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November 1, 1997
Technology and Educational Leadership Development: Part One
by Linda C. Wing
What are the possible connections between technology and educational leadership development? In this series of two articles I provide one perspective based on my experiences as the coordinator of the Urban Superintendents Program (USP) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While the co-head of USP and I use technology as a teaching, advising, and management tool, my focus here is on our students, not on the faculty. Our students are expected to attain specific competencies in their personal use of technology as a means of advancing their learning of the superintendency. They are also expected to gain an understanding of the ways in which technology might enhance teaching and learning throughout an entire school system under their leadership. In this article, I focus on the students' development of competencies. In the second article, I discuss their acquisition of knowledge.
Context
Designed by faculty in close collaboration with superintendents, USP is a doctoral program whose mission is to prepare a new generation of leaders for the nation's urban school systems, leaders who not only draw upon the most effective practices we already know, but who also break new ground. USP consists of three components:
- 12 months of demanding and rigorous course work at Harvard;
- a full-time, six-month internship in the field with an outstanding urban superintendent;
- the research and writing of a dissertation on a question of urban policy or practice, an endeavor usually requiring more than 18 months of work.
Since 1990, USP has annually admitted small, select cohorts of six to nine students each. At a time when less than four percent of superintendents in the nation are people of color and only 11 percent are women, 68 percent of our students are people of color and 70 percent are women. USP students have so far come to Harvard from the District of Columbia and 21 states, including California, Illinois, Texas, and New York. Prior to enrolling, USP students were teacher-leaders, principals, or district-wide administrators. They were selected based on their demonstrated capacity to improve teaching and learning for children attending urban public schools and to meet high standards for achievement in their own academic work.
Competencies
USP explicitly expects its students to acquire and demonstrate a range technological skills. Just as we make it clear and specific that within 18 months all students must be able to articulate in a coherent, concise, and compelling manner their visions for education, exhibit expertise in strategic planning, and understand the benefits of alternative educational accountability policies, we make it equally clear that they are to attain and demonstrate competencies in the use of technology for learning. USP believes it is essential to engage in such "straight talk" so that our students have the information they need to be able to navigate effectively through a course load in 12 months that students in other Harvard doctoral programs in education take nearly 24 months to complete. Accompanying this "straight talk" are support, guidance, and multiple opportunities for students to meet the standards; regular feedback to the students on their work; and routine requests of students to assess the program in return.
USP has the goal of developing a culture of collaboration and collegiality within and across cohorts. We believe that the promise and problems of urban education cannot be successfully identified, analyzed, and understood by single individuals learning alone. Educational leaders working alone, no matter how heroic their efforts, cannot enable each and every child in a school system to meet high standards for achievement. We are convinced that aspiring and practicing educational leaders who share their best thinking based on what they know from practice and research, who debate each other's positions on initiatives and solutions to problems, and who take joint responsibility for bringing about educational improvements all together stand an excellent chance of renewing and improving urban education for all students
We have found the goal of developing a culture of collaboration and collegiality to be achievable and sustainable, in no small part, by our use of technology, primarily e-mail. E-mail is essential to USP because during any given year, by program design, there is an on-campus cohort of first-year students doing course work, an off-campus cohort of second-year students engaged in internships with superintendents in different locations throughout the country, and in still other locations, multiple other off-campus cohorts of advanced students and graduates working on their dissertations and/or serving as educational leaders in urban school districts. E-mail enables USP students and graduates to communicate with each other across great distances at low cost and high efficiency in order to engage in collaborative and collegial learning, analysis, and action.
USP's expectations regarding our students' technological competencies are few and simple. Two of our expectations pertain to the ways in which we ask our students to prepare themselves to come to Harvard. First, USP asks incoming students to come to Harvard equipped with personal computers, printers, and word processing applications and be well versed in their use. Second, we encourage but do not mandate that individuals familiarize themselves with e-mail and the Web prior to coming to Harvard.
Two of our expectations pertain to competencies that our students are to develop during the first year of the program with respect to their work in the professional seminar on the urban superintendency. First, we require USP students to demonstrate, within the first four weeks of beginning their course work, ability to use e-mail, including the sending of messages with file enclosures, to access and download information on the web and the newspaper database called NEXIS, and to swap files across platforms and word processing programs. Second, we encourage our students to begin experimenting as soon as possible with presentation software and the scanning of graphics. By the midpoint of the spring semester, they must use presentation software with scanned graphics as one means of enhancing vision speeches and issue briefings they periodically give as part of their work in the professional seminar.
One hundred percent of our students have met USP's expectations for technological competency. However, this has been no small accomplishment for our students for two reasons.
First, USP operates in an institutional setting which was, until quite recently, technologically poor. We were unable to provide readily available technical assistance to students or even to offer a school-wide e-mail system with wrap-around text. For our students to have ready access to up-to-date tools as well as training and support, USP must undertake concerted planning and continuous technology investment. Our students must do so too. The cost to the students and program in terms of both time and money is considerable. Ideally, our would students learn how to use technology in a far more technologically advanced environment with a full complement of training and technical assistance.
It is important to note that the Harvard Graduate School of Education is currently immersed in a long-term effort to upgrade faculty, student, and staff access to technology tools and services. The pace of change is measured, as it should be; but one effect is that USP remains the only doctoral program in the school that specifically asks its students to meet technological expectations before and after beginning their studies. A small doctoral program by itself, no matter how entrepreneurial, is limited in its capacity to develop a complete spectrum of high level technical expertise and to purchase and maintain equipment and software. It goes without saying that USP is entirely unable to address in any way systemic structural issues having to do with wiring, space, and the like.
Second, a large proportion of our students have limited pre-USP experiences with technology. For example, many of our students had no exposure to e-mail prior to enrolling in the program, probably due to a combination of three factors. One factor has to do with USP students coming to Harvard from the world of practice, most typically school-based practice as a principal, where interactions with teachers, students, and parents are primarily and best done face-to-face. Another factor has to do with the limited extent to which technology exists in urban school districts. It is well documented that schools with high proportions of students from minority backgrounds and/or in poverty have far fewer computers per capita than other schools. These are the schools that characterize urban school systems. A third factor has to do with many USPers having last been in college as a student prior to the advent of the personal computer and the Internet as campus mainstays. The average USP doctoral student has nearly 20 years of professional experience and thus may have obtained a previous college degree in the late 1970s.
Significantly, having few prior experiences with technology is less characteristic of cohorts of USP students admitted in recent years. One hundred percent of the cohort admitted in 1997 had previously used e-mail. Still their expertise ranged from minimal to extensive.
Despite learning to employ technology in an institutional setting with few supports and despite the fact that a number start with no prior use of a key technology, USP students become adept at meeting the program's expectations for competency. They do so by taking full advantage of the support and assistance offered by USP during the initial phase of learning. Support includes the provision of high-speed modems and e-mail accounts with an Internet provider at no cost to the students; assistance includes both one-on-one tutorials and training workshops for an entire cohort.
We have observed that successful student learning during the initial phase becomes internal motivation to learn more. Put another way, the value of learning with the assistance of technology becomes clear to the students. Soon students find themselves conducting NEXIS searches in order to examine press coverage of superintendents upon whom USP focuses in the professional seminar on the urban superintendency. They download and then analyze student achievement data from the web sites of the school districts headed by these superintendents. In undertaking group projects and presentations, the students find that collaboration is facilitated by their exchanging, merging, and/or converting files created on both Macs and PCs and in various software applications.
As the students work over an 18-month period to refine their vision of education speeches, they figure out how to underscore and illustrate key points with presentation software and graphics they have selected and scanned themselves. They do this at first with great reluctance and trepidation, as it is difficult enough to craft the content and organization of a vision speech and deliver it before friendly but critical audiences. We have observed, nonetheless, that when the students give the fourth version of their speeches before an audience of superintendents who are advisors to USP, their efforts to communicate the substance of their visions with added power and persuasion using technology are often pointedly endorsed by the superintendents.
The students submit their papers for the professional seminar via e-mail enclosures rather than having to print copies and deliver them in person. In the second year of the program, after the students have moved from Harvard to different school districts across the country in order to undertake full-time, six-month internships with outstanding superintendents, they especially find it convenient to submit their internship papers via e-mail enclosures and to receive e-mailed feedback on the work. Students in the third year or beyond who are working on their dissertations at locations remote from Harvard similarly benefit from the use of e-mail as an easy and low-cost way of sending draft chapters to Harvard and getting back faculty assessments of the work.
First-year USP students meet face-to-face with colleagues in the previous cohort and the subsequent cohort in interactive seminar settings at Harvard. They also find value in interacting via e-mail with USP students and graduates from all other cohorts whom they have not met face-to-face and who, at last count, were living and working in a total of 17 states. These interactions are usually prompted by the e-mail request of a USPer for information about practices or policies in their colleagues' school districts pertaining to a particular issue, the e-mail announcement of a USPer's impending graduation or assumption of a leadership position, and/or a new article about urban education distributed to everyone via e-mail.
Conclusion
In all these ways and more, doctoral students in the Harvard Urban Superintendents Program acquire and use their technological skills to learn about leadership and to demonstrate and apply the knowledge gained. They do so in a manner that benefits them as individuals and also connects them to other members of their cohort and the larger USP community. Ultimately we think that our students' personal experiences in learning with the assistance of technology will contribute to their leading the change and improvement of school systems so that children in urban areas can similarly engage in learning with the help of technology tools. In the second article, I highlight how the curriculum in the professional seminar on the urban superintendency addresses ways in which teaching and learning can be enhanced in an entire school system through the use of technology.
E-mail: Linda Wing
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