"Each partnership yields new and important understandings for me about the field of instructional technology."
 
 

Besides the mini-lab activities, we also initiated our "Teacher Tools" project. The goal of this project was to design and develop a computer-based tool that would help teachers do their job. If we designed it well, then teachers would use it everyday and as a consequence, would become more competent with computers. We began this project by conducting an environmental and a task analysis. There was a computer in every classroom that was connected into a local area (10 base-T) network connected to the world on a T1 line. The task analysis involved following teachers around all day and writing down exactly what they did. The results suggested that the Teacher Tools ought to include email in the building, grading, planning, communications outside the building, and a variety of other tools because the teachers spent considerable time on each of these tasks. 

One of the lessons we learned over the first two years was that after spending six weeks on the creation of a multimedia document, the children were very competent with using the computers. We also observed that as long as we supported the teachers, they were willing to implement the project-based approach in their classrooms. Without our support, they no longer used this approach. In informal discussions with the teachers, I discovered that the reason for this was that the teachers had not become comfortable with the computers. We concluded that the students gained competence by using computers every day for their projects, but teachers did not gain competence because they did not use the computers regularly. So we needed to provide the teachers with some reason to use computers every day: the Teacher Tools project. 

In the spring quarter of the third year, I had a multimedia class at the university design and develop the Teacher Tools software for their course project. Because the class taught students how to use Macromedia Director, this development tool was used to implement the Teacher Tools. This prototype was taken to the teachers during the end of the school year and used to prompt the teachers for ideas about how it could be improved. It is interesting to note that when we conducted the task analysis we asked teachers for ideas on the Teacher Tools program, but they were not able to come up with many ideas. When we were able to put a prototype in front of them, they were able to generate many ideas. Once they saw the kinds of operations the technology could do, they were able to creatively generate many ideas for getting the computer to help in the classroom. 

Three other important events happened during the third year that deserve mention. First, Joi Moore, one of my doctoral advisees, took on the Teacher Tools project as her own. Macromedia Director was the wrong development environment. Director is an excellent multimedia tool, but the Teacher Tools project was a database problem. Joi re-implemented the Teacher Tools in FileMaker Pro (a database tool) during the summer and on into the fourth year. 

A second important event happened when another one of my advisees bent his research interests so that they fit in with a middle school population. He had worked on some of the Intelligent Tutoring projects with the Army and had wanted to examine scaffolding in this context. Scaffolding is a powerful teaching tool because learners take as much control of the learning process as they are able to do. Instead of working on an Army project, he created an arithmetic game that could be used at the middle school level and implemented the desired scaffolding approach in this game. During the third year, he was able to go into our computer mini-lab and conduct all three of his pilot studies in this setting. Because he had used several students from each of the grade levels, he wound up going to another middle school to collect the data for his dissertation, but it was through my contact at Lincoln that he was able to do this. He collected his dissertation data during the fourth year. 

Third, another dissertation was completed as part of this project. The principal had been working on his doctoral degree in Educational Leadership during the project (he is referred to as the assistant principal above, but he became the principal during the third year of my partnership). He looked at implementation issues with regard to the technology grant. One of the major consequences of this study was that he found that students were not getting access to the computers during the third year. Students were not doing projects anymore because they had only one computer and did not seem to think about sharing. The outcome is that they redistributed the computers in the fourth year into three mini-labs with about 10 computers per lab. This decision had serious consequences for Joi's implementation of the Teacher Tools during the fourth year. 

By the way, if you have been keeping tallies, the total number of dissertations completed as part of this four-year partnership was 5. There were the two project-based dissertations (Fan, 1996 and Wang, 1996), there was the principal's dissertation (Sherman, 1997), the Teacher Tools dissertation completed during the fourth year (Moore, 1998), and the arithmetic/scaffolding dissertation completed in another middle school during the fourth year (Zhao, 1998). I might add that one other student conducted some pilot work for his dissertation during the third year, but, for a variety of reasons, is now doing his dissertation in veterinary medicine. One other student who worked on Huey-Ling's replication experiment is currently considering working with a science teacher at Lincoln on a project-based science dissertation. So there were many opportunities to conduct research as part of this relationship. 

The fourth year was a kind of winding down of the partnership. The only major project was the Teacher Tools project. There were a variety of problems that arose as part of this project. The first problem was alluded to earlier. We designed the Teacher Tools with the idea that teachers would have their own computers in their classrooms. This was not the case during the fourth year. There was a mini-lab available to each of the grade levels (sixth through eighth). These labs were placed in each of the grade level's hallways. While the labs were physically close to the teachers, the situation was not the same as having one in the classroom. Another problem with the Teacher Tools project was that it required a lot of programming in addition to the fact that Joi needed to write a prospectus for her dissertation. The combination of these two issues was that the Teacher Tools software was not available until January of the fourth year. This is not a good time to get teachers to change the way they work although it was an excellent time for Joi to get her dissertation done by the end of the school year. Bad timing along with a bad configuration of computers (bad for teacher use, good for student use), resulted in only a few of the many features of the Teacher Tools being used. 

If you are in a partnership and detect a problem, you seek a solution. Because we found that the Teacher Tools program was not being implemented well, we went looking for funding sources that might help solve the problem. If we could get a notebook computer for each teacher that had an ethernet card, a modem, and a display system, then we would have a useful setting in which to implement Teacher Tools. We found a funding source, but it required us to scale up from the school level to the district level along with other partners. I began to set up this alliance and at the same time began the creation of the grant proposal. 

Unfortunately, after investing many hours in this grant proposal, the district decided that they did not want to participate. The grant was supposed to originate from the district, so the grant was dead. This was the second time that I had put time and effort into a proposal to help Lincoln and the district had gotten involved and wound up not allowing us to submit the grant. While this was not the primary reason for ending the partnership with Lincoln, it was a contributing factor. The primary reasons were all personal. 

I continue to contact people at Lincoln, but the whole-hearted partnership that I previously had with Lincoln no longer exists. I have now moved into a partnership-like relationship with one of the local instructional design firms. My plan is to try this for four or five years and move on from there. Each partnership yields new and important understandings for me about the field of instructional technology. 

Having described my four-year partnership with Lincoln, I turn now to some generalizations based on my experience. Finally, I turn to the literature to see if there might be some generalizations that might be made about partnerships. 
 
 

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