Technological change and risk management for schools

Introduction

The impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the school education sector is wide-ranging. More than a question of funding or finding the necessary technical expertise, it is even more than a matter of pedagogical change, important and far-reaching though that aspect certainly is.
In this paper I want to concentrate on the new technologies as a critical risk management issue. As well as promising fascinating opportunities, ICT technologies also threaten schools. A schooling system that is used to a stable teacher/class/classroom model as the basis for its pedagogy and its economic viability should find the "promise" of the new technologies more than a little disturbing.
When learning materials can be presented
* with individual tailoring to encompass simultaneously the differing interests of each learner,
* with individual pacing and assessment to allow rapid movement through the material while confirming understanding of each component
* with remote-access electronic interaction with appropriate content experts and to equally interested peer learners (even if they are geographically remote),
why would a traditional school, with its regimented physical routines and its behaviour management issues, or a classroom teaching model with its inability to fully differentiate the learning experience, be certain of its survival?
For schools, managing technological change and its impact is about risk. It is about risk whether a school jumps into the new technologies, or tries to remain as untouched as possible. Many other industries facing similar technological changes have been revolutionised, with all the pain, and industry departures, that this can cause. The past stability of schools and school systems may only make the revolution more traumatic.

In the following I provide a number of thoughts with a risk management focus for your consideration.

1. Keep pace with your competitors

When uncertainty and change hits an industry, there is little that an individual entity can do to make sure that it is completely safe. Its first priority is to make sure it is not lonely.
Obviously those that don't adapt will be left behind. But pioneering schools are also adopting a high-risk strategy at both the technical and perceptual levels.
Technologically a school might financially commit itself to a hardware or software platform that limits its subsequent flexibility. Even if the platform is proven technically superior, market dominance and hence content may still move elsewhere (such as the Sony Beta standard).
As important as the technological reality is the perception of it by staff, parents and potential parents. School community members, particularly those frustrated or threatened by change, are only too ready to highlight shortcomings. It is important for a school not to oversell its technological prowess and vision but to let any results, particularly educational results, speak for themselves.

2. Flexibility and small scale

This does not mean schools should stay out of the new technologies. Schools need to learn how to utilise them both strategically and tactically as a learning community - in particular teachers will need time and encouragement to adapt.
It does mean keeping trials and changes as small-scale and as flexible as possible. Schools should have more than one trial operating at the same time. This sends the message that change is not driven by some unyielding educational or technocratic vision, but rather is provisional and led by motivated teachers (though a school should also ensure it has sufficient motivated technically-oriented facilitators to provide reality checks on and support for these teachers' visions!).
Retaining flexibility intrudes in choices such as between desktop and mobile computing devices, between hard-wired and wireless networking, and between software and data standards. In the face of uncertainty the school needs to recognise the value of keeping future options open (including those not currently anticipated).

3. A collaborative work in progress

Schools should not see technological change as a one-off planning challenge. Or as a funding challenge - how does it raise the money to get enough computers in the classroom? - with an implicit belief that the problem is then solved.
Those who were forward thinking some years ago - and sought both a computer lab and a computer in every classroom - have long since realised that this was far from the endpoint. Even the best visionaries of today have only a small chance of predicting the precise shape of learning environments in ten or twenty years. Rather the "work-in-progress" needs to include continual revision of its own goals, with this resting on both evaluations of new technology developments and the school's own implementation experience.
Schools also need to make the decision-making collaborative for at least three reasons:
Firstly, any single person's vision is very unlikely to be the right one.
More important than even the accuracy of the vision, however, is that the solution has to be a shared solution if it is going to work. One person does not make a school. One person's vision without the contribution and buy-in of the rest of the school community could well destroy a school.
Finally the whole school community has to adapt to the new technologies. There is no better way to encourage willing adaptation that to involve everyone in the decision-making.

4. Celebrate the technophobes

Often there is a struggle between the technophiles and those for whom computers are a betrayal of humanity. Generally both parties come away frustrated and threatened.
Schools should acknowledge openly the magnitude of the issues, and the genuine feelings and angst of the various parties. Indeed positively harness the strengths that various viewpoints bring to the community collaboration. It is easy to ask the technology "believers" to review new developments and others' experience with them. But it is just as important and useful to ask the sceptics to spot the relative weaknesses or problems in the different paths ahead.
Instead of energy dissipating in a negative battle between parts of the school community, it can be far more productively used in the collaborative ranking of technological possibilities, both for what they offer and for what problems they avoid. It is a real joy to see a "believer" and a "sceptic" jointly review an offering for the benefit of their school - and when they both agree, a school knows it is onto something.

5. Concentrate on the educational goals

The end goal of technological change in schools can appear unclear. Is it a classroom where students can access electronic learning materials individually and collaboratively, all under the watchful eye of their teacher? Is it a school with more student-directed autonomous learning, and less teachers? Or a school-less community with student learning undertaken mainly from homes with community centres providing the location for face-to-face contact "excursions"?

Faced with huge uncertainty on both the form of future technological change and the as-yet unproven educational advantage of the various visions, it is tempting to retreat to simply expressed and tangible targets such as "a PC for every four students" or "all teachers to pass IT level one certification". The danger is that these tangible short-term targets become the end goals in themselves.
Schools should avoid technology-based targets and stay with educational goals with which it is comfortable. What does it want its students to learn? What should they be able to do? How can they best learn this? Let the debate and evaluations concern how these educational goals are enhanced

This is also consistent with avoiding "big decisions" and "fanfare projects" that encourage both hype and then disappointment. Let decisions be taken to wire and equip a classroom cluster (where teachers are enthusiastic advocates) rather than an entire school that includes other teachers and learners who would work far more effectively with a different technology makeup. Importantly, "learning from mistakes" becomes a normal, important educational management skill rather than a search for a scapegoat.

6. Establish performance measures

If you have serious educational goals then it is important to establish measures of performance against those goals. Indeed the less tangible the goals the more important the performance measures.
This is difficult but not impossible. Some suggestions include:
* Start with the precise educational goals and ask those responsible for them (council, principal, head teachers, etc) what they look for to know if they are successful.
* Anonymous surveys are a relatively easy and under-used mechanism for measuring some of these intangible factors. Moreover electronic communications make such surveys cheap to implement.
1. Ask teachers who live at the chalk-face how effective and accessible the offered range of learning materials are in helping them meet the individual educational needs of their students.
2. Ask students what they feel competent doing using technology. Ask them how empowered they feel for a life after school.
3. Ask parents how they rate the school in helping their children become ready for adult life.
* Look for value-added student achievement indicators - look for evidence of change to avoid simply counting the capacities of the students who attend the school (or at least compare the results with other schools in similar socio-economic areas).
* Include explicit risk measures. Monitor dependence on critical technology items and on key staff. Monitor the proportion of students and staff that feel alienated by the school's technology.

7. Managing parent communication/expectations

A likely outcome of improved electronic communications is a rise in the expectation of some parents for improved school reporting on the progress and any other issues concerning their child.
Email provides a whole new way for parents to ask questions of their child's teachers. And to get answers. As well as eating into already limited teacher time, there is another risk for the school. The communication exchange has a key difference to the parent-teacher interview and hurried phone call. An email exchange is easily stored, and can be used later in disputes with the school. As teachers represent and legally commit their school in their replies, procedures need to be established to protect the school.
There is also a positive side to the new communication possibilities that needs to be nurtured. As a parent I want to know when my high school aged child fails a test. I don't want to find out about this in the report that arrives as or after school closes down for the year and the teacher concerned no longer has any role with my child. Timely advice to and response by the parents, especially working in conjunction with the teacher and school, is also likely to have several favourable educational benefits. And this can now be done at minimal cost, by the equivalent of simply "carbon copying" to the parents any student notification of an assessment result. Protocols to ensure parents understand the communications and to protect the school would be required, but this risk management overhead needs to be seen against the available positive benefits.

8. Staff development before anything

A school's staff is its major interface to its clients - both its students and its parent body. If anyone is effectively presenting the school's success and motivation in employing educational technology, it is its staff. A staff member's obvious enthusiasm for new technology that allows him or her to respond to a learning need of one of his or her students will communicate itself far more effectively than any notice in a school bulletin.
Obversely a staff member's negative feelings about technological change will also be obvious to all students and parents with whom he or she is in contact.
It should not be surprising if staff members feel insecure about the adoption of new technologies. Very few adults would relish having their working skills, the main area of their sense of personal competence, suddenly thrown up into question by external changes.
It is for this reason that all the staff need to be involved in the early discussion and consideration of the new technologies, and need to be confident that their evaluations of the impact on educational goals is sought. This empowerment is critical to their being motivated and confident enough to consider, adapt to, and gradually "own" the change that the new technologies bring.
A strong emphasis on professional development generally will also balance any underlying concern that ICT strategies are being introduced only for cost-cutting purposes.

9. Finding best practice learning materials

The new technologies allow a school to access best practice learning materials from across the world.
The problem is finding them amongst all the clutter, and doing so on a just-in-time basis.
A skill that needs to be developed and cherished within a school is that of the electronic learning librarian - someone who can assess the quality of different learning materials and then match them against teacher's goals and the specific learning needs of the school's students.
Many government and private entities are providing annotated directories of learning materials, some of exceptional quality. Nonetheless a school-based specialist is still needed both to add a filter layer according to the values and needs of the particular school, and to provide a friendly interface for the school's teachers.

10. Formalising the changing teacher role

Some teachers' role will change to one of learning facilitator or architect, with less emphasis on content expertise. Ongoing flexible small-scale technology changes and full collaboration between affected staff will facilitate this trend and reduce but not eliminate staff resistance. It makes sense to ensure that new staff know and accept that they are joining a school committed to change to meet the school's educational goals.

11. Managing digital divide issues

Even a fairly homogenous school community will have its own digital divide issues, with some families more computer-aware and resourced than others. It is not in a school's interest to have those families who are less computer-literate or resourced feeling that they have been educationally disadvantaged.
Again collaboration is the key. A school needs to harness the enthusiasm and skills of the digital haves to provide support for the have-nots. Do this between students, and amongst the parent community at large. Provide opportunities for parents to come in and experience the developments at the school.
Not only will this reinforce the use of the learning tools for students, it will also strongly diffuse any sense of resentment on behalf of those who are digitally disadvantaged.

12. Other risks

Briefly, some other significant risk management issues associated with new technologies in schools include:
* Need to change student assessment approach - not only to recognise the dangers of internet plagiarism, but more importantly to reflect the change in skills needed in an information rich world
* Electronic "duty of care" - if competence in accessing and interacting with external information is a critical skill for the 21st century student, how does this affect a school's responsibility to protect a student from possible damage from "hate" or porn sites, of from "external mentors"
* Avoiding proprietary standard systems - ensuring that a school's technology investments are relatively future-proofed (that it can at least transfer its data from one software platform to another)
* Managing the school's public image this refers both to managing the way the school appears and is referred to electronically (including in on-line marketing guides/comparisons), but also to the marketing the school's image so that its brand can extend its reach beyond geographical constraints.