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Raise your hand if you donate $3.00 every year to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund on your 1040 when you do your taxes. Hey, stop laughing! Quit it! I'm trying to have a real conversation here!

Asking people to voluntarily give up their money without incentive isn't a very good way to raise cash. Let me give you another example.

Take $1.25 and put it in a yellow interoffice envelope. Address it to "Office of Instructional Technology, Battlefield High School," and send it via courier to me. I will use it to purchase a tasty Cherry Coke Zero, thereby supporting my athletics boosters. More importantly, it's tasty and I get to drink it. Your reward? My undying gratitude. Reaching for a yellow envelope? Of course not. And that's about where most teachers are when it comes to the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers.

We band directors (the progressive ones anyways) lived and breathed by the National Standards of Music Education, so when I became a professional technologist, it was literally part of my daily practice to work in alignment with "the National Standards." Check that again: it was part of my daily practice. You'd think that at a Center for Information Technology like my high school, we'd be up to our eyeballs in teachers who are anxious to instill digital literacies in their kids, but we've got a quadrambulating-surry-preceding-equine-propellant problem there:

If a teacher doesn't practice integrating technology literacies into his/her daily practice, it is unreasonable to expect that the teacher will instill those literacies into children.

We ITRTs have a role to play in our often strange but sometimes rewarding middle ground between classroom teacher and administrator. We have a responsibility (and a state mandate) to engage our administrators and teacher leaders in a dialogue about how we're going to expect the inclusion of a set of benchmarks for teacher technology. As reading and writing are now regarded within a context of literacy that must extend across the curricula, so too must the use of digital technologies, especially PCs, be part of a comprehensive experience from classroom to classroom. What benchmarks?

The NETS-T.

Why reinvent the wheel? (Especially when you've got four good ones from that cart I alluded to earlier.) No, printing off a copy of the NETS-T and stapling it to an observation to check off isn't the solution. But how are school leaders (mentors, department chairs, team leaders, administrators, professional developers) within your school actively engaging teachers in conversations and learning opportunities about the NETS-T?

I had a conversation with an ITRT the other day who said that her principals basically ignored her, treating her like a lab paraprofessional who babysits for teachers to have breaks. I'm horrified by that, but realize that it happens a lot, especially in elementary school. The truth of the matter is that we need to work together and call upon our support from Pat, Ginny, and Kim in situations like that.

An ITRT is not a lab-sitter.
An ITRT is not a provider of break time.
An ITRT is a school leader in technology integration and instructional practices.


We have a responsibility to step up when we're pressured down, and to call for support when we're not being properly supported. We have a set of national standards that all of us must take responsibility for, and chief among them are the NETS-T: the actual work on the ground, in classroom, is done by classroom teachers. Those are the people that we ITRTs support the most, and if we're not getting support in return - or worse yet, are being opposed - we need to get together.

That's where the NETS-A come in, in a way, but it's also about our network as a group of professional technologists.

Without incentive, nobody's going to buy our $3.00 worth of standards... or more accurately, but into them. We try (or should be trying) to create rewarding enrichment opportunities through our professional development and collaboration in the classroom, during which we can engage in conversations and practices that are technology integrative. It's our job to provide the positive reinforcement and work on the intrinsically-motivated... but at the end of the day, if we are to expect institutional change, an extrinsic motivation may be required, particularly for those hyper-resistant teachers who are obstacles to learning and not conduits to learning. We can work together, call upon Pat's office, and engage our administrators as best we can do help scaffold a support system towards that end. We have to.

After all... did you send me a buck and a quarter?

Copyright

© 2006-2008, Keith David Reeves. All rights reserved. Reproduction and/or distribution not permitted without the express written consent of the author.

MLA Citation

Reeves, Keith David. "The Way Up: Leadership, Awareness, and Data in Integrated Education." 1 Feb 2008. KDReeves.com. . <http://www.kdreeves.com/art_wayup.html>.