Technology choices for leadership classrooms.

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the potential for technology to improve performance-based assessment and achieve reflective practice in educational leadership classrooms. Videotaping performances is relatively easy, but distribution logistics required by reflective practice are difficult to resolve. Technology adoption literature helps to explain how potential benefits are weighed against implementation problems to determine the likelihood of technology adoption in graduate classrooms. Recording and distribution technology will be adopted to improve performance-based assessment and achieve reflective practice only if instructors perceive it as useful and easy to use.

Introduction

Preparing teachers and other educators for leadership positions in schools and school districts is a daunting task. Although conveying technical information such as budget and teacher evaluation rules and regulations is relatively simple, teaching people how to lead is not. Bridges (1992) and Copland (2001) suggest that prospective school leaders should be confronted with open-ended problems to solve as a means to learning how to lead. Therefore, effective leadership programs should be structured to take future administrators beyond discussion and presentation and into the realm of engaging in authentic leadership tasks. Yet, experience alone is insufficient without collaborative reflection (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). A major challenge in preparing educational leaders is to provide the right balance among classroom experiences, assessments and reflection. Performance-based assessment (PBA) is the deliberate evaluation of classroom experiences that require students to engage in authentic professional work. Activities upon which PBA is based, commonly referred to as performances, help prospective leaders learn how to lead. But giving students consequential feedback on their attempts to practice leadership is challenging, particularly when the performance is a fleeting experience such as role playing. Despite the problems involved in PBA, it is an effective way of linking experiences to reflection to maximize learning, and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) requires it. Reflective practice uses group input to move beyond changing students' views through instructor and self-assessments to changing their actions (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004), thus expanding the benefits of PBA.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the potential for technology to improve both PBA and reflective practice. Video technology can help achieve a combination of the two, but technology integration is not simple and occurs inconsistently across classrooms. To explain this inconsistency, we reflect on past classroom practice and turn to theoretical and empirical literature to analyze the implementation barriers and problems associated with using video technology. User-friendly technology provides the means to achieve both better PBA and reflective practice. We begin with a brief scenario that demonstrates a need for better ways of capturing authentic classroom experiences. Following the scenario is a description of the promise and problems associated with applying digital video to PBA in an effort to achieve reflective practice. We then provide a literature-based framework as a hypothesis to explain technology choices and conclude with recommendations for technology adoption to enhance PBA and reflective practice in the future.

A Performance Too Real

Halfway through the first course in an educational leadership program, the class was engaged in role-playing. All the players were excellent in their roles. The rest of the class and the instructor were deeply absorbed in observing the scenario as it unfolded. Suddenly, the woman playing the role of a middle school student started to cry. The instructor was pleased because the person playing the assistant principal was having her skills and knowledge put to a true test, but he was also worried that the scenario had triggered something deep in the crying student. The instructor's ability to assess the performance of an aspiring assistant principal was slipping away as he became distracted by other concerns. Merely taking notes during an authentic performance in the classroom is a weak means of gathering data. Not only is there the potential for major distractions such as extreme emotional engagement of role players, but it is very difficult for an instructor to observe and run a live scenario while recording it on paper. A fundamental PBA problem is capturing sufficient data about performances to be able to assess them with a high degree of validity.

Choosing Technology

Without some type of recording, the performer and instructor in the scenario above depend on subjective memory distorted by stress and anxiety caused by classroom performances and further eroded by activities that occur between performance and assessment. Peer observers have similar problems remembering in detail what actually occurred. Videotape recording allows the instructor to both interact with the performance as it plays out and conduct meaningful assessment after the conclusion of the class. Videotape is a common, attractive solution to the fundamental PBA problem of capturing live scenarios. More novel is making the performances available immediately after class to multiple viewers. How to do this is not entirely clear, but necessary to achieve the collaborative component of reflective practice (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). Wide distribution could be achieved by uploading digital video to the Web in the evening after class to make it available to students the next morning. But there is a major technology-based implementation barrier in this simple solution to the distribution problem.

For many, if not most, students in educational leadership programs from rural, suburban, and urban school districts, broadband Internet connections necessary for video distribution are unavailable, too expensive, or both. But the distribution barrier is not only a problem for students. With a 1:5 ratio for converting digital video to Web format in Quickrtime, for example, two hours of classroom performances would require ten hours to upload in addition to any required editing time. Server space is also likely to be strained if multiple videotapes are used for any given class. The complications of timely distribution and review using the Internet are probably so severe that neither students nor professors would find this kind of distribution attractive or feasible.

Linking a VCR to the video camera to make two copies at one time--one in the camera and one in the VCR--is more attractive than using the Web. After the performance is recorded, the performing student may take the VHS copy of the videotape home for later review. The instructor would retain the original digital version to engage in assessment outside of class. Although peers would not be able to view the performance after its conclusion, the efficiency and distribution problems are at last solved for the student who is the focus of the live scenario and for the instructor. Therefore, digital video recording with simultaneous copy to VHS format combines experience and assessment with enhanced reflection to improve the quality of PBA. Although combining digital and VHS video technology works well for instructor and self-assessment, it does not achieve reflective practice because of the exclusion of peers (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). Classmates can provide immediate feedback at the conclusion of a performance, but this tends to be superficial because of forgetting and filtering. In the charged aftermath of an authentic performance with severe time constraints for reflection, peers are inclined to provide affective support to the performer rather than critical feedback.

Reflective practice is important to leadership training because its intent is to move from thought to action and back to thought again to understand the consequences of action. Both thought and action are critical. Students may acquire new ideas, but unless and until they act on them and reflect on their actions, old ways of thinking will continue to govern their practice. Reviewing performances via videotape gives students the opportunity to assess how the goals of their own and peers' performances compare to the outcomes, thus placing them on the path to reflective practice (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). Collaborative peer reflection is a critical part of reflective practice because it helps to expose a performing student's assumptions and habits (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). It also requires observers to be reflective about what constitutes good leadership in action. Without access to a recorded performance for all class members, reflective practice is impossible and the value of the activity to both performers and non-performers is substantially reduced.

Despite distribution limitations, the application of digital video and VHS technology to is relatively easy to implement and would have improved PBA in the vignette at the beginning of this article. Both the instructor and the person playing the assistant principal would have been able to reflect later on the student's demonstrated leadership ability, rather than being stuck in the vivid experience of another class member getting emotionally caught up in the scenario. Had the whole class been able to review the role playing activity, a much richer discussion of how to handle potentially explosive situations could have ensued. Why, then, isn't videotaping more widely practiced in educational leadership classrooms? Regardless of apparent advantages, innovations such as digital video are not necessarily adopted by virtue of their utility (Rogers, 1995). Technology choice is influenced in multiple ways.

A Framework for Understanding Technology Choices

To understand instructors" technology choices, we examine two key factors that influence the decision to use a certain type of technology--perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (Davis, 1989, 1993; Koufaris, 2002; Szajna, 1996; Taylor & Todd, 1995; Venkatesh, 2000). These two ideas are brought together in the Technology Acceptance Model.

Perceived Usefulness The construct of perceived usefulness is based on an assumption that people will use a tool or application when they believe it will help them enhance their job performance (Davis, 1989). According to Rogers (1995), adopting videotaping as an innovation for assessing performances will occur only if uncertainty about its usefulness is greatly reduced in the process of searching for a means to capture live scenarios. That videotaping is useful for PBA seems quite certain, but its usefulness with regard to reflective practice is circumscribed, and made more uncertain, by the distribution problem.

Perceived Ease of Use As with perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use has a significant effect on intentions to use a specific system (Davis et al., 1989; Gelderman, 1998; Mahmood, Hall, & Swanberg, 2001). When making adoption decisions, users gauge how difficult it will be to adopt a particular tool and the effort required to achieve a desired outcome (Russo & Dosher, 1983). Since individual effort is a finite resource allocated among various responsibilities, people will select those tools they perceive as the easiest to use but will still allow them to complete a given task. To improve the chances that instructors will adopt video to enhance PBA requires that doing so not be overly cumbersome for the professor who must balance teaching, advising, research, and service. The compact, lightweight simplicity of contemporary digital video cameras meets the ease-of-use criterion, but wide distribution does not. Consequently, the use of recorded performances to achieve reflective practice is in doubt. Without the potential to accomplish reflective practice, the use of video for PBA alone might be judged not worth the effort.

Technology Acceptance Model A hypothesized relationship between perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use is contained in the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1986). The model is based on the possibility that if potential users believe that a given application is useful, they may, at the same time, believe that the system is too hard to use. In this instance, the potential benefits of a tool are outweighed by the effort of using it and the tool will not be chosen. Perceptions of usefulness and ease of use interact to determine if a user will employ a particular technology (Davis, 1989).

We expand on TAM and apply it to teaching contexts by suggesting that the likelihood a specific tool will be adopted is a ratio of perceived usefulness to perceived difficulty. (Note that perceived difficulty is another way of stating perceived ease of use and helps the ratio to make sense.) We emphasize that the terms of the ratio cannot be specified quantitatively, but the ratio is, nevertheless, analytically helpful. Thus, the likelihood that instructors will adopt a particular technology for the classroom can be increased either by increasing their perceptions about the usefulness of the tool, by reducing perceptions of difficulty, or by doing both simultaneously. Each individual will likely have a different ratio, thus explaining inconsistencies across instructors for adoption of a specific technology tool. Professors who are inclined to use technology but are not convinced of the importance of PBA will have low perceptions of difficulty and low perceptions of usefulness. This reduces the likelihood that they will adopt digital videotaping and copying to VHS. On the other hand, instructors who highly value PBA are more likely to adopt the tool because, even though they might perceive a greater level of difficulty than other instructors, their perception of usefulness will be greater. Solving the distribution problem would make videotaping more useful for reflective practice and take away distribution as a contributor to difficulty, thus possibly increasing the ratio for instructors to the point where adoption becomes more widespread.

PBA and Technology in the Future

Both context and distribution present challenges for applying technology to PBA and achieving reflective practice. Educational leadership classrooms are often far removed from college campuses and are probably not secure enough to leave equipment in them. Consequently, equipment must be transported back and forth between the classroom and the university. This kind of logistical challenge inhibits the diffusion of the innovation of using digital video to enhance PBA and achieve reflective practice because perceived uncertainty about its effectiveness and ease of use will be too high (Rogers, 1995). Apart from logistics and facilities concerns, the future use of digital video technology depends on finding an efficient and effective means of distributing performance recordings at the end of class to enable collaborative reflection. Although the Web still holds great promise, broadband access and the efficiency of uploading digital video are not likely to be resolved in the near future. Compact disc technology is available today, however, and most students now have the capability to view CD's. For less than $1,000, a CD copier, linked to a digital video camera, would allow all class members to have a copy of the performance to engage in either peer or self-evaluation outside of class without disrupting the flow of a live scenario. The future of technology-assisted PBA and reflective practice appears bright for those who see the value and the ease of use of digital video and CD duplication.

Conclusion

Video technology has great potential to enhance the quality of PBA and arrive at reflective practice, but its adoption in the graduate classroom is based largely on any given instructor's perceptions of the usefulness and ease of use of the tool. If graduate programs in education wish to improve the quality of PBA and attain reflective practice through a better means of capturing and distributing performances, then they would benefit from focusing professional development on these perceptions. Reflective practice literature suggests that to change faculty inclination to adopt technology will require a collaborative effort that focuses first and foremost on whether or not espoused performance goals for program graduates are being met without it (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). Reflective practice is an essential step in the process of taking prospective educational leaders from embracing the status quo to understanding how educational outcomes can be improved. Making it easy for instructors to both record live performances and distribute those performances among class members is therefore a critical element of improving educational leadership instruction. Future technologies will probably enhance our ability to engage in PBA and reflective practice, but for the near term, linking digital video to CD copying provides a stepping stone to improving PBA and achieving reflective practice.

References

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S. David Brazer, George Mason University, VA

Brett Sparrgrove, George Mason University, VA

Peter Garvey, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

Brazer, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Education Leadership and Sparrgrove is a doctoral student in the College of Education and Human Development; Garvey is a high school special education and technology teacher in Fairfax County Public Schools.