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St. Bonaventure
St. Bonaventure, NY
1999 Implementation Grant
Annual Education Degrees Awarded: 307
PT3 abstract - PT3 website
Project Contact:
(716) 375-2141
When Nancy Casey and her team at St. Bonaventure University (SBU) structured their PT3 grant project, they were keenly aware of three objectives that would be critical to success. The project, they concluded, must be:
- Simple enough that others could adopt the model,
- Elegant enough that it could be smoothly integrated into the school's elementary education program without giving the "technology" precedence over the curriculum, and
- Realistic enough that it would be accepted by university faculty, public school faculty and administration, and preservice students themselves.
Now in its third and final year, the resulting grant project is not only achieving these objectives, it has helped create a sea change in the culture of the university.
St. Bonaventure is a relatively small school located in rural western New York. Four years ago, SBU adopted the professional development school (PDS) model for teacher education, and its students now spend large blocks of time in local schools under the guidance of both university and school-based faculty. During two semesters of PDS-based work ("Field Blocks I and II"), cohorts of 15 to 20 preservice teachers and two university professors spend two days a week at a PDS site. Half of each on-site day is spent taking a 9-credit block of classes in theory and pedagogy; the other half is spent putting theory into practice in the classroom.
In line with the PDS model, and keeping it "simple enough," St. Bonaventure's PT3 grant focuses the bulk of its resources and learning experiences on the field-based portion of its elementary education program.
The PT3 grant provided SBU with the opportunity to revise their curriculum to enable elementary candidates to achieve the competence required by the ISTE standards for classroom teachers. The fact that SBU's program was already field-based helped ensure that the project design would be "elegant enough" to be seamlessly integrated. Casey emphasizes that technology in education is not important in and of itself; it should support and enhance teaching and learning. "Learning how to use technology appropriately in an educational setting can only be successful as an integral aspect of learning how to teach in general," she says. "We do not teach technology. We teach about children; we teach about teaching; we teach about learning. We help our candidates focus on effective ways of helping children learn."
Creating Receptive Elementary Environments
"Elegance," of course, is harder to achieve if the schools in which preservice teachers are placed are behind the curve when it comes to technology. In some cases, preservice teachers encountered resistance when trying to implement a technology-infused lesson. In many cases, the school was simply not equipped with the minimum technology needed to conduct the lessons. Most of SBU's partner-school teachers, if they were using technology at all, use it to support their own work. They have not ventured into designing learning experiences where children are using technology.
Realizing that local PDS schools needed a boost in that area, in the second year of its grant SBU decided that one means of creating schools that are receptive to technology-infused learning was to invite a few of the local schools to become Student Teaching Technology Sites (STTS). "All they needed to be was open," says Nancy Casey, SBU's PT3 project director. "They needed to say, 'I don't know how to do this, but I know that you do.'"
Teachers at participating STTS schools agree to facilitate the preservice teacher's use of learning technologies. In exchange, the school is provided with a media cart that includes a laptop loaded with educational software, a projector, printer, scanner, zip drive and a digital microscope. Teachers in STTS schools receive technology training as needed.
Casey reports that a true learning community has evolved out of the STTS model, where the student teachers are teaching the cooperating teachers how to use the learning technologies, who are in turn mentoring the student teachers in the art of teaching. "Our PDS sites have evolved into ideal laboratories where our preservice teachers can learn about technology," Casey says.
While all student teachers are encouraged and trained to infuse technology into their field experiences, STTS student teachers are required to implement technology on a regular basis.
Learning by Doing - And Teaching As They Are Taught
The PT3 grant gave SBU the opportunity to examine their program and identify an appropriate sequence of technology learning experiences for the preservice teachers. Renewal is an ongoing process; the current emphasis is on ensuring that all faculty understand and address ISTE standards.
During the Field Block semesters, university faculty model a variety of approaches to using technology in the classroom. For example, in the course on Developmental Reading, a professor might use Inspiration to model the use of character webs as a method to help children develop reading comprehension skills. During a science methods course, professors and candidates together might use a digital microscope to examine fruit and vegetable peels.
During each of their Field Block semesters, the student teachers are required to plan and implement a technology-enhanced learning experience for the children in their classroom, integrated with what the children are learning. The learning experience must be structured so that children are the users of the technology.
The fact that the student teachers have come to know the children well during the semester provides for a richer, more realistic teaching opportunity. Casey compares this experience with that of preservice teachers in more traditional education programs, where they might design technology-enhanced lessons in the university setting but don't actually implement or test the lessons in a real classroom setting.
During the grant's first year, Field Block students with little or no technology experience created projects that were based on relatively simple applications of technology. For example:
- Children created class yearbooks with digital pictures and short stories about each other.
- Children used Inspiration to create character maps about the main characters in the novels they were reading.
More recent cohorts of students are entering the Field Block semesters after having experienced technology-infused courses in their university core courses. These students' projects are more sophisticated, and Casey believes that's because their training allows them to spend more time thinking about curriculum and less about technology. Typical projects now include:
- Children working in cooperative groups while studying Native Americans, with one writing the tribe's history using Storybook Maker, another creating a timeline, a third creating a map of the tribe's location and a fourth using Community Construction Kit to develop a scale model of the tribe's village.
- Fifth graders developing a retrospective timeline of their journey through elementary school, to use at their "moving up ceremony."
- Third graders interviewing each other, videotaping the interview and then creating an interactive online yearbook using HyperStudio.
In every case, preservice interns have planned and developed these activities, have tied these activities to local and state standards and local curriculum, and have helped children create amazing products.
Lessons Learned
St. Bonaventure conducts evaluations at every stage to track progress and discover necessary adjustments. In terms of field experiences, the project team has learned that perhaps the most important lesson the interns can learn is that "if it can go wrong, it will." They have emphasized the importance of preparation and testing in advance of technology-infused lessons. They have learned, as Casey says, that "plugging in equipment is not intuitive."
In terms of faculty development, Casey says faculty are "on board," but progress has been slow. Field-based faculty are modeling educational technology, but results from workshops have been mixed. Project staff realize that faculty commitment and knowledge are the keys to sustainability of the project once PT3 funding ends and have adjusted training, incentives and requirements based on input from fellow grantees. The greatest results are coming from requiring students to "learn by doing" in the professional development schools.
Now, three years into the project, Casey and her colleagues are seeing their original strategies take hold. The project they designed is indeed simple. It's elegant, and it's realistic. "We never lost sight of those rules," says Casey. "They guided us to success and SBU is better for it."
July 2002
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