16. ICT in Education and Training
Paper
School Level Factors Motivating Teachers to Integrate Digital Technology in the Teaching
Liudmila Rupsiene, Ruta Girdzijauskiene, Egle Pranckuniene
Klaipeda university, Lithuania
Presenting Author: Rupsiene, Liudmila
Digitalisation of education has been declared a European priority for 2021–2027 (European Commission, Digital Education Action Plan 2021–2027: Resetting Education and Training for the Digital Age, 2020).
Digitalisation offers new possibilities to teach and learn: teachers online and offline integrate various elements of teaching, learning, assessment, roles and technologies in different ways (Jahnke et al., 2017). Digitalising schools have developed new ways of communicating, planning, organisation and administration (Petterson, 2021).
Research suggests that school digitalisation has many positive effects: fosters students’ self-directed and independent learning, stimulates their engagement and motivation to learn, enhances computing skills and access to online content, improves attendance and enrolment, increases teacher collaboration, professional development opportunities, improves student–teacher relationships, reduces discipline problems etc. (Islam & Grönlund, 2016). However, school digitalisation is a rather complicated process, as it can have not only positive, but also negative or, in some cases, no effects (Islam & Grönlund, 2016; Hatos, 2019; Warschauer, 2007).
In this context, it is important to address the arguments that technology and the use of technology in schools themselves do not change educational practice (Islam & Grönlund, 2016; Warschauer, 2006). Technologies are just tools that “have value only in the hands of thoughtful, well-prepared people, with a clear goal in mind” (Peck and Sprenger, 2008). So, school digitalisation amplifies the role of human mentorship (Warschauer, 2007). This means that the digitalisation of schools greatly depends on teachers’ behaviour using technology.
According to the Fogg Behavior Model, any behaviour depends on the convergence of three factors: sufficient motivation, ability and triggers to perform the behaviour (Fogg, 2009). Based on this understanding, it can be argued that the digitalisation of schools depends to a large extent on teachers’ motivation, abilities and triggers to use technology.
Research shows that since the start of the Covid pandemic, teachers are more motivated to use technology for teaching and are better able to do this (Beardsley, Albo, Aragon, Hernandez-Leo, 2021). Scholars are obtaining more and more evidence that teachers who consider technology as valuable to the teaching/learning are more motivated to use it (Chiu, 2022). The provision of resources for technology use in the school is also seen as a strong motivating factor: the better teachers are equipped with technological resources, the more likely they tend to use them in their pedagogical practice (Chiu, 2022). Insufficient support from schools is a major barrier to the use of technology in the teaching practices (Serriawati & Azwar, 2020). The higher the school support, the more effectively teachers use technology (Serriawati & Azwar, 2020). Support from school leaders, participation in peer co-learning groups and training from external experts can reinforce teachers’ motivation to integrate technology (Chiu, 2022).
However, there is not enough understanding of what motivates teachers to use technology in the teaching practices and how to stimulate this motivation, especially taking into account the diversity of digitalisation processes worldwide and, particularly, in Europe. Hence, it is no coincidence that there have been recent calls to continue researching the influence of leaders on teachers’ motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2020), to investigate teachers’ motivation in digitalisation processes and, especially, in technology integration (Chiu, 2022), and to explore the factors that ensure improvement and dissemination of good practice of technology-assisted pedagogy (Islam & Grönlund, 2016).
This paper focuses on the factors that motivate Lithuanian teachers to integrate one type of technology, the AI driven learning experience platforms.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedDuring a 4 month action research period, 11 schools of Lithuania were offered to pilot two learning experience platforms, such as Eduten Playground (https://www.eduten.com/) and LearnLab (https://learnlab.net/). 2–5 teachers in each school and their leaders collaborating with researchers “went” all the way from getting to know the platforms, understanding their philosophy and operating principles, learning to use them, more or less integrating them in the teaching, facing and solving problems, experiencing various motivational triggers at school, municipal and national levels.
Throughout implementation of the project, regular online weekly meetings of teachers and the project team took place. The team visited the project schools to meet with participating teachers and school leaders and to discuss the problems, the solutions and the observed changes in teaching/ learning, teachers’ motivation to use the piloting learning experience platforms and the factors influencing this motivation. The experience of these teachers and school leaders is important because it helps to understand what factors motivate Lithuanian teachers to integrate new technology, specifically AI driven learning experience platforms, in the teaching practice.
During the school visits and at the end of the action research, we interviewed project teachers (N=20) and school leaders (N=7). We conducted face-to-face interviews as part of our school visits, other interviews were conducted via video conference meetings (Zoom). We used the interview method following Brinkmann & Kvale (2018). Among others, the interviews were focused on the broad research question: how to motivate teachers to use new technologies, such as learning experience platforms, in schools. In total, about 15 hours of recordings were made, which were transcribed and encoded, focusing on what was said. After coding, we categorised the codes into two broad themes: 1) national level motivating factors, and 2) school level motivating factors.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe study shows that at the national level there are several factors that motivate teachers to integrate new technologies, such as learning experience platforms: decent salaries, prestige of the teaching as a profession, rational demands for teachers, a system of assessment that promotes learning, the provision of technology tools etc. However, in these areas, the research participants identify several problems that hinder their motivation and that of their colleagues. For example, they consider teachers’ salaries to be too low and the remuneration system as not encouraging to learn new technologies and their use in the teaching practice. A low salary makes the teaching profession less prestigious, and the national system of school evaluation based on students’ performance in exams forces teachers to focus on preparing students for tests rather than on the holistic development of students, which is well served by experiential learning platforms.
At the school level, the following factors were identified: technological equipment (computers, software, Internet), support for teacher collaboration in learning new technologies and their use in pedagogical practice, good relations between school leaders and teachers, adequate allocation of resources in the school etc. At school level motivation system, the research participants also helped to identify several serious problems that hinder teacher motivation. For example, there is too little collaboration among teachers in learning new technologies and putting them into practice, only 30% of schools are equipped with computers, efficiency of Wi-Fi does not meet the needs of the school, not all teachers are able to choose the digital tools they would like to work with etc.
The identified factors that motivate teachers help to better understand why technology, specifically artificial intelligence technology, is underused in Lithuania. This understanding can also be useful for other countries where, like in Lithuania, the use of digital technologies in teaching is still underdeveloped.
ReferencesBeardsley, M., Albo, L., Aragon, P., Hernandez-Leo, D. (2021). Emergency education effects on teacher abilities and motivation to use digital technologies. British Journal of Educational Technology, 52 (4), 1455-1477.
Brinkmann, S., & Kvale, S. (2018). Doing interviews (2nd ed.). London: SAGE.
Chiu, T.K. (2022). School learning support for teacher technology integration from a self-determination theory perspective. Education Technology Research Development, 70, 931–949.
Fogg, B. J. (2009). A behavior model for persuasive design. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Persuasive '09) (pp. 1– 7). Association for Computing Machinery, Article 40.
Gustafsson, U. (2021) Taking a step back for a leap forward: policy formation for the digitalisation of schools from the views of Swedish national policymakers. Education Inquiry, 12 (4), 329-346.
Hatos, A. (2019). The impact of digitalization on educational achievement: a literature review from a sociological perspective. Calitatea Vieții, 30 (1), 3–16.
European Comission, Digital education action plan 2021-2027: resetting education and training for the digital age, COM (2020). 624, Brussels, 30 September 2020.
Jahnke, I., Bergström, P., Mårell-Olsson, E., Häll, L., & Swapna, K. (2017). Digital didactical designs as research framework – iPad integration in Nordic schools. Computers & Education, 113, 1–15.
Islam, S., & Grönlund, Å. (2016). An international literature review of 1:1 computing in schools. Journal of Educational Change, 17(2), 191–222.
Peck, K. L., & Sprenger, K. (2008). One-to-One educational computing: Ten lessons for successful implementation. In J. Voogt & G. Knezek (Eds.), International handbook of information technology in primary and secondary education (pp. 935–942). New York: Springer
Pettersson, F. (2021). Understanding digitalization and educational change in school by means of activity theory and the levels of learning concept. Education and Information Technologies, 26, 187–204.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, Article 101860.
Serriawati, M., & Azwar, S. (2020). Correlation between perceptions of school support and the mastery of information technology to teachers’ self-efcacy. Journal of Psychology and Instruction, 4(1), 22–28.
Warschauer, M. (2007). The paradoxical future of digital learning. Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 41-49.
16. ICT in Education and Training
Paper
Instructional Leadership In A Digitized World
Julia Gerick1, Pierre Tulowitzki2
1TU Braunschweig, Germany; 2FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland
Presenting Author: Gerick, Julia;
Tulowitzki, Pierre
There is nowadays a wealth of evidence linking educational leadership to student outcomes (Grissom et al., 2021). School leaders influence teacher capacity, motivation and working conditions which then in turn affect classroom instruction and student performance (Leithwood et al., 2017). Additionally, school leaders have long been identified as “change agents” (Fullan, 1993) that can act as gatekeepers or drivers of innovation in schools (Hall & Hord, 2019). These innovations include ICT usage in schools. Here, school leaders have been shown to influence teachers’ knowledge and usage (Dexter, 2018). This has been linked to the competencies and usage patterns of principals and to their leadership approaches (for example Navaridas-Nalda et al., 2020). Generally speaking, instructional leadership has been shown to be beneficial for the quality of classroom instruction and student learning in the anglophone world (Robinson et al., 2009), with some scholars questioning the effectiveness of this approach in other contexts (Klein et al., 2022). As the integration of digital technologies into classroom practices can significantly alter teaching and learning (De Florio-Hansen, 2018), it stands to reason that instructional leadership practices nowadays might need to include or integrate aspects of digitization in order to have a beneficial impact on classroom instruction and student learning. ICT-related competencies of teachers and student might especially benefit from such adapted leadership practices.
However, corresponding research is rare, with some scholars even stating that the “field has no knowledge of digital instructional leadership” (Berkovich & Hassan, 2022, p. 1). Existing contributions are often aimed at practitioners (Sorenson et al., 2016) or rely solely on self-reported data from school leaders (for example Nurabadi et al., 2022). Additionally, such contributions tend to focus on the competencies or attitudes of school leaders. Contributions analyzing the (possible) influence of digital instructional leadership on teaching practices or student learning as well as studies of leadership (practices) that take into account multiple perspectives (for example data from school leaders and from teachers) are lacking. This lack is even more poignant when it comes to contributions making use of large, international datasets.
An international understanding of how school leaders use ICT and how they might influence ICT integration in schools seems especially important as the pandemic has highlighted the potential of ICT in schooling but also – in many countries – that the current state of integration in many countries leaves room for improvement (Karakose et al., 2021; Ramos-Pla et al., 2021).
This contribution and the underlying study were designed to fill in some of the gaps mentioned before. The aim was to study digital instructional leadership, how it might be perceived by school leaders and teachers and its possible effects on inner-school factors. The following research questions guided the research:
- How is instructional leadership in a digital world perceived by school principals and teachers in Germany and to what extent do the perceptions of school principals and teachers differ?
- What are the effects of digital instructional leadership on various inner-school factors as well as on student learning?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedTo answer the research question, secondary analyses of data from the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS 2018) are used. The ICILS 2018 study is an international comparative school achievement survey that was conducted in 2018 in its second cycle (Eickelmann et al., 2019). The focus is on the computer-based measurement of computer and information literacy of eighth graders in Germany in an international comparison as well as the assessment of the framework conditions of acquisition via extensive background questionnaires for the stakeholder groups teachers, IT coordinators, and school administrators (Mikheeva & Meyer, 2020; Vennemann et al., 2021).
The focus of this paper is on the information from the administrators and the teacher questionnaire. To operationalize instructional leadership in a digitized world, national supplements (6 items), which were only used in Germany, are used. Those 6 items were used in the administrators as well the teacher's questionnaire to be able to compare both perspectives (research question 1).
Secondary analyses are used to answer the previously formulated research questions using descriptive statistics (research questions 1) as well as correlation analyses and structural equation modeling (research question 2). The complex data structure is taken into account by using the IEA IDB analyzer as well as the software Mplus. Since the ICILS 2018 sample design for schools is designed to obtain best possible samples and estimates at the student and teacher level, the school-level data, and thus the data from school administrators, are considered to be characteristics of teachers and students respectively, i.e., the data from school principals are weighted to the teachers as well as for students. The analysis sample for this contribution comprises an average of n = 2,328 teachers and n = 3,655 students.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsIn summary, the findings show for research question 1 that school administrators in Germany themselves perceive their leadership actions to be more pronounced than teachers perceive them to be. This is particularly the case for the perception of providing support for teachers who have difficulties with the use of ICT in the classroom. Results for research question 2 show very small positive effects of digital instructional leadership on various factors relevant to student learning, notably teachers’ ICT-related self-efficacy as well as on the emphasis of teachers promoting computer and information literacy in their teaching. However, no significant direct effects between digital instructional leadership and students’ computer and information literacy could be identified. This possibly indicates that while school leaders might play a significant role when it comes to influencing the ICT competencies and usages of teachers, their influence does not extend to students (not even indirectly). It’s possible that teachers who enjoy a high degree of autonomy in Germany act as a “buffer” for any possible impact school leaders might have. If this were the case, then successful professional development for school leaders related to ICT should not focus (much) on using ICT for instructional purposes (as the influence of school principals on teachers in Germany might be too limited in this area), but more on fostering a whole school digital strategy.
These results as well as further findings will be presented and discussed against the background of current European discourses on the role of instructional leadership in the context of the digitalization of schools and teaching (including Tulowitzki et al., 2022).
ReferencesBerkovich, I., & Hassan, T. (2022). Principals’ digital instructional leadership during the pandemic: Impact on teachers’ intrinsic motivation and students’ learning. Educational Management Administration & Leadership.
De Florio-Hansen, I. (2018). Teaching and learning English in the digital age. Waxmann.
Dexter, S. (2018). The Role of Leadership for Information Technology in Education. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen, & K.-W. Lai (Eds.), Second Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education (pp. 483–498). Springer.
Eickelmann, B. et al. (Eds.). (2019). ICILS 2018 #Deutschland. Waxmann.
Fullan, M. (1993). Change Forces. Probing the Depths of Educational Reform. The Falmer Press.
Grissom, J. A., Egalite, A. J., & Lindsay, C. A. (2021). How Principals Affect Students and Schools. Wallace Foundation.
Hall, G., & Hord, S. (2019). Implementing Change: Patterns, Principles, and Potholes. Pearson.
Karakose, T., Polat, H., & Papadakis, S. (2021). Examining Teachers’ Perspectives on School Principals’ Digital Leadership Roles and Technology Capabilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Sustainability, 13(23).
Klein, E. D., Bronnert-Härle, H., Boone, W. J., & Muslic, B. (2022). Constructs of leadership and diverging institutional environments. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 33(4), 564–587.
Leithwood, K., Sun, J., & Pollock, K. (Eds.). (2017). How School Leaders Contribute to Student Success. Springer.
Mikheeva, E., & Meyer, S. (2020). IEA ICILS 2018. User Guide. IEA.
Navaridas-Nalda, F., Clavel-San Emeterio, M., Fernández-Ortiz, R., & Arias-Oliva, M. (2020). The strategic influence of school principal leadership in the digital transformation of schools. Computers in Human Behavior, 112.
Nurabadi, A., Suhariadi, F., Mardiyanta, A., Triwiyanto, T., & Adha, M. A. (2022). Digital principal instructional leadership in new normal era. International Journal of Evaluation and Research in Education, 11(3), 1090–1098.
Ramos-Pla, A., Tintoré, M., & del Arco, I. (2021). Leadership in times of crisis. School principals facing COVID-19. Heliyon, 7(11).
Robinson, V. M. J., Hohepa, M. K., & Lloyd, C. (2009). School leadership and student outcomes: Identifying what works and why. New Zealand Ministry of Education.
Sorenson, R. D., Goldsmith, L. M., & DeMatthews, D. E. (2016). The Principal′s Guide to Time Management: Instructional Leadership in the Digital Age (1st ed.). Corwin.
Tulowitzki, P., Gerick, J., & Eickelmann, B. (2022). The role of ICT for school leadership and management activities: International Journal of Educational Management, 36(2), 133–151.
Vennemann, M., Eickelmann, B., Labusch, A., & Drossel, K. (2021). ICILS 2018 #Deutschland. Dokumentation der Erhebungsinstrumente. Waxmann.
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