Purpose: The state of North Carolina has had the fastest growing population of English language learners (ELLs) in the nation. The Title III Department at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has tackled this need head on by adopting the research-based Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) as a framework for helping teachers in North Carolina address the needs of ELLs. The Department created a statewide cadre of educators trained in SIOP, but couldn’t keep up with the demand to add new cadre members or to provide follow-up training to existing cadre members. The purpose of this project was to help the Department reach a wider initial audience and to provide opportunities for follow-up training for cadre members.
Audience: The SIOP cadre consists of several hundred teachers, academic and language coaches, and district personnel and is coordinated by staff at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI), the state education agency.
My Role: As the Director of Technology for the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center (ARCC), I was brought into negotiations with the Title III staff at the Department to determine how technology might be used to expand the initial cadre and provide follow-up training to cadre members. I served as project manager over three years of this project and any success that can be attributed to the project is the result of a team effort from my colleagues in the ARCC and staff at the NC DPI.
Challenges: The first challenge I faced was building trust with DPI staff, a common challenge of any change agent. The Director of Title III at the Department is a highly skilled professional and passionate about helping teachers in the state. She appeared to be frustrated when I first met her, because while she had found a process that showed promise, she had limited staff in order to implement it. She had also received a lot of well-intentioned advice about different technologies to use that, unfortunately, had served to cloud the issue.
Working through this project, several different challenges surfaced. Some related to technology, especially the lack of access to technologies in a school setting that many of us use on a daily basis at home. Limited technology proficiency was also a challenge. We started with this knowledge and gently and consistently pushed the participants in this cadre over a period of several years to the point where some were eventually using new technologies to support their personal and professional growth.
Strategies and Outcomes: The first step in building trust was providing information and data. We tech folks are often charged with pushing for the “latest and greatest,” but it was important to determine up front what was feasible and possible with available resources and to develop reasonable expectations for the overall project. Working with my colleagues at the ARCC, we began by conducting a needs assessment of members of the statewide cadre. Data is objective and can be a good starting point for conversations.
From this, we were able to determine that most of the participants felt comfortable with sending e-mails with attachments, taking and sharing digital pictures, and searching the Web. Very few of those who responded had access to or familiarity with common social networking tools, so blogs and wikis were out. This may be because we were working primarily with educators, and—as we found out—most of the participants used school computers more often than home computers.
For our first activity, we piloted a book study with select members from the statewide cadre. While few had experience with social networking tools, the interface for the discussion software we used looked very similar to composing an e-mail message, and it introduced many of them to online collaboration. We also leveraged expert resources, by inviting the authors of the book to participate in a one-hour webinar where the book study participants could interact with them and have their questions answered. We recorded the author interviews and later made the recordings available in a book study guide for future groups.
Another important strategy used in this project was ongoing evaluation, and from that pilot we learned several critical points (some of which came back to haunt us later). We learned
there was a general lack of awareness about SIOP, especially by school leaders, and so it was hard to get buy-in or support for those trying to implement the framework in their classroom.
the activities should be shorter. Our book study lasted 8 weeks, but most said they’d rather read and interact more often over a shorter period of time.
some techniques to better manage and engage the participants, which led to creating guides for hosting online book studies.
school networks still blocked some of our activities, especially streaming video, despite our attempts to contact network administrators and solve the problems.
incentives were necessary! While the pilot group volunteered for the project, most said they would not have participated in the event on their own unless they received some kind of credit or other incentive.
The following year, we tackled those issues head on. First, we designed a series of one-hour webinars about SIOP and targeted them to building and district administrators. More than 150 people registered for the first webinar and the last one featured success stories from school districts across the state that was so popular that we stayed online an extra 30 minutes to accommodate all the questions from participants. Those webinars were archived and available for anyone who could not attend in person.
We also collaborated with the Department to sponsor a second book study, this time only four weeks, and utilizing a book with a companion DVD (to avoid the streaming media problem). Participants were also going to receive recertification credit for successful completion. The response was overwhelming! We hoped for 20 brave souls and we had over 250 people register in the first two days. We had to shut down registration before the deadline. The Department eventually agreed to six total book study groups (delivered as three pairs of cohorts) and was able to include participants from every region of the state, thereby expanding awareness about the importance of SIOP. We collaborated with but eventually weaned the Department staff from our technical and facilitator support to the point where in the third year the Department was sponsoring and hosting book studies on their own—using a Ning they created! So the strategy we used there was modeling, one that is especially important when teaching new technologies to people.
During the third year (which is still ongoing), we were a little more ambitious and pushed to provide collaborative technology to support a small group of science teachers trained in SIOP, a group dubbed SIOP Soulmates. My colleagues and I worked with the Department staff to develop guidelines and structures to encourage the science teachers to continue to communicate with each other and collaborate on issues related to SIOP, regardless of whether they were in the same school or district. We’ve struggled with this more intense collaboration, but have made some headway. The collaboration wasn’t as robust as we had planned, nor as frequent, but we did have a group of five middle school science teachers who continued to communicate with each other throughout the school year. The teachers received no extra incentive to participate, so we should probably reconsider that aspect when we start our next group. The most critical lesson, one that we really were aware of but still didn’t address well, is that facilitation is crucial. It’s too easy to ignore the computer and chatting online when you’re faced with an ongoing rotation of classes of students every day.
This project continues to grow thanks to the dedication of staff at the ARCC and the NC DPI.
During the third year (which is still ongoing), we were a little more ambitious and pushed to provide collaborative technology to support a small group of science teachers trained in SIOP, a group dubbed SIOP Soulmates. My colleagues and I worked with the Department staff to develop guidelines and structures to encourage the science teachers to continue to communicate with each other and collaborate on issues related to SIOP, regardless of whether they were in the same school or district. We’ve struggled with this more intense collaboration, but have made some headway. The collaboration wasn’t as robust as we had planned, nor as frequent, but we did have a group of five middle school science teachers who continued to communicate with each other throughout the school year. The teachers received no extra incentive to participate, so we should probably reconsider that aspect when we start our next group. The most critical lesson, one that we really were aware of but still didn’t address well, is that facilitation is crucial. It’s too easy to ignore the computer and chatting online when you’re faced with an ongoing rotation of classes of students every day.