Teacher Training: Even Successful Deployments Have Teacher Training Challenges

Education and Accelerated Learning, ICT - Information and Communications Technology, Student Intensive Instruction, Teacher Training

Feb 272011

Even Successful Deployments Have Teacher Training Challenges

Wayan Vota

Teacher Training: The Eastern Townships School Board district in Ontario Province was the first in Canada to widely distribute laptops to its students. In the last eight years, the board has handed out around 5,600 laptops, mostly to students in grades 3 to 11. A preliminary study, posits that:

the implementation of ‘one laptop per child’ strategy at the Eastern Townships School Board is a primary factor to explain its leap from 66th position in 2003 to 23rd in 2010 (out of 70 school boards), and why the student dropout rate has plunged from 39.4% in 2004–2005 to 22.7% in 2008–2009.

This progress, which we may at least partly attribute to the ‘one laptop per child’ strategy, would certainly never have been possible without the complete commitment and outstanding skills of the teachers, the school administrations and other education stakeholders at the Eastern Townships School Board.

Yet at the same time, even this very successful ICT deployment was not so successful in its teacher training. The following is an excerpt from that report that should give insight on how to improve teacher training around ICT deployments in education:

Excerpt from Benefits and challenges of using laptops in primary and secondary school: An investigation at the Eastern Townships School Board. Summary of main results, Karsenti, T., & Collin, S. (2011). Montreal, QC: CRIFPE.

4.3 Technological Skills

Figure 5. Impact of ICT training on the professional development of teachers who participated in the study (%)

From the teachers’ standpoint, the use of laptops is related more to the issue of training in the pedagogical integration of ICT. From the results obtained, the teachers who participated in the study did not seem to have received the ICT training that they needed. In fact, 69.4% of the teachers felt that their training had little or no impact on their teaching practices, versus 30.6% who felt that the impact on their pedagogical use of ICT ranged from slight to major (see Figure 5).

These results, derived from the closed questionnaire responses, are corroborated by the results on the interviews and the open questionnaire responses.

T. “I did not have a useful professional development course.”

More precisely, a number of participants reported that some of the suggested activities were not doable in their classrooms, and that their efforts were usually in vain. They also complained that their training was usually too intense, too short or redundant.

T. “I haven’t found any to be particularly helpful in that not enough time is given to learning how to use the technology efficiently and effectively enough to take it back to the classroom and use it right away.”

Consequently, the professional development of teachers in the pedagogical integration of ICT seemed to be largely trial and error

T. “I have learned mostly on my own, ‘playing around’ on my computer and with the various programs.”

Among the training needs mentioned by the teachers was the suggestion to better align the training with the realities of teaching and learning. To do so, they recommended that the training:

Include time so that teachers could exchange experiences with their colleagues about ICT activities they had used;
Be given in small groups of teachers who share something in common (cycle, subject, ICT experience(or)expertise);
Involve the students, or hold the training in the classroom with the students. T. “I want to bring students with me, as they are excellent teaching assistants in the classroom.”

Thus, training the teachers and students at the same time, and in the classroom, would appear particularly useful.

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