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What Factors Support or Prevent Teachers from UsingICT in their Classrooms?

Margaret Cox, Christina Preston and Kate Cox

King's College London, MirandaNet Project University of Surrey

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference,University of Sussex at Brighton, September 2-5 1999.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings of a small project funded by theTeacher Training Agency and Oracle through the MirandaNet project, set up toinvestigate the factors which have contributed to the continuing use of ICT byexperienced ICT and ICT teachers in their teaching. Evidence has been collectedthrough a literature search, teacher questionnaires, teachers' reports and interviews. Thefactors which were found to be most important to these teachers in their teaching were:making the lessons more interesting, easier, more fun for them and their pupils, morediverse, more motivating for the pupils and more enjoyable. Additional more personalfactors were improving presentation of materials, allowing greater access to computersfor personal use, giving more power to the teacher in the school, giving the teachermore prestige, making the teachers' administration more efficient and providingprofessional support through the Internet.

1 Introduction

This research project was set up to investigate the factors which motivate teachers to useICT and to sustain their use of ICT in teaching. The aim of the project was to use thefactors identified to inform the professional development requirements of practisingteachers to enable them to use ICT appropriately in their teaching. The idea from theproject came from the experience of two projects, MirandaNet, directed by ChristinaPreston, and the ICT and Motivation project, conducted by Margaret Cox to investigatethe effects of ICT on the motivation of pupils. More details about the project is reportedin Cox, Preston and Cox (1999).The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of the literature review conducted by the project and the research results relating to the uptake of ICT in teaching obtained

from a range of data collected through a survey of ICT and ICT teachers, records of MirandaNET members' uses of ICT.

2 Evidence from previous research

Over the past 25 years, alongside a series of national and local programmes for thedevelopment of ICT in education, there have been research studies of the uptake of ICTin education. These include studies of the effects of teacher training (Cox, Rhodes &Hall 1988), levels of resources (Cox, 1993), teachers' pedagogies and practices (Watson,1993), and teachers attitudes (Woodrow, 1990). For detailed research papers on many of these aspects see Passey and Samways (1997). Many of these studies have shown thatinspite of teacher training programmes, an increase in ICT resources and therequirements of national curricula there has been a disappointingly slow uptake of ICTin schools by the majority of teachers. Some of the reasons for this lack of morewidespread uptake of ICT are discussed in more detail below.

2.1 Understanding the need for change

In a study of projects to promote educational changes in America, Canada and the UK,Fullan (1991) found that one of the most fundamental problems in education reform isthat people do not have a clear and coherent sense of the reasons for educationalchange, what it is and how to proceed. Thus there is much faddism, superficiality,confusion, failure of a change programme, unwarranted and misdirected resistance andmisunderstood reform. They maintain that teachers who resist change are not rejectingthe need for change but they are often the people who are expected to leaddevelopments when they lack the necessary education in the management of changeand are given insufficient long term opportunities to make sense of the newtechnologies for themselves.

2.2 Questioning professional practice

There are many studies which have shown that teachers are "not given to questioningtheir professional practice" (Underwood, 1997). Once they have finished their initialtraining they do not expect to need much further training therefore do not take theinitiative to improve their practice and learn new skills. Desforges (1995), in a literaturereview of the shift from novice to expert teachers, found that "many teachers areperfectly well satisfied with their practices and are unlikely to question prevailingeducational processes" (Feiman-Nemser & Buchanan (1985) in Desforges (1995)). Inorder for teachers to make changes to their professional practice, according to Desforges"a considerable effort is necessary to create the possibilities of restructuring knowledge(about teaching and learning) in the face of experience............... In regard to old

knowledge we can speculate that the impact of new experience (e.g. using ICT) will beseverely attenuated if it is in conflict with teachers' basic ontological categories, e.g. their beliefs about the nature of their job or the nature of childhood". Therefore if teachers seeno need to change or question their current professional practice they may not acceptthe use of ICT in their teaching

2.3 Pedagogical practice versus technical skills

Previous studies (Cox et al, 1988, Cox, 1994) have shown that until recently the majorityof courses offered in the UK to train teachers in the uses of ICT have focused on thetechnical aspects of ICT with little training about the pedagogical practices required andhow to incorporate ICT in the curriculum. In many ICT professional developmentcourses, teachers are not often taught

how to revise their pedagogical practices, how toreplace other traditional lessons without depleting the curriculum coverage and so on.This means that after teachers had attended a course they still did not know how to useICT for teaching pupils, They only knew how to run certain software packages and tofix the printer. There were many such courses offered all round the UK which had verylittle long term impact on the uptake of ICT in schools.

2.4 Support from the whole school

Much research by Fullan (1991) and others has shown that the most effective way to bring about the adoption of an innovation in schools is to engage the whole school in ademocratic process of planning change. This means that all the teachers are involved inthe decision to adopt ICT in the school and are supportive of any individual teachergoing on a course and willing to learn from their new knowledge and skills when theyreturn. If the school, and particularly the head teacher, are not committed to adoptingchange and particularly ICT, then if one teacher goes on a course, the rest of the schoolsets up antibodies to any new ideas which the unfortunate teacher brings back into theschool. The last thing the other teachers will then do is to change their practice.

2.5 Losing control of the learning

The majority of teachers first priority is to maintain order in the classroom and to have acontrolled learning environment. Any suggestion of adopting very innovative teachingtechniques such as using ICT is therefore seen as threatening this orderly pattern andtherefore not desirable. There is a genuine fear amongst many teachers about ICT andscepticism of its value to their pupils

2.6 Inadequate resources