TECHNOS

February 9, 2012

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 2000 Vol. 9 No. 1

Teacher Education and Corporations: Unlikely Partners with Potential

by Donna L. Wiseman

Quietly last fall, on a Midwestern university campus, a revolution of sorts began — with no shots fired, no pomp and circumstance. Instead, it began with a quiet meeting of minds that has as its goal no less than the propulsion into the Internet Age of that university's Teacher Education program. This is just the beginning…

Newly recruited university professors in the College of Education at Northern Illinois University spent every Friday morning of their first semester on campus in class — it wasn't a class they were teaching, but one in which they were students. They were taking part in a series of planned activities that exposed them to up-to-date educational multimedia and technology. The seminar also provided them time to discuss their own attempts at integrating technology into their teaching and research.

A large cohort of new faculty and a College-wide focus on technology set the stage for a unique learning opportunity. However, it was the unlikely pairing of teacher education programs and a corporation that served as a catalyst for the evolution of the new faculty technology seminar. The seminar was one result of an unusual partnership between a college of education and a corporation. At the onset of the relationship, the higher education and corporate partners considered a wide range of educational initiatives, but as discussions continued, they began to focus on teacher education programs. The partners realized that together they had the potential to encourage future and practicing teachers to integrate technology into their teaching. The resulting collaboration between education and the corporation evolved into a relationship that produced benefits for both parties.

Business people can be amazed at the level of bureaucracy at the university.

Corporate Partnerships with Schools and Universities
Corporate-sponsored educational initiatives are not unusual in Pre-K–12 settings. There are examples of corporate programs that train or reward practicing teachers and support schools with the hope of improving local educational practices. Forward-thinking corporations share their products and assist with training for teachers in the communities where they are located, and they encourage their employees to become involved in educational programs. Business people tutor in schools, give money to special projects, or serve as experts, guest speakers, or career-day discussion leaders. Occasionally the corporate world will make a major difference in how schools educate young adults. The school-to-work movement that has emerged with the help of the corporate world is one example of how schools can be impacted by business partnerships.

Corporate connections to education can be the result of good business. Businesses that sell educational products, particularly textbooks and technology, often provide training sessions that help teachers use their products. Dukane Corporation, for example, employs educational specialists who provide training for teachers in schools that buy their systems. Some major technology companies provide programs to train teachers to teach secondary students technology-related skills. The Cisco Networking Academy provides secondary schools and community colleges around the world with online programs that teach teenagers and young adults to build and maintain Internet networks.

Interactions between universities and corporations provide examples of worthwhile connections to education. It is common for corporate America to support business, engineering, liberal arts or medicine in higher education. Traditionally, such partnerships produce internships or focus on recruitment activities. Corporations often work with university colleges of education to establish training programs, design research protocols, and implement assessment or research processes in the corporate setting. However, a partnership between teacher preparation in higher education and a corporation is more difficult to find. The collaboration between Northern Illinois University (NIU) and the Dukane Corporation, in which I am involved, offers one example of what can happen when these unlikely partners begin to work together.

Unlikely Partners
Over a year ago, the northern Illinois-based Dukane Corporation and the College of Education at NIU began talking together. The first contacts were made after Dukane's education division began to consider how their technology equipment was being integrated into public school classrooms. The company knew that even though it provided professional development training when schools purchased its multimedia technology equipment, teachers did not always use the technology tools. This finding is not unique to this corporation and is reflected throughout many of our nation's schools. It is no secret that teachers are not regularly integrating technology in their classroom activities (Fatemi, 1999), and the corporation's officers wanted to understand how they could encourage integration of technology systems in teachers' lessons and teaching strategies.

Dukane contacted an administrator in the college to see if there would be an opportunity to work with the College of Education programs and develop ways to encourage and facilitate teachers as they learned how to use new technologies. A small team of individuals from the corporation and the college began meeting regularly to discuss how they could work together. In my role as an endowed chair of teacher education, I was often involved in establishing partnerships that would improve the preparation of new teachers. Therefore, I became a member of the NIU-Dukane team along with faculty from our instructional technology department, representatives from our college technology center, and an assistant dean for research and her staff. Our Dukane partners included the general manager of instructional technology, the training manager, the director of sales, and the director of training.

University partners can be rather unconcerned about issues related to marketability and productivity.

Donna Wiseman conducts a class for pre-service teacher sin her university's Smart Classroom, which features Dukane Corporation's SmartSystem technology.

Smart Classroom Makes for Tech-Smart Students and Teachers The partnership between Northern Illinois University and the Dukane Corporation paid off in the installation of that company's SmartSystem technology in NIU's College of Education Learning Resources Center.

Among the high-tech features of the SmartSystem are video conferencing, Internet access, computer presentation programs, VCRs, CD-ROMs, and laserdisc and DVD players — all of which can be utilized via remote control. In this Smart Classroom, education students (pre-service teachers) are exposed to the new technology, and professional development for in-service teachers and media specialists takes place. Payoffs abound for both parties.

According to Terri Conway, Dukane's Director of Training, the company can conduct market research with users of the system as well as product development with user input. At the same time, university professors and students not only learn to use the technology, they can also conduct critically needed scholarly research on the use of technology in education, especially its impact on learning. Eventually, of course, both parties hope to attract teacher-alumni to Dukane's technology on NIU's campus. It's a win-win proposition.

But NIU isn't the only place where SmartSystem has been installed. Several case studies are available from Dukane through its Web site at www.dukane.com. They feature highlights of how the system has helped educators stretch their technology appropriations in these diverse settings: Washington State University in Pullman, Loogootee (Indiana) Community Schools Corporation, Hobart (Indiana) High School, and Canmore Collegiate High School in Alberta, Canada.

Shared Mutual Concerns and Vision
Our team's mutual concerns about how to include integrated technology into the preparation of teaching and learning lead to the establishment of a shared vision that guided our work together. We agreed that together our joint efforts would “…act as agents of change toward the adoption and educated use of integrated instructional technologies in Pre-K–12 schools.”

As the team identified overlapping interests, our discussions eventually focused on initial teacher preparation. The focus seemed to make a lot of sense at a time when the profession is anticipating a great need for new teachers to replace the high number of anticipated teacher retirements within the next five years. If new teachers who graduated from the teacher education program at our university were trained to integrate technology into instruction, they would impact teaching and learning throughout their careers. The team's interest in new-teacher preparation coincided with the College of Education's efforts to integrate technology into its teacher education curriculum.

The team worked from the premise that one way to expose new teachers to technology integration is to model the process during the students' undergraduate experiences. In order to model integrated technology, teacher education faculty needed access to current technology, so the corporation donated equipment that increased the technology resources in the college. Together we set up three technology-rich, multimedia classrooms to be used in graduate and undergraduate teaching. The classrooms are equipped with cutting-edge technologies such as video conferencing, Internet access, computer presentation programs, and DVD players. The media are controlled remotely and allow the user to switch quickly between different media presentations. A remote-control button can switch between a videotape, computer screen, and World Wide Web pages.

While the new multimedia rooms were impressive, the faculty were hesitant to use the technology. It didn't take long for the partners to realize that they needed to address faculty use of the media and the integration of technology into university teaching. The ten new faculty members who were to arrive in the fall of 1999 seemed like a good place to start.

With our dean's blessing, the newly hired faculty were provided release time from one class they normally would have taught so that they could meet regularly throughout the fall semester. I facilitated the seminar, which was designed to develop awareness of the equipment provided by Dukane and to introduce other aspects of technology available throughout the college and university. We met in the media-rich rooms where technology teaching strategies could be demonstrated and the new faculty could get involved in hands-on activities that promoted their own learning. Experienced faculty members who were comfortable with the equipment were invited to illustrate how they integrated the technology in their teaching. These veterans also offered support to new faculty outside the seminar, as they learned about new technologies.

Seeking Measurable Effects
Initial feedback indicates that the seminars did make a difference and the cohort of new faculty is integrating technology into their teaching. In a written evaluation of the seminar, faculty indicated that the experience developed more of a propensity to try to implement technology into their teaching. “Prior to this seminar, I never even considered integrating technology into my classroom,” wrote one faculty member. “I now am interested and excited about using technology in my classrooms and plan to do so…” Both the College and the corporation have increased their understanding about what is needed to encourage educators to integrate technology tools into their own teaching. A serendipitous advantage of introducing the new professors to ways to integrate technology is that they will model their new technology skills to future teachers who are in their university classrooms.

In a little over a year, the NIU-Dukane partnership has made a difference in the teacher-training program at our university. New faculty members were exposed to innovative uses of technology and now demonstrate it regularly in their classes. The enthusiasm of the new faculty about technology stirred an interest among experienced faculty who were not in the seminar. These folks are requesting that the same opportunities be provided to them, so they can learn about integrating technology into their teaching! Future teachers see their professors use multimedia in their university classes. Already there is evidence that our students are using technology more to make class presentations and lead their peers in discussions (Suiski, 2000).

The partnership has also impacted Dukane. Last summer, the corporate teacher-training sessions took place on our university campus instead of at the corporate headquarters. In this way, teacher education faculty and public school teachers learned how to use the equipment together. The partners' interactions have the potential to impact the corporation's training, too — their training specialists are currently reviewing training sessions with the help of the college research assistance office.

Additionally, this partnership has served as a public relations vehicle for both NIU and Dukane. Early last fall, the College of Education and the university dedicated a reconstructed one-room schoolhouse on campus. The university and corporation worked together to plan the day of events, which included the entire university, the surrounding community, and the local schools. Nearly 600 people attended the dedication and participated in a “history walk” from the one-room school of the 1890s, across the street to the technology-rich classrooms of the 2000s. Once the guests arrived in the modern classrooms, both corporate and university technology specialists demonstrated the potential of technology in education.

The partnership continues to evolve. We are attempting to find a school that has invested in the same technology that the College of Education possesses. The intent is to establish a field site that would offer future teachers the chance to see how schools use technology that is used in their university teacher preparation courses. If we can demonstrate the integration of cutting-edge technology while our students participate in practicums and student teaching experiences, our new teachers will emerge more confident about their own technology skills. Thus, the triad of corporation, university, and school will be complete.

It is still possible to learn a great deal from each other, and professionals in corporations and teacher education can benefit from interacting.

The team is planning to conduct research together. One topic of interest is the impact of integrated technology on student achievement in classrooms. Additionally, the partnership wants to continue to explore the best ways to train new and experienced teachers to integrate technology into their teaching. The partnership is beginning to find answers by collecting data about the new faculty who took part in the technology seminar.

CEO Forum Highlights Technology Education for Teachers

The CEO Forum on Education & Technology was founded to help ensure that every child in the United States is equipped with the essential technological, critical thinking, and communications skills necessary to compete in the 21st Century [see TECHNOS, Vol. 7, No. 4]. By regularly highlighting the importance of education technology and monitoring its deployment in the schools, the CEOs seek to accelerate the country's progress in preparing our children for the next century.

The Forum pursues this objective through an annual education and technology assessment aimed at measuring the nation's progress through our public schools. This assessment, known as the School Technology and Readiness (STaR) chart, measures integration of the four issues, or “Four Pillars,” that have been identified as critical to the process of teaching and learning: hardware, connectivity, digital content, and professional development. It is accessible online.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report stating that only 24 percent of new teachers identified themselves as being “very well prepared” to utilize technology in their classrooms. To date, only three states test teacher candidates on their technology skills: Idaho, North Carolina, and Virginia.

This year, the CEOs were joined by U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley in challenging university schools of education to assess their ability to prepare teachers for high-tech classrooms by gathering data requested in the StaR chart and publishing it within six months.

For more information about the CEO Forum on Education & Technology, or to obtain its reports, access its Web site at www.ceoforum.org; or call Mark A. Root, Project Director, at 202/585-0208.

Why Are These Partnerships Rare?
Examples like the NIU teacher education-Dukane partnership are rare. There are several reasons why teacher education and corporations rarely connect. Stereotyping of teacher education implies an out-of-date process that is slow to change programs or try new and innovative methods (Imig, 1999). The NIU-Dukane partnership provides evidence that colleges of education and teacher education programs are anxious to form healthy relationships that result in innovations related to technology. The partnership also demonstrates that teacher education programs have something to offer their corporate partnerships during the process of collaboration.

Another factor contributes to the unlikelihood that corporations will contact colleges of education for partnering. In some cases, the public, university, and even other areas of the college of education hold teacher education in low esteem (Goodlad, 1990). When a corporation contacts the president of a university, teacher education does not usually have the prestige to be considered a viable partner. But this attitude is changing. Recent national attention directed toward high-quality teacher preparation has helped refocus colleges of education and universities to respect the teacher-training components on their campuses. Teacher education provides universities a way to make a difference in schools and communities. There is new rhetoric and action on college campuses that indicates the trend is for universities to recognize the contribution of their teacher education programs.

Even if issues of stereotypes and prestige are not present, it is difficult to forge relationships between teacher education and corporations. The two groups work at different speeds, use different language, work toward unique goals, and survive in diverse working environments. Business people can be amazed at the level of bureaucracy at the university. On the other hand, university partners can be rather unconcerned about issues related to marketability and productivity. Even so, it is still possible to learn a great deal from each other, and professionals in corporations and teacher education can benefit from interacting. In such partnerships, teacher education and corporations both benefit — and what emerges from the interactions will have a greater impact than either of them could have accomplished alone.

References

Fatemi, E. (September 23, 1999). “Building the Digital Curriculum.” Technology Counts '99, Education Week, XIX, 4, 5-10.

Goodlad, J. I. (1990). Teachers for Our Nation's Schools. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco.

Imig, D. (1999). Environmental Scan. Washington, D.C.: American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education.

Suiski, J. (January 2, 2000). “Technology Is Making Partners of College, Businesses.” Education Today, Chicago Tribune, section 18, p. 8.

Donna L. Wiseman is the LD and Ruth G. Morgridge Chair of Teacher Education and Preparation at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education and is pursuing and conducting research about partnerships with schools, corporations, and other universities to advance teacher preparation. Previous to her appointment at NIU, she served on the faculty at Texas A&M.