Starting in August of 2012, Irving Independent School
District reduced the Instructional Technology Specialist position by half.
Previously, the district had employed forty-one Instructional Technology
Specialists, one ITS at each elementary and middle school, and two at each high
school. After the reduction, each of the twenty remaining IT Specialists
serviced two schools, spending two days a week at each of their campuses. According
to the job description of the ITS in Irving ISD ,the ITS must “provide sustained,
in-depth professional development for campus staff which focuses on the
integration of technology and curriculum.” With the reduction in staff, the Instructional
Technology Specialists were having a difficult time maintaining the same level
of service as our teachers expected and had experienced in the past. Our goal
was to find new ways to provide professional development to teachers by pooling
our reduced resources and using technology.
Irving Independent School District has a focus on
technology. According to the Profile of the District, students have a great
deal of access to technology, with high school students having laptops issued
to them. Because of this strong focus,
it is essential that teachers are able to get the training and support that
they need to effectively incorporate technology into the curriculum. Our
department had a strong need to find new ways to bring professional development
to our staff. At the beginning of the school year, in September of 2012, the
Instructional Technology Department came together to solve the problems we had
experienced during our first year of the reduction in staff. We developed
committees to address the different problems and challenges we faced.
I became one of three members of
the staff development committee. Our committee developed four goals: to
increase attendance in staff development sessions, to maximize the efforts of
district Instructional Technology Specialists, to determine the types of staff
development that are most desirable to teachers, and to develop and implement a
long range plan for district technology staff development through various
avenues. The goal of this action research project is to determine the types of
staff development - times, format, topics, locations, and instructors - that
are most desirable to our teachers.
Irving Independent School District
has three early childhood centers, twenty elementary schools, eight middle
schools, and five high schools, serving over 34,000 students. We needed to find
a way for only twenty technology specialists to train and support over
twenty-three hundred teachers who worked in thirty-six locations around the
city. We decided to set up training sessions that were open to all teachers in
the district, varying the times, topics, instructors, locations, and formats.
Our committee encountered a variety
of challenges in finding training times that worked for teachers. Each type of
school has different start and end times, complicating the coordination of
training times. We decided to offer some training sessions back to back,
because our teachers get off of work at different times. We also offered
evening webinar sessions to accommodate teachers who were unavailable after
school in the afternoon.
We developed a list of topics to be
sure that we covered a wide variety of software and subjects that would
interest our teachers. We allowed the Technology Specialists who would be
teaching the sessions to either choose from the list that we had developed or
to propose additional topics.
To be sure that the Technology
Specialists were prepared to teach and support teachers at all levels, we
encouraged elementary specialists to team up with secondary specialists when
scheduling training sessions. Because every teacher in the district was invited
to the training, it was important that the focus of the training was broad
enough to interest teachers at all grade levels.
Another area that we addressed was
session location. Before the staff reduction, Technology Specialists offered on
campus training for the teachers at that school. We needed to find out what
locations to which teachers were willing to travel. We offered training
sessions at a variety of schools throughout the district and at the
administration building.
Finally, we wanted to offer a
variety of training formats to see what was most popular with teachers. We
offered in-person training, web conferences (live and recorded), and online
courses. In the past, teachers had resisted web conferences and online
training, but we wanted to try these formats again to see if they were more
effective or more popular than before.
Ultimately, our goals were to increase attendance in staff development
sessions, maximize the efforts of the reduced number of district Instructional
Technology Specialists, and to determine the type of staff development (times,
format, topics, locations, instructors) that were most desirable to teachers.
Our professional development and technology departments with both benefit from
the information found in this research project, and teachers will be given a
greater choice in fulfilling staff development requirements.
