals beyond technology for student performance, adequate budgets, effective staff development, stable and robust technical environments and ongoing assessment processes. It is not just about having data, it is about HOW we use the data and tools to educate and mobilize our systems to act in the highest interest of our students’ intellectual capacity. By continuously measuring, analyzing and planning (MAPPing) NextSteps with practical data tools and large group processes, we can move our vision of what schools now need to be into practice. Grappling with Accountability 2002:
MAPPing Tools for Organizing and Assessing Technology for Student Results (Bernajean Porter, 2002) provides a comprehensive toolkit to guide groups step-by-step with 80+ tools, templates, group processes, actions-to-consider and sample reports culled over 14 years of field experience.

Grappling’s Four CornerStones
Readiness for Change, Teaching and Learning, Technology Deployment, and
System Capacity - measure the system for twenty-four essential factors. If any of these areas are weak, no amount of equipment by itself will be able to yield the results or accountability expected.

Measuring Efforts or Results
Proving the impact of any new technology is fraught with complexity – involving pedagogical practices, beliefs, and values. Thus far most of the implementation work has been focused on efforts – installing, training, using it – leaving the specifics uses up to optional, individual choices which has created a disparity of student experiences. If you measure efforts – you count what has been done. Results are about actual measurable changes and benefits that all students experience because of the efforts that were made. If schools are ready to shift from optional doing to expected pervasive outcomes – from efforts to results --- beware of using single source data collections like surveys to guide implementation resources and decisions. Simplistic approaches to data collections will likely inhibit and possibly even misdirect the ability to implement a school’s vision. Measuring the progress of results requires varied and multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative data in order to triangulate findings.
Grappling’s MAPPing Tools use artifact analysis, surveys, interviews, focus groups, building observations, and evaluation of student products to create a comprehensive force-field analysis of what’s working and what needs to work better to ensure increasing results for all students.

No Longer an Option
Results cannot be developed with optional budgets, optional student uses, optional technical support and optional staff development. If we are to mobilize our systems to scale and sustain the best of these uses, schools will need to explicitly organize technology resources and uses for targeted outcomes that impact all students. Data collection processes need to involve a large group of stakeholders in identifying the highest essential outcomes for all students, making sense of the data from multiple factors, collectively owning the problem/situation and then developing urgent action items that will mobilize what needs to happen next to increase the speed and depth of what is really possible for our kids.