TECHNOS

July 20, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1992 Vol. 1 No. 3

The Slow Boat to Reform

By Melinda Grewar

After the big-name panels in Washington issue their calls for national education reform, how soon do real changes appear in the classroom? The journey to America 2000 includes stops at committee meetings, policy sessions, and fund-raising events. The process may well take longer than the seven years till the turn of the century to create the kind of competency-based, globally minded education reformers are recommending. It begins one classroom at a time…

James Zimmerman, a 1992 Christa McAuliffe Educator, is reforming education for the 21st century now, starting with his own classroom. It's going slower than he'd like.

Two weeks before the spring semester ends, a fatigued Mr. Z lifts a cardboard box full of plastic Lego parts and wades through chairs, desks, and clusters of student bodies to search for another storage place. “We're finishing up our science projects, so it's a little chaotic right now,” he explains.

Where will this box of Lego parts go? Atop the hamster cage? Under the hornet's nest hanging from the fluorescent lights? Zimmerman stops at a precarious stash of other boxes, some holding parts of model space shuttles and Renaissance sailing vessels. Many boxes bear names of computers and accessories. Ironically, the box of Lego parts is placed atop a box holding models of Christopher Columbus's ships. A reminder that the journey to the 21st century—at least as far as education reform is concerned—is via a slow boat.

Start Your Engines

“We want to spend some time this afternoon working on our science projects,” Mr. Z announces.

“Yes!” his students shout.

In Zimmerman's cluttered fifth-grade classroom at Thomas Paine Elementary School in Urbana, Illinois, students are enthusiastic about their science projects. They are middle-class and at-risk 10- and 11-year-olds who have progressed beyond wide-ruled writing tablets and crayon drawings. These kids compose drafts, digitize images, and scan barcodes.

Zimmerman's students produce typed science reports containing inset pictures of the heavens that include barcodes—the footnote's younger sister—indicating where the images can be found on videodisc. For this project, Zimmerman has taught his students to use Macintosh word processing software, Optical Data's Windows on Science videodiscs, and the New Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia.

“For most kids, writing a term paper or report is a very dull assignment. But from the beginning of this lesson on space, I showed them what their reports would look like when they bring pictures in from videos,” Zimmerman explains. “Right there, the motivation went up. Students are much more willing to do some tedious work, because they know the end result is going to be enhanced by the technology.”

During a unit on simple machines, Zimmerman's students are thinking robotics. They use Dacta's LegoLOGO kits to build machines from plastic Lego blocks and then program LOGO computer commands. With a touch of the return button, the machines act out motions the students have engineered. Some students are so enthusiastic about preparing their machines for the school's spring science fair that they work on the projects during recess and after school.

Zimmerman wants his students to arrive in the 21st century equipped with an indestructible enthusiasm for learning and the skills necessary to meet their goals. That's why his chosen mode of transportation to the year 2000 is technology. The fueling station for the technological engines of Mr. Z's fifth-grade curriculum includes a library of videodiscs, CD-ROM resources, and software packages. The engines number nine computers, two laserdisc players, three TV monitors, and a hand-held image scanner.

“Students become more comfortable and confident as they use technology. To be able to digitize an image and bring it into a report increases their confidence level,” he says. “It also gives them practice in using the tools to gather information and to manipulate it. I think that's a very important skill for succeeding in the real world.”

For Zimmerman instructional technologies such as these are fascinating tools that magnify and make relevant what his students learn in their core-subject studies. The incorporation of technology is just one aspect of his efforts to restructure education, a project he began several years before the U. S. Department of Education's America 2000 strategy was formulated. Another focus is global education.

Making Crucial Connections

“There are so many bridges connecting us to people in other cultures,” Zimmerman says. “We're tied together economically, environmentally. But America has kind of a ‘tourist’ attitude about the rest of the world. We look at it as something for us to enjoy, not to understand. And some of the problems that we face globally are challenging us to rethink that attitude.”

So he turns a weather lesson into a chance for his students to learn along with thousands of other students connected worldwide by computer and modem to AGE, the Apple Global Education network. Zimmerman's students share weather reports with classes elsewhere, and at the same time experience the power of on-line computer networks, which allow users to communicate, share ideas, and access information databases around the globe.

Of course, nothing can replace the human touch. For social studies, he invites international guest speakers to class. Today's visitor, an instructor of Portuguese at nearby University of Illinois, is a native of Brazil. “We could learn about Brazil by opening a textbook and doing a workshop, and students will get a perception of that country,” Zimmerman says. “But to be able to talk to someone from Brazil, to have that direct contact, is going to have a much stronger impact.”

Then, Zimmerman stretches the lesson technologically to include on-line communication with students in Brazil. “It's done with a lot of enthusiasm and motivation, because students sense they're dealing with real people. I think that's one of the keys to successful restructuring. We've got to involve kids in reality—based education—make it real.”

Doing a Reality Check

But with this global education goal, the technology engines in Zimmerman's classroom grind to a snail's pace and the next century dims. For while Apple donated a Macintosh computer, telephone modem, printer, and access to AppleLink to encourage participation in the AGE network, his students can't use it because the classroom has no telephone line. They must rely on Zimmerman to access AGE for them, in a tiny library storage room down the hall where the equipment now resides.

In fact, there are many schools better equipped than Thomas Paine, a K–5 school serving 479 students, to model 21st-century education methods. While in Zimmerman's class every 2.6 students share a computer, in most other rooms at Paine there is just one computer for all 25 or so students. The school also lacks a computer laboratory where students could learn software applications to use with that one powerful machine in their homerooms. By contrast, some technology magnet schools in this country enjoy a student-computer ratio of 3 to 1, and in schools participating in the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow and similar technology immersion programs, the ratio is 1 to 1.

As for other technologies, every Paine classroom is wired to receive cable, but the local signal is too weak. The school can't take advantage of real-time educational cable broadcasts such as “CNN Newsroom” or “Channel One.” Zimmerman envisions a day when the school will have a satellite dish that would allow it to participate in special projects such as down linking live video from NASA during space shuttle missions. He imagines a day when Paine has a TV studio where students could produce videos for broadcasting on educational cable or sharing with classrooms abroad.

How are Zimmerman and Thomas Paine Elementary restructuring for the year 2000 when they don't have all of today's technology? Mr. Z is working very hard to use the technologies available to him, but he's also realistic. Despite his consuming love for them, Zimmerman believes that having the most sophisticated tools is not essential.

“A classroom with no or limited technology can have as valuable a program as the classroom that has all the latest things,” he says. “It shouldn't drive the curriculum; you should have your curriculum and find ways to enhance it with technology.”

Seeing Is Believing

But there are advantages inherent in the use of technology in the classroom. Just ask Janice Bradley, principal of Thomas Paine Elementary. She sees instructional technology allowing teachers to teach to different learning styles and quickly assess student progress, usually privately without risk of embarrassment. Bradley thinks computers and word processors are especially helpful for the 25 percent of Paine's students who are classified as students at risk of failing in school.

“I see technology as a plus for all those students who have struggled so long with the traditional way of using paper and pencil. The old way isn't working for some of our children,” she explains. “Through technology, those children are now finding another avenue, another opportunity to grow and to shine.”

As yet, there are no standardized tests to measure the effect of technology use in the classroom, so statistical proof that Paine students are benefiting from it doesn't exist. “I hate the fact that we don't have the scores,” Bradley admits. “But we can't measure this phenomenon by our existing assessment tools. You really have to be in the classroom to see how the students are affected.

“Their eyes light up when they use the computers. And some of these children were never turned on by anything else in the classrooms—never read books, for instance.”

Such success convinces Zimmerman and his colleagues that the educational reform they're effecting—augmented by as much instructional technology as they can muster—is on track. In fact, Zimmerman's thoughts echo the goals outlined in the U.S. Department of Labor's 1991 report, “What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000,” suggesting that perhaps the beleaguered field teacher and national committee may someday meet on the path to reform.

“We need to rethink the structure of our education system,” Zimmerman says. “The idea that we can teach kids all that they need to know is ridiculous. We can't do that. Somehow we have to teach them the skills to be lifelong learners, to know how to find and access information, to know how to organize that information, and to know what to do with it when they get it.

“Because this and more is what kids are going to be needing in the real world. If we're concerned about educating students for the 21st century, and we ignore technology, then there's a big gap in our philosophy of what we think we need to prepare them.”

Paying the Piper

Yet his efforts to bring education even this close to 2000 have not been without cost. A self-described workaholic who “spreads himself too thin sometimes,” Zimmerman, 40, struggles to balance home, family, church, and work. This father of three spends much of his working hours immersed in technology and reform activities. In addition to serving as on-call volunteer technology trainer in his own school, Zimmerman presents about 60 science and technology workshops each year at state and national education institutes. He coordinates The Teacher Is the Key, a math, science, and technology program that meets at several sites around Illinois for six days of workshops and collaborative projects. In addition to organizing the food, housing, and logistics of each meeting, Zimmerman presents three to four training sessions each day.

Interspersed among those activities were several trips to Washington, D.C., in 1992 to plan the 10-day Christa McAuliffe Institute for Educational Pioneering sponsored by the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education. Assembled at Stanford University in August, Zimmerman and four other McAuliffe Educators led 20 McAuliffe Fellows in activities planned around the theme, Preparing All Students for the 21st Century: Using Telecommunications to Restructure Education for Global Understanding.

Some of Zimmerman's splintered time is spent writing grant applications. Since 1985 he has received nearly $400,000 from state and national sources for classroom equipment, projects, and teacher training programs such as The Teacher Is the Key. The result: Many of his teaching goals are being met, but at the expense of other responsibilities.

Teachers like Jim Zimmerman are doing the hard work of reforming American education, one classroom at a time. It takes frequent phone calls, planning sessions, and never-ending reading and self-training to stay current with technology. But all these endeavors are made easier, Zimmerman is quick to point out, by knowing he is supported by his school administrators and colleagues.

“I think Urbana is unique, and 90 percent of the teachers in the district would echo the same sentiment. Teachers are valued as professionals here,” he says. “We're encouraged to teach to our strengths and to try different approaches. And the administration is definitely pro-technology.”

Moving Beyond Rhetoric

Principal Bradley doesn't have a computer in her own office, yet she recognizes that instructional technology is forcing a restructuring of the way teachers teach. She and other administrators in the district determined this year to make faculty comfortable with that trend. Bradley started with inservice training led by herself, Zimmerman, and Carol Godoy, a second-grade teacher at Paine. The three set up all the school's computers, software, and accessory equipment in the school gym and gave teachers a technology blitz.

Bradley believes that “technology's coming and there's no way to avoid it anymore. I think the key is to make sure that teachers are given the support they need so they can feel as comfortable with it as possible.” The first line of that support, she says, are the students, who often pick up new software applications just as quickly as they learn the latest video arcade games, and other teachers who have acquired technology literacy elsewhere.

Godoy is just such a teacher. She established the school district's access board to Free Educational Mail, or FrEdMail, a grass-roots, on-line network transmitted between Apple computers. Like Zimmerman, Godoy has found that implementing the technology—acquiring hardware, getting principals' consent, establishing phone lines, and training teachers from each school—is a slow process. She estimates that just 10 to 15 teachers in the district used FrEdMail during the last school year, but expects interest to grow. Urbana High School joined the network this year.

Of course, Godoy and Zimmerman use FrEdMail. Last year, with the help of University of Illinois educational psychology professor James Levin, they teamed their second- and fifth-grade classes to take part in an international project to collect ideas for a zero-gravity space station. Their students devised recreation and exercise activities and plans for a classroom in space, then put them on the FrEdMail bulletin board. There, they were critiqued by other participants—students, teachers, even NASA and Lockheed researchers. Godoy and Zimmerman's students were thrilled to receive responses to their ideas and eagerly revised them as they learned about the challenges of living in a zero-gravity environment.

Despite such collaborative projects and his own campaign to implement technology, global perspectives, and future-minded objectives, Zimmerman realizes that a few individual teachers can't carry reform all the way into the next century.

Drawing Battle Lines

He needs the help of an army of teachers who have raised their knowledge and comfort level with instructional technologies—something they aren't accomplishing through occasional staff workshops held after school, when dozens of other tasks beckon. Zimmerman advocates frequent inservice training, facilitated perhaps by sending students home an hour early once a month to free up teachers' time.

And he'd like to see university schools of education focus on the reality that technology-aided classrooms are alive and advancing. “The applications and software that are coming out now should be available for preservice teachers so they can become comfortable with the technology, so they're not technologically illiterate when they go into the classroom,” Zimmerman says. “The districts they're in may not have those resources, but if the teachers are informed, then they'll find the resources and make the effort to bring them into their classrooms.”

Money to support instructional technology is a perennial concern. Sometimes, however, it doesn't cost a cent. At Paine they've learned that a reputation for innovative technology use begets more technology: Thanks to Zimmerman's high profile in teacher-training and grant-writing circles, he often receives new hardware or software free from vendors, who know his endorsement is an invaluable marketing tool. It's a Catch 22 situation, though. The freebies usually end up in Zimmerman's room, while other classrooms with less technologically advanced teachers go without.

Bradley would like to create a better equipment balance among all of her school's classrooms, but she is under financial constraints. Paine has no special technology line in its budget, and money is always needed for such basics as paper, pencils, and crayons. “I wish there were more funding, but we're going to take any little bit that's available and try to become as competent as possible in technology,” she says. “I'm balancing a very sensitive scale.”

The sensitivity has to do with which teachers are comfortable with the technology and whether or not all students will be equitably served. Even when gifts of equipment and funds are offered by vendors, local businesses, and families, equity is an issue. The Urbana school district is formulating a policy to deal with it.

“I don't want to see schools not be able to accept gifts, not have access to technology because the school down the street doesn't have it. In that case, everybody gets penalized,” Zimmerman says. “I think somebody—the state, the government-has to think about equity, and that translates into dollars and business partnerships. I think it's going to be a problem that we'll have to deal with for a while. It may never go away.”

All Aboard!

Everyone agrees: The challenge of reforming American education is a daunting one, whether it starts in Washington or in the classroom. Those looking for the fastest route between the two points perhaps should consider addressing the obstacles that Zimmerman, his colleagues, and other classroom-level reformers have been unable to overcome.

Real reform is being done by teachers in the trenches, people like Jim Zimmerman, who are working as hard as can be expected to effect change. After a summer jam-packed with presenting teacher-training workshops and attending seminars and institutes, Mr. Z returned to his classroom in August with a bright eye on the future and one wary eye on that teetering pile of cardboard boxes. The slow boat to reform moves on.

Melinda Grewar was an assistant editor of TECHNOS Quarterly and writer/editor for the Agency for Instructional Technology at the time this article was written.

Click here to access the Christa McAuliffe Educators ‘Touch The Future’ Sidebar that accompanied this article.