Quinto Electronic Professional Development Tool

The school is set in a small rural California town of approximately six thousand people. Historically, residents of this community worked in the nut and fruit orchards of the north central valley. Now the population also includes many seeking a family community lifestyle within driving distance of city career opportunities. Many residents are Mexican immigrants which translates into a 47% native Spanish speaking student population. The fifth grade includes five classrooms with an average student to teacher ratio of 30:1. Two of the five classrooms have bilingual certified teachers. Fifth grade students who are still in need of Spanish-English transition support are placed in these two classrooms. Currently the 5th grade classrooms are located in portable temporary units adjacent to the permanent school structure. Recently a bond was floated within the district to build a new school to relieve the overcrowding stress; this new structure is at least three years from realization. The district is committed to technology use, but this, similar to a new school facility, is slow coming. At present there are approximately nine computers for student use in a school of 900 students and no current Internet capabilities. The teachers viewed the creation and use of the fifth grade teacher team proprietary listserv (Quinto) as a beginning experiment and commitment to introduce technology into their professional lives.

 This is a year-long interpretive case study (Merriam, 1988) of a 6-member rural fifth grade teacher teamís use of an electronic listserv as a professional development and communication tool within their project of planning and implementing an integrated fifth grade CREEK curriculum for their students. This case study employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The forms and details of data collection are further explained in the next section.  Some of the characteristics of case studies described by Olson (1984) illustrate the purpose of selecting a case study methodology:

• It can examine a specific instance but illuminate a general problem.
• It can illustrate the complexities of a situation--the fact that not one but many factors contributed to it.
• It can explain why an innovation worked or failed, (p 36).

Data for this research project consists primarily of a year-long archived transcript log of all messages and dialogue posted to the electronic list by the 6 teachers in the team. Quantitatively this archived transcript provides verbatim teacher dialogues, exact number of email transactions per teacher and the dates and times for all transactions.  For triangulation purposes teacher reflections during and after the academic year regarding their use of the listserv and researcher observations of the new curriculum being designed and piloted during the school year were also collected.

The main data analysis includes the coding (inter-rater reliability of 0.85) of the archived listserv messages for emerging themes and the subsequent Chi Square analysis of the data to test for significance among the themes, teacher users, times of the day and year for message postings. Table 1 shows the 18 themes that emerged from the data in a percentage ranking.