5.1: Needs Assessment:
|
Artifact
Teacher Technology Assessment Reflection The Teacher Technology Assessment is an artifact I composed after using survey tools and multiple interviews as well as five coaching sessions with the teacher. The artifact details the teacher’s perspective on instructional technology, problems with student learning in the class he co-teaches, his limited role in lesson-planning as a co-teacher, and his desire to implement more technology than his limited role permits. Also discussed is his Integration Profile, as assessed by a Levels of Teaching Innovation (LoTi)-based questionnaire a team of three educators and I created, and his Adopter Profile, as assessed by a second LoTi-based questionnaire the same team and I created. Based on the collected findings, a needs statement is included. The needs assessments conducted for this artifact include surveys, the two interviews, and the five coaching sessions. Findings from those assessments revealed the limitations the teacher faces despite a desire to better serve the needs of his students through better pedagogy and technology integration. His personal enjoyment of technology is a strength that makes him a willing adopter of technology interventions. Through the interviews, I determined that the students in his class were in definite need of a new instructional approach if they were to succeed in the course. As the Special Education co-teacher in a math course, however, he does not write lesson plans. The lead math teacher writes the lesson plans without his input, and the assessed teacher’s desire to see more class time devoted to the students practicing the math skills and less devoted to lecture often goes unnoticed. Consequently, interventions that required any significant time commitment (like the flipped classroom model that I initially presented to him) could not be implemented, and we worked together to use the student learning problems and his planning limitations to inform a powerful and quick technology tool that would serve his and the lead teacher’s needs. Its effective implementation became the basis for the technology workshop he and I collaborated on later in the semester. This field experience taught me that the theory of implementation is often a lot easier to deal with than the actual logistics. There are barriers everywhere. Some of the barriers faced during this experience include lack of empowerment for potential adopters and a seemingly insurmountable mindset that technology tools are only good for non-EOC courses because they are “extra” instead of a new way of accomplishing curricular goals more effectively. To improve the artifact, I could research ideas to overcome these challenges and share them with the teacher. The impact on the teacher’s development was clear: he implemented the new quick and useful technology tool and worked with me to create a technology workshop to spread the idea to other teachers in his department and throughout the school. The idea is to utilize Google’s free survey tool, Forms, as an assessment tool that provides immediate, individualized, documented data revealing how many and which students do and do not understand certain concepts. The impact on student learning is measured through the implementation of the tool and corroborated by increasing summative assessment scores. References Level of Teaching Innovation Framework. (2013). Retrieved from http://loticonnection.cachefly.net/global_documents/LoTi_Framework_Sniff_Test.pdf |