July 2004 — SETDA

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North Carolina: Preloading Professional Development to Ensure Potential Success

by Frances Bryant Bradburn, Director of Instructional Technology, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction

When a state makes the decision to award a small number of high-dollar grants, the stakes are considerable. For North Carolina's IMPACT Model School Grant applicants, professional development started long before a single dollar was ever awarded.

Several factors contributed to our decision to award 11 grants of $450,000 each with our No Child Left Behind Act, Title II, Part D: Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) competitive money:

    First, based on early calculations of initial eligibility, we knew that little more than a third of our then 119 school systems and 96 charter schools met the federal high-poverty/high-technology need qualifications.

  • Second, we knew that we needed to show results quickly. A direct, research-proven correlation of technology use to student achievement based on standardized test scores in only three years, as proposed by the U.S. Department of Education, would be difficult to produce regardless of conditions. And with small, scattershot grants, it would be pretty much impossible to prove.
  • Finally, North Carolina had "been there, done that." Federal Technology Literacy Challenge Fund grants had accomplished their intent of spreading technology dollars across the state. This allowed systems to provide some hardware, software and professional development to a majority of the state's schools and teachers. But concrete, systemic correlation to student achievement was difficult to identify. We had anecdotal data, but little valid research.

A Collaborative Model

In light of these conditions, we decided to issue a high-dollar, highly prescriptive grant, the IMPACT Model School Grant. The model itself is based on "The North Carolina Educational Technology Plan" (http://tps.dpi.state.nc.us/Tech2000rev). Based on the research to date, the model outlines the infrastructure, hardware, software, professional development and personnel necessary to implement an effective technology program at the building level.

The linchpin of the model's success is personnel - a certified instructional technology facilitator who works in partnership with the school's existing library media specialist, as well as a building-level technician and/or technology assistant. It is a collaborative model, one in which the instructional technology facilitator and school library media specialist plan with teachers in a technology-rich, resource-rich instructional environment. The grant funded the implementation of the model - as outlined in the technology plan - at the optimum level.

A Colorado study titled "The Impact of School Library Media Centers on Academic Achievement," which was completed in 1992 and published in 1993, has been replicated in 12 other states since its publication. It found that schools with professionally trained school library media coordinators, abundant technology, and high collaboration between the media coordinator and classroom teachers had higher student achievement than those that did not. It seems justifiable to assume the same correlations in certified instructional technology positions and services.