Research into the possibilities of pedagogic change with ICT in English schools

In this section I will explore the evidence of pedagogical change with ICT from studies of schools and classrooms in England, and the extent to which this is enabled or constrained by national frameworks for the assessment of students’ learning. I will argue that innovations in pedagogy do not lie within the teacher’s gift, or even within the school’s gift, because they always have implications for how students, teachers and the school are recognised and valued by the community, locally and nationally. At the level of the classroom, pedagogy is extremely complex. A key factor is the range of pedagogies made possible by working with ICT, including the kind of close work in supporting students’ conceptual development in the ZPD described by Ridgway and McCusker (op. cit.). Alexander’s comparative study of culture and pedagogy in ﬁ ve countries makes a useful starting point. He provides a review of theories and comes to the conclusion that it is not possible to understand teaching as either an art, or a science or a craft, but only as a combination of all three together with the values and beliefs of teachers:

The position from which I approached this project was that in transaction the act of teaching has elements of both art and craft, but not of laboratory or experimental sciences; but that in conception and planning teaching draws on general principles and laws, some of which have been validated by disciplined scientiﬁ c enquiry (the art or craft of the science). However, it also draws on the cumulative and collective craft knowledge of teachers in general (the art or craft of the craft); and on the personal experience, theories and beliefs of the individual teacher.

(Alexander 2000, p. 275) Webb and Cox (2004, pp. 238–9) provide a framework for analysing pedagogic

practices relating to ICT use and an extensive review of research mainly carried out in England. They take Shulman’s (1987) model of pedagogic reasoning as their starting point and add to it ‘knowledge of affordances of ICT and decisions about their use’. Although they include ‘students’ knowledge, beliefs and values’ in the model the underlying assumption of their analysis is that pedagogy is a rational process whereby teachers decide on the resources they need and ‘build these into lesson plans’. They describe the affordances of ICT as additional to the other affordances of the classroom, including the teacher and students. The teacher’s role is to provide an ICT affordance, prompt students to use it fully and explain and demonstrate it. This

46 Understanding innovation model places responsibility for pedagogic change ﬁ rmly in the hands of individual

teachers, rather than seeing teachers’ pedagogic practice as a function of the education system that regulates the purposes of schooling and the organisational structures and reward systems within which teachers and students co-construct classroom activities. On the other hand, it is also a model which predicts little fundamental changes in pedagogy as a result of introducing ICT, because it assumes that ICT is an additional resource, of the same nature as other resources, rather than a tool with transformative possibilities. Their review of research on pedagogies with ICT largely conﬁ rms this position as they ﬁ nd little evidence of transformation in students’ learning. Like many other writers, Webb and Cox (2004, p. 278) conclude their review by calling for more teacher professional development because ICT is ‘making the role of the teacher much more complex’.

Watson (2001) adopts a larger frame for her analysis of the innovation of ICT in education in England. She contrasts what is happening in classrooms with the ubiquitous use of technology in the business world and seeks to understand the disappointingly low level of its uptake by teachers. Like McFarlane (op. cit.) she identiﬁ es the root of the problem in confusions at the policy level. The difference between teaching people with computers and teaching people about computers has become blurred at the policy level, with the result that the use of ICT as a resource for learning has been reduced at the level of the school to a focus on teaching ICT skills and competencies. She likens this to students being taught the component parts of a car ‘but never actually take[ing] a vehicle onto the road for the purpose of travelling from A to B’. She also points to the logistical problems teachers face in booking and teaching in specialist ICT rooms and the way in which this separation of ICT resources from the classroom creates for teachers a sense of professional separation in the ICT room from their primary object of teaching a subject. Watson draws on a UNESCO report (Moran 1999) on ‘seven knowledges necessary for education for the future’ to suggest that current policies for ICT in education in England are backward-looking and failing to meet the current and future needs of students. Rather than calling for more professional development for teachers, she concludes by calling for ‘an intervention of educational philosophy and debate’ to which teachers would contribute because they are ‘both well suited and informed’. ICT should be used to service new educational goals negotiated between policy-makers and teachers, rather than being expected to provide a catalyst for change without any theoretical foundation to the direction of change that is needed.

The framework of analysis I am adopting, described in Chapter 1, gives priority to understanding pedagogic practice in relation to the education system as a whole.

A small number of studies published between 2001 and 2005 present evidence of ICT use in classrooms and indications of the factors that support or constrain change. Higgins (2001) focuses on using ICT to teach for understanding, adopting Dewey’s deﬁ nition of understanding as ‘meaning making’. Focusing speciﬁ cally on the use of ICT to teach mathematics, he emphasises the importance of the mediating role teachers need to play in making connections between the software and other mathematical activities. However, at the start of the article he notes that almost all ICT use in primary schools is for discrete skills teaching and he ends by saying that

Inside innovation 47 the challenge for research is to support teachers in playing this active, mediating role

when using ICT ‘in the range of social and curriculum contexts in schools’. A new context which has become commonly available in English schools since 2004–05 is the interactive whiteboard which directly supports teachers in whole-class teaching. Several studies report on the rapidity with which it has been taken up and integrated with classroom practice (Kennewell and Morgan 2003; Cox et al. 2004; Miller 2004; Hall and Higgins 2005; Higgins et al. 2005). Whereas teaching the current national curriculum and preparing students for national tests does not provide a clear rationale for teachers to involve students in using ICT individually to support their learning, an interactive whiteboard that is used by the teacher as a presentational tool perfectly ﬁ ts their needs in delivering the whole-class teaching required by the mandated numeracy and literacy strategies (Somekh et al., in preparation).

Hennessy et al. (2005) report on research undertaken in partnership with 15 secondary school teachers, using socio-cultural theory to inform the analysis. They focused on the need for teachers to adopt the role of facilitators or mediators of learning and work collaboratively with students. The research set out to ‘compare the rhetoric of transformation with classroom reality’ in secondary subject teaching (ibid., p. 269), focusing specifi cally on the teacher’s role in selecting ICT resources and framing these ‘to exploit ICT in structuring, sequencing, monitoring and assessing learning with ICT’ (ibid., p. 270). In phase 1 the teachers undertook small-scale, classroom-based, exploratory projects and in phase 2 these were used for cross-case analysis to draw out learning from across the sites. The research found that teachers integrated ICT resources with established classroom cultures wherever possible, gave priority to pre-structuring tasks, and planned particularly carefully for students’ Internet research, often by pre-selecting websites and placing time limits on students’ searching activities. They were concerned to avoid diluting the focus on subject content and ensure that time spent on computers was limited so that the benefi ts of interactive whole-class teaching were retained. However, the use of ICT shifted classroom organisation towards more small-group work, encouraged teachers to devise pedagogic strategies for facilitating and mediating students learning, and increased students’ responsibility for their own learning. They conclude by saying that if ICT is to be integrated into subject teaching there is a need for involving teachers in discussions about pedagogy, something which they describe as ‘an unusual step’ (ibid., p. 288). In a second article drawing on the same data, Ruthven et al. (2005) focus on how Internet resources were incorporated into classroom practice. They report that in all 15 case studies using the Internet for subject-teaching required relocating the class to a specialist room, which disrupted normal routines as well as requiring special planning. There were also signifi cant technical problems that disrupted lessons. The research showed that Internet use led to ‘modifi cations to the texture of classroom teaching and learning’ rather than radical change. Given the logistical diffi culties experienced in giving students access to the Internet and the short time frames in which they had to work, this fi nding is unsurprising.

In the InterActive research project, into the use of ICT within subject teaching in secondary schools, special emphasis was placed on integrating ICT within subject cultures (Sutherland 2004). A team of 59 teachers worked with researchers and teacher

48 Understanding innovation educators in Subject Design Initiatives to plan and evaluate focused studies carried

out within classrooms. The examples of studies presented by Sutherland et al. (ibid.) show that they are largely teacher directed and make use of ICT tools to carry out work very similar to what might otherwise have been done. ICT is seen as providing

a new analytic lens ‘for enhanced theorising of teaching and learning, whether or not ICT is being used in the learning process’ (ibid., p. 9). Sutherland emphasises ‘that learning within a subject discipline means learning about the discourses, practices and tools which relate to the particular subject world’ and uncovers some problems that arose: for example, sometimes removal into a specialist ICT room shifted the teacher’s discourse away from the subject towards ICT speciﬁ cally, so that unintentionally the lesson had lost its subject focus; and in another article from the same research (John and Sutherland 2005) there were two examples of lessons where the games genre of the software re-focused the students’ attention on completing the work rapidly rather than thinking through the conceptual issues it was intended to teach. While it is clear that ICT tools can never be neutral and transparent, but will always have an impact in shaping the learning of the subject, it should not be forgotten that this is also true of learning in classrooms without ICT tools. School physics and school English are not the same as physics and English in a university, or again as physics in an industrial company or English in the life of a poet or novelist. The introduction of ICT into subject teaching will certainly disturb established school knowledge of that subject, but now that ICT is ubiquitous in constructions of disciplinary knowledge outside school we cannot assume that this will have negative consequences. Indeed, as McCormick and Scrimshaw (op. cit.) suggest, the developing nature of teacher’s knowledge is an essential feature of pedagogic innovation.

Research into the possibilities of pedagogic change with ICT in English schools