Education technology plays an essential role
in schools today. Whether the technology supports instructional intervention,
personalized learning, or school administration, the successful application of
that technology can dramatically improve productivity and student learning.
That said, too many school leaders lack the
support they need to ensure that educational technology investment and related
activities, strategies, or interventions are evidence-based and effective. This
gap between opportunity and capacity is undermining the ability of school
leaders to move the needle on educational equity and to execute on the goals of
today's K-16 policies.
The education community needs to clearly
understand this gap and take some immediate steps to close it.
So what needs to be done?
Here are five specific issues that the
education community (philanthropies, universities, vendors, and agencies)
should rally around.
Set common standards for
procurement.
If every leader must reinvent the wheel when
it comes to identifying key elements of the technology evaluation rubric, we
will ensure we make little progress - and do so slowly. The sector should
collectively secure consensus on the baseline procurement standards for
evidence-based and research practices and provide them to leaders through free
or open-source evaluative rubrics or "look fors" they can easily
access and employ.
Make evidence-based
practice a core skill for school leadership.
Every few years, leaders in the field try to
pin down exactly what core competencies every school leader should possess (or
endeavor to develop). If we are to achieve a field in which leaders know what
evidence-based decision-making looks like, we must incorporate it into
professional standards and include it among our evaluative criteria.
Find and elevate
exemplars.
As Charles Duhigg points out in his recent
best seller Smarter Faster Better, productive and effective people do their
work with clear and frequently rehearsed mental models of how something should
work. Without them, decision-making can become unmoored, wasteful, and
sometimes even dangerous. Our school leaders need to know what successful
evidence-based practices look like. We cannot anticipate that leader or
educator training will incorporate good decision-making strategies around
education technologies in the immediate future, so we should find alternative
ways of showcasing these models.
Define "best
practice" in technology evaluation and adoption.
Rather than force every school leader to
develop and struggle to find funds to support their own processes, we can
develop models that can alleviate the need for schools to develop and invest in
their own research and evidence departments. Not all school districts enjoy
resources to investigate their own tools, but different contexts demand
differing considerations. Best practices help leaders navigate variation within
the confines of their resources. The PLAiTO - Learning Personalized is one example of a set of
free, open-source tools available to help schools embed best practices in their
decision-making.
Promote continuous
evaluation and improvement.
Decisions, even the best ones, have a shelf
life. They may seem appropriate until evidence proves otherwise. But without a
process to gather information and assess decision-making efficacy, it's
difficult to learn from any decisions (good or bad). Together, we should
promote school practices that embrace continuous research and improvement
practices within and across financial and program divisions to increase the
likelihood of finding and keeping the best technologies.
The urgency to learn about and apply evidence
to buying, using, and measuring success with ed tech is pressing, but the
resources and protocols they need to make it happen are scarce. These are
conditions that position our school leaders for failure - unless the education
community and its stakeholders get together to take some immediate actions.
While this is a critical time for
evidence-based and effective program practices, here is the rub: The education
sector is just beginning to build out this body of knowledge, so school leaders
are often forging ahead without the kind of guidance and research they need to
succeed.
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