learning networks as well.
Unlike the grade-band books, this book is specifically structured to help school leaders create and sustain systemic change.
This Book
We have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in the process of incorporating technology in schools, and, in this book, we’ve tried to share our practical, honest experiences with the change process and offer real stories drawn from our journeys. Each of the educators involved with this project started with different challenges: demographics, technology, teachers, curriculum, culture, communities, or administrators. That diversity of experience helped this book avoid becoming merely the story of one district and its specific challenges.
We designed this book so that each district and school could customize its basic framework to meet its specific needs. The process we describe—the why, the what, the how, and the then what, followed by any necessary rethinking or revision of any of the pieces—may not happen at the same pace, scale, or sequence in all districts. Changing any educational system is complicated. Our hope is that you will find success in helping your team look beyond the technology tools and stay focused on answering teaching and learning questions by deploying the following framework on which we structured this book.
• Why?
• Seeking support
• Establishing the visioning process
• What?
• Communicating the plan
• Creating teacher activators
• How?
• Defining and deploying personnel resources
• Defining and deploying technology resources
• Defining and deploying financial resources
• Then what?
• Implementing professional development
• Connecting the community and showcasing student projects
In this book, chapter 1 starts with the vision itself, or the why, which is the most important part of the entire process. The important parts of the framework include the process of seeking support from key stakeholders who will support your innovation throughout its implementation, and the visioning process itself. This chapter also discusses the idea of a growth mindset, which is critical to any innovation’s success, as well as the SAMR model (Puentedura, n.d.) for designing and assessing learning opportunities. SAMR, which stands for substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition, is a reflective model intended to help educators integrate technology in purposeful ways.
The planning continues in chapter 2 with the what. The key parts of this stage involve communicating the plan to staff, stakeholders, and all other involved parties, as well as creating a small teacher-activator group to begin implementation. This is where the vision from chapter 1 begins to flesh out and the innovation starts to take some serious shape. This chapter also introduces the idea of getting it out the door.
Chapter 3 investigates the how. This involves defining the essential resources for the implementation of your plan—personnel resources, technology resources, financial resources—and deploying each to good effect.
Chapter 4 discusses the then what, a topic that our team believes is a too-often neglected aspect of any successful innovation. This is the plan for encouraging ongoing learning and professional development, as well as for sharing student work, outside of building or district walls, with the community.
Chapter 5 discusses the importance of shifting the vision by revising and updating your innovation over the long term to take best advantage of technological advancement, as well as using data and formative assessment techniques to measure its impact on your building or district.
Finally, we include two appendices. Appendix A provides a full listing of the lesson plans offered in the other four NOW Classrooms series books, giving administrators an easy reference for individual grade bands. In appendix B, we’ve included a list of hundreds of resources, including apps, technology tools, and websites, as well as potentially unfamiliar technology terms. For each listing, we’ve provided a short description, web link, or other information that teachers and education leaders might find useful in deciding how to incorporate these resources into a classroom.
Similar to the grade-band books, we have included discussion questions at the end of each chapter that can be used for personal reflection or collaborative work with colleagues.
Conclusion
After talking with educators from a variety of schools that have successfully cultivated what we’ve termed a NOW classroom, we learned that there is no single right way to achieve that result. Every school and district is at a different starting point, and all of them face different challenges. Because of this fact, we wrote this book as a choose your own adventure, assuming that leaders would jump to the chapters that best apply to their situations. Your building- or district-level administrative team may also select chapters that specifically address its concerns about technology readiness or effective instructional coaching, as the case may be.
Whatever path you choose to start with, we hope it leads to creating a school full of classrooms where student learning is active, engaging, and purposeful. We suspected we were on the right track with our approach when one peer reviewer told us, “This book should be given to every teacher in a 1:1 classroom.” We believe you will agree.
CHAPTER
1
The Why: Creating and Communicating a Vision for Change
When contemplating any instructional innovation, the most important question a school district can ask itself is, “Why are we doing this?” That why—an inspiring and instructional vision for innovation—needs to be at the very heart of a district’s purpose. Yet all districts wrestle not only with the best way to articulate that vision but also with the best way to communicate it to the stakeholders who will support its implementation. This chapter discusses the importance of stakeholder support and offers advice on beginning the visioning process. We begin by addressing the challenge of helping everyone in a school building adopt the growth mindset necessary for successful innovation.
Establishing Growth Mindsets
The process of building NOW classrooms begins with changing your school community’s underlying culture. As a building or district leader, you can’t simply decree that the culture must change; you need a cyclical plan that cultivates it. The plan involves:
• Creating a vision for changing classroom culture and incorporating technology
• Implementing experiments to build that vision
