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technology in education

Put Technology to Work in Rural Schools

March 30, 2015

Technology makes it possible for each of us to do more, learn more and be more connected.

Need to pay your bills and register your kid for swim lessons while locating a recipe for dinner? Jump online. Want to learn more about something you just overheard while in line at the grocery store? Type it into a search engine. Wonder what your former Little League teammates are up to? Check your Facebook newsfeed.

Imagine what we could do for education if we maximized the potential of technology for teachers and students. Technology’s potential seems particularly compelling for rural schools, which struggle to offer an array of learning opportunities, to transport students to a central facility and to get the best combination of teachers from small candidate pools.

Technology in education sounds terrific: It can bring the world to a classroom. It can give students access to courses and resources they might not otherwise get. It can inject engaging fun into the classroom, as students learn through games and create in a digital medium.

Technology seems like a shiny tool that will build a bridge across the achievement gap. But technology’s power, like any tool, depends on how it is used. If a builder buys a new skill saw and wants to get the full value from his investment, he will place it in the hands of his best carpenter and will charge that leader with training the other carpenters to use it effectively. Likewise, efforts to use digital tools in education gain new potential when paired with efforts to give more students access to the best teachers.

Schools in several states are doing just that by developing new staffing models that break out of the traditional one-teacher-per-classroom model. They extend the reach of their top teachers using technology and team leadership. These teacher-leaders help their peers orchestrate in-person and online activities to maximize student learning. They use flexible student groupings and scheduling to meet each student’s needs while coaching teams of teachers toward excellent instruction.

Most rural schools, including districts participating in the Idaho Leads initiative, the Idaho P-TECH network, Khan Academy in Idaho and other efforts, are already forging ahead with integrating technology into their work. But to tap the full potential of technology, students, communities, educators and policymakers will also need to re-envision the traditional paradigm: particularly the notion of education delivered within classrooms of 20 to 30 students led by a single teacher.

In Technology and Rural Education, a paper funded by the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation and developed with the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho, we offer a set of recommendations to overcome challenges and capitalize on the potential of technology to serve students, particularly Idaho’s rural students, including:

Opportunity Culture® in the News: How to Transform Education

March 13, 2015

How can state and district leaders transform education by extending the reach of great teachers and their teams to many more students, for more pay, within budget? Read our latest thoughts this week:

  • On EdNC.org, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel exhort North Carolina’s leaders to focus on the destination–giving all students access to excellent teaching, consistently–and set the guideposts districts need to get there. “State leaders can transform North Carolina by funding a diverse set of districts to design financially sustainable, scalable advanced pay systems that reward excellent teachers for reach and leadership,” write the Hassels, co-directors of Public Impact and founders of the Opportunity Culture initiative.
  • On GettingSmart.com, the Hassels write about the challenges–and a possible solution–to the need for great school leaders at a time when schools must achieve deeper learning, not just learning basic skills. They call for a new model–one that combines Multi-Classroom Leadership with multi-school leadership.
  • And EducationNext.com highlights our video about the Opportunity Culture choices of Ranson IB Middle and Ashley Park PreK-8 in Charlotte.

Coming Monday: All about our latest Opportunity Culture video!

In the News: Charlotte Multi-Classroom Leaders Explain Jobs

February 11, 2015

Learn about an Opportunity Culture from some of the people who know it–and love it–best: Ranson IB Middle School multi-classroom leaders (MCLs) Bobby Miles and April Drakeford, along with Principal Alison Harris, and Ashley Park PreK-8 MCL Kristin Cubbage told Andrew Dunn of the Charlotte Observer and TimeWarner Cable News how Opportunity Culture roles keep great teachers in the classroom and provide the support, collaboration, and coaching all teachers need.

“This definitely is my dream job,” Drakeford told TWC News. “Teachers are getting better each week because they’re coached weekly. …It’s a lot of work, but you see so much success.”

In video clips for Dunn’s Opportunity Culture primer, Miles, Cubbage, and Harris explain some of the differences between Opportunity Culture positions and usual teaching roles, and tell how an Opportunity Culture creates career paths for teacher-leaders to stay in the classroom and keep and support great teachers.

In the News: Charlotte’s Opportunity Culture®

January 30, 2015

New Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS) Superintendent Ann Clark highlighted the district’s Opportunity Culture career paths in her “State of our Schools” speech Thursday, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Discussing the need to be competitive on teacher pay to retain teachers, Clark pointed out how an Opportunity Culture helps great teachers stay in the classroom while making much more money, using such models as Multi-Classroom Leadership and Time-Technology Swaps. Pay supplements for multi-classroom leaders can be as much as $23,000, or 50 percent more than average teacher pay in North Carolina, for example–within current school budgets.

Shortly into the first year of Opportunity Culture implementation in four schools, the district’s top leaders, including Clark, were so pleased that they decided to dramatically scale it up to reach nearly half the schools in the district by 2017-18. Now in their second year, those four schools were joined by 17 more, with up to eight more joining next year.

How 2 High-Poverty Schools Planned an Opportunity Culture® Overhaul

January 29, 2015

High-need schools. Lagging student performance. Teacher churn. “We’ve tried everything.” For many school principals, this may sound unpleasantly familiar.

At two Charlotte schools, though, the principals found something they hadn’t tried: creating an Opportunity Culture for their students and teachers.

By extending the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to many more students—for much higher pay,within available budgets, and adding time to plan, collaborate, and improve—the schools saw a way to address their dilemmas using the Opportunity Culture formula. By involving teachers at each school from the start in choosing how to extend teachers’ reach and pay more, they improved teachers’ morale, recruited more great teachers, and kept them.

“Opportunity Culture spoke to me,” says Alison Harris, principal of Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte, in a new case study. When Harris arrived at Ranson in 2011, it was a school in trouble, unable to recruit and retain enough teachers for its struggling students.

“In the 2011–2012 school year, I just made it clear that we’ve got to do something to help our scholars catch up,” Harris says in an accompanying video. “They are already coming to us behind—it is no one’s fault, but it is everyone’s responsibility. … For many of our scholars, it is truly life and death whether or not they get a great education in middle school.”

Nearby, Tonya Kales and Jeanette Reber at Ashley Park PreK–8 felt similar concerns about getting their students a great education. At both schools, the principals and school teams that included teachers chose to use new Opportunity Culture teaching roles—Multi-Classroom Leadership for teacher-leaders, and Time-Technology Swaps, which blend learning through in-person and online instruction.

Those roles and the support for teachers, time for collaboration, and paid career advancement options they offer would, Reber says in another new case study, help Ashley Park attract and keep teachers and further boost her students’ learning.

In Multi-Classroom Leadership, excellent teachers continue to teach while leading, supporting, and developing a team of teachers. “Teachers don’t always want to leave the classroom,” Reber says in the video. “They don’t always want to get far removed from being directly involved with scholars. So Opportunity Culture was the perfect thing for these teachers who want to stay connected with the kids and grow themselves.”

After settling on the new roles, Ranson and Ashley Park began the multiyear process of introducing, implementing, and adjusting their models.

Being a Multi-Classroom Leader: “It Is My Dream Job”

July 22, 2014

“I glance at my computer clock; it is already time for the next block and I forgot to eat lunch. When a Frenchman forgets about eating, this is a sign that he loves what he does.”

So says Romain Bertrand, the first multi-classroom leader (MCL) at Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., today in “Expand Your Reach: New-world role combines coaching teachers and teaching students” on Education Next. Walking readers through a piece of a typical day, Bertrand explains how he leads two pods of three teachers and one learning coach (or teaching assistant) each–and is responsible for the learning outcomes of 800 sixth- and seventh-graders.

In an Opportunity Culture, MCLs earn significantly higher pay; in the Project L.I.F.T. schools within Charlotte-Mecklenburg, that means up to $23,000 more, or 50 percent more than average teacher pay in North Carolina. MCLs get to continue teaching while providing on-the-job professional learning for their teams, planning, coaching, and collaborating with them.

Bertrand loves his job–and he wants the world to know, so other teachers can have similar, highly paid opportunities that let them advance while staying in the classroom, reaching more students with great teaching. For more about him, Multi-Classroom Leadership, and the Opportunity Culture schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, see:

Cabarrus County, N.C., Schools Join Opportunity Culture® Initiative

May 12, 2014

A second North Carolina district has joined its neighbor in implementing an Opportunity Culture: Three elementary schools and seven high schools in Cabarrus County, N.C., will pilot Opportunity Culture models in 2014–15–affecting approximately 1,000 students in the first year of implementation alone.

Public Impact will assist some of the school teams in redesigning their schools. These schools will each have a team of administrators and teachers to choose and adapt the models that fit their school best, following the Opportunity Culture Principles.

The district is beginning work without philanthropic support for the costs of making this transition, but hopes to obtain funding to support additional school-level design teams. Six of the high schools asked to be included after hearing a presentation about Opportunity Culture models from the first high school principal to opt in this spring and Jason Van Heukelum, deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction for Cabarrus County.

Once schools make the transition to an Opportunity Culture, the higher pay is all funded within existing school budgets, not temporary grants. (See financial analyses of the models here.)

The Cabarrus County district, which includes Concord, N.C., has 39 schools and 30,000 students, 43 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Its schools join neighboring Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in implementing an Opportunity Culture. Four CMS schools piloted their new models this school year, and CMS announced plans in January to scale up its Opportunity Culture work to include nearly half of the district’s schools by 2017–18.

In the News: Multi-Classroom Leadership

March 21, 2014

The Opportunity Culture website is chock-full of materials to explain how our school models–such as Multi-Classroom Leadership and Time-Technology Swap–work. You can read the detailed models themselves, financial details about the models, broader overviews such as An Opportunity Culture for All or materials specifically for teachers–or you can just work your way through everything listed on the Tools for School Design Teams page to get the whole Opportunity Culture shebang.

And our case studies show how schools are just beginning to implement this work. We’ll have many more coming that get into the nitty-gritty as schools gain some experience with their new models, which design teams of teachers and administrators adapt to fit each school’s needs.

Meanwhile, though, Christina Quattrocchi at EdSurge fills in one piece of that nitty-gritty this week, in How to Teach 800 Middle Schoolers. She walks readers through the workweek of Romain Bertrand, a multi-classroom leader at Ranson middle school in Charlotte who incorporates blended learning into his math team, to help understand how Bertrand extends his reach to many, many more students than the one-teacher-one-classroom mode.

You can also read one of Bertrand’s blog posts on EdSurge, Reaching 800 Students with a Stylus and an iPad, to hear his thoughts on how thoughtful use of tech tools in the classroom can make a difference in many ways. Check out his entire blog to learn more about first-year implementation joys and challenges in his team.

Using Blended Learning to Pay Teachers More

October 28, 2013

The power and promise of blended learning—to let students learn individually paced basics online, so teachers can focus on personalized, enriched face-to-face instruction—can bring excellent teaching to more students, and enable all teachers to earn at least 20 percent more, sustainably. In addition, teachers can gain planning and collaboration time during school hours.

How? In what we call Time-Technology Swaps—one of the job models in an Opportunity Culture— excellent teachers and the teams they lead reach more students, for more pay, within budget, without having to increase class sizes. Paraprofessionals working with leadership and direction from teachers supervise the online-learning time. Lower wage rates for paraprofessionals enable higher pay for the excellent teachers and their teams. These teaching teams can teach more students without increasing class size because, at a given time, some of their students are online while teachers work in person with others. Schools can even reduce class sizes and still pay teachers more.

Scalable Secondary-Level School Models Increase Teacher Pay, Planning Time

October 24, 2013

Recently, I was chatting with a secondary school-level teacher who co-leads her teacher-run charter school. In her school, scheduling and staffing deliberately provide abundant teacher collaboration time and teacher-leadership, crucial for teachers to innovate and improve as they serve the school’s high-need population. She asked, “Emily, how can we make models like this scalable and appealing to more schools, so that districts use them, too?”

We have just released our latest calculations in the Opportunity Culture series, which indicate that middle and high school teachers who use blended learning and lead teaching teams can earn 20 to 67 percent more, within current budgets, and without class-size increases. This requires new school models with redesigned teacher roles that extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students. Using these models, teachers also gain 5 to 15 additional school hours weekly to plan and improve instruction collaboratively.