Critical Element of Successful Faculty Development in Information and Communication Technology

The almost infinite potential educational uses of information and communication technology (ICT) will only be realized when most teachers have sufficient knowledge and skills to truly integrate ICT into their curricula, utilizing it to make teaching and learning more effective and efficient. For this to be accomplished teachers must experience the integration of ICT into their own pre-service learning as well as into the pedagogical skills they are taught. Teacher education faculty responsible for the pre-service experience of teachers must themselves develop high levels of knowledge, integrative skills, and comfort with ICT. It is the professional development of teacher education faculty that is the focus of this paper. The critical elements of successful faculty development in ICT presented here are drawn from the experiences and evaluation of roughly a year and a half of providing development activities for the faculty of a large, public, urban school of education in the Eastern United States. At the start of the project the most common uses of technology reported by faculty were word processing and accessing e-mail. Due to lack of knowledge most required assistance to complete a modified version of the School Hardware Technology Survey [1] describing the basic features of their office computer hardware and software. The principal imme diate goal of the project was for the faculty to acquire specific basic knowledge and skills regarding computer hardware and software. The principal medium-range goal was that faculty would develop technology related products or projects that would result in more effective and/or efficient teaching and learning of a unit of a teacher education course. A long range-goal was the modification of the teacher education curriculum to reflect greater integration of technology and to meet technology standards of various professional organizations and government agencies. The main focus of the intervention was the provision of staff development activities to increase the faculty’s level of ICT proficiency and enable faculty to integrate technology into coursework. Development activities followed a constructivist model that included the following elements: hands-on workshops, project-based learning, and learning teams of mutually supportive members. Central to the model was the requirement that each faculty member develop a technology product to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and learning one unit of a course they were currently teaching. On the basis of a range of data—survey questionnaires, focus group discussions, individual interviews—the following have been identified as critical elements to successful faculty development in ICT.