Technology Empowered Transitions : Curriculum , Teachers ’ Practices , and . . . Change ?

Introduction Meet Joshua (pseudonym), a ninth grade student attending a rural community school in a rural state. Joshua is the oldest of three children living at home with his parents in an impoverished neighborhood. Neither his father (a Native American), nor his mother (of Anglo descent) have completed the 12" grade. Both parents hold minimum wage jobs, thus the daily tasks of putting food on the table and taking care of their children occupies their energies. Due to their lack of educational experiences, Joshua's parents have little understanding of what they can do to help their child complete high school and attend college. Joshua's school counselor has over 200 students to oversee. Joshua has no vision about the high school he will enter, let alone college. No one has articulated it for him. He is passive in school, with low self-expectations. Now that he has completed middle school, his parents are talking to him about getting a job and helping the family. Slowly, the societal expectation of completing high school and going to college diminishes in Joshua's day to day reality. While his teachers see his lack of commitment, they are faced with other students in similar situations. Because of lack of professional development training, teachers do not make the appropriate connections within the curriculum to help Joshua and his classmates become successful in school and move on to college. Joshua is unprepared for the rigorous curriculum needed to prepare for college. This fact combined with the lack of support from home for the needed rigorous high school program, Joshua may just slide by in school or worse yet, drop out. Joshua's story is representative of the at-risk student population who were served by the Technology Empowered Transitions: From High School to Higher Education grant. This grant obtained in March 2003 from a state Department of Education was designed to help high schools with high poverty populations in the state adjust their curriculums so teachers could instruct to both state and ACT objectives. When combined with the other state initiatives, students in this state have school curriculums that better prepare them for higher education. The following objectives were identified for the Technology Empowered Transitions (TET) project: 1. School personnel will implement a revised appropriate curriculum(s) based upon the results of the EXPLORE and PLAN portions of ACT's Educational Planning and Assessment System. 2. School personnel will identify problems classroom teachers experience when implementing curriculum changes, and explain how these problems were OVerCOne.


Introduction
Meet Joshua (pseudonym), a ninth grade student attending a rural community school in a rural state. Joshua is the oldest of three children living at home with his parents in an impoverished neighborhood.
Neither his father (a Native American), nor his mother (of Anglo descent) have completed the 12" grade. Both parents hold minimum wage jobs, thus the daily tasks of putting food on the Joshua's school counselor has over 200 students to oversee. Joshua has no vision about the high school he will enter, let alone college.
No one has articulated it for him. He is passive in school, with low self-expectations. Now that he has completed middle school, his parents are talking to him about getting a job and helping the family. Slowly, the societal expectation of completing high school and going to college diminishes in Joshua's day to day reality. While his teachers see his lack of commitment, they are faced with other students in similar situations.
Because of lack of professional development training, teachers do not make the appropriate connections within the curriculum to help Joshua and his classmates become successful in school and move on to college. Joshua is unprepared for the rigorous curriculum needed to prepare for college. This fact combined with the lack of support from home for the needed rigorous high school program, Joshua may just slide by in school or worse yet, drop out. Joshua's story is representative of the at-risk student population who were served by the Technology  School personnel will identify exemplars of "best practices" associated with the implementation of curriculum changes. It was hypothesized by the researchers that once those objectives were met, target schools would have a curriculum enabling students to become more successful in school. Thus for change to be successful, the process needs to be understood and implemented.

Grant
Bennis, Benne and Chin (1976), Hord, Rutherford, Huling-Austin and Hall (1987), and Fullan (2001) all state that change is a process. A synthesis of these works indicates that change occurs through the following four step process: The initial step in the change process is awareness.
Administrators often tell teachers that curriculum alignment is both needed and important. This instruction came from four university professors acting as mentors during the participants' course of study. At the completion of the Summer II session, participants became so familiar with the needs and process involved in curriculum alignment that they were able to explain the conceptual and specific elements of these proposed changes to others. So upon completion of Summer II session the second step in the change process, understanding, occurred.
The third step in the change process is implementation. This part of the change process was begun during the Fall 2003 semester when participating lead teachers began the task of aligning their curriculums with the ACT and state objectives. This is a crucial step in the change process because, "If the instruction and classroom assessments are not aligned with the standards around which these large scale assessments are constructed, then a student could perform very well in the classroom and then fail the high stakes assessment" (McGehee & Griffith, 2001, p. 142 Gall, Gall and Borg (2003) recommend that "when the expected frequency in any cell is less than five, a Yate's correction or the Fisher exact test needs to be applied" (p.315). To compensate for this need, the researchers collapsed data from Likert scale items from 5 levels to 3 levels prior to analysis. In addition to increased student engagement, the data suggested that TET helped teachers be more aware of students' learning styles. One middle school math teacher wrote that as a result of TET, "I have changed my teaching methods to address learning styles as a result of a discussion I had with a fellow student in TET." A high school math teacher stated that the "technology provided by the grant allows the students to see and hear the curriculum in a variety of methods which enhances learning."

Curriculum Alignment
Four items were constructed to elicit data that would allow the researchers to address whether or not participants viewed the TET grant as an effective tool for assisting them with curriculum alignment.
Item 2 asked participants if TET was effective in assisting them to learn "how and why it is important" to align their curriculum with state and ACT standards. What was not answered in this study was why teachers believed strongly that student learning was enhanced. Perhaps this is an additional avenue for further research.
The Rural Educator -