Transforming Music Teachers via Technology: the Role of Professional Development
The article I read this weekend is about music teachers who spent a week at a music technology workshop. The authors investigate whether this one week workshop can be an effective means for the professional development of music teachers in using technology for instruction. Participants were school music teachers enrolled in summer music technology workshops. The workshop curriculum was standardized, developed by a major professional organization dedicated to providing in-service training in music technology to teachers.
At the beginning of the workshop, participants completed a questionnaire designed to provide demographic information and assess their knowledge of music technology, degree of comfort with music technology, and the frequency with which they used music technology in their teaching. Following a weeklong workshop dealing with music technology, participants completed a second questionnaire that was parallel to the first. Then the participants completed another similar questionnaire (on web) 9 to 10 months after the workshop. Before jumping out to find out the overall result, here are some of the facts about the survey. First, the return rate for the follow-up was lower than desired; only 35 percent of the participants completed the last questionnaire. This fact should be examined with caution. It maybe that only those teachers who continued to be interested in and use technology regularly are the ones who made the effort to respond. Second, the authors found that the group incomplete follow-up contained a higher percentage of women than did either of the other two groups, whereas the follow-up complete group had a fairly equal distribution of men and women. The gender issue also should be viewed carefully. As result, the authors found that with 30 hours of training, teachers began to use technologies such as music software and web sources in classrooms more often. They also claim that teachers did gain knowledge and comfort with technologies and increase their frequency of use of technologies.
In this study, the investigators found that, with regular access and support for technology in their classrooms and with extended experiences, teachers not only mastered the technology but also made significant changes in their instruction. The long-range goal of this type of technology training for music teachers is not only to help teachers make incremental gains in efficiently implementing traditional teaching approaches but also to work toward transforming the nature of teaching and learning in classrooms. Transforming process can be a long-term effort involving professional growth through stages of entry, adoption, adaptation, appropriation, and invention. The study has demonstrated that the initial phases of this process can be accomplished through teacher training workshops. As the authors said, support, resources, and further informal and formal learning are essential to achieving long-term transformation of teaching technology.
Authors: William Bauer, Sam Reese, Peter McAllister
Source: Journal of Research in Music Education, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 289-301
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3345656
The research on which you report here, Kim, represents one of the challenges of assessing the value of faculty development, in that the data which would be the most important to those working on the development, the 9 – 10 month out data, is often the most incomplete, for reasons on which the investigators can only speculate, as you note. As survey sequences are often used in research on teaching and learning and on faculty development, this report highlights well the potential disadvantages, as well as advantages, of this type of data collection – very useful to us all.
I should have been interested here to learn more about the kinds of technologies that were integrated into the workshop, being unfamiliar with those which are critical or just very useful to music teachers.