Richard Alvidrez, Educational Affairs Office
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Note: Material from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, is provided under a contract with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
In the teacher training institutes we've conducted over the past few years, we've noticed that, as teachers get comfortable with each other, they begin to share their sources for materials, professional development programs, software, information found in World Wide Web sites and newsgroups, grants, field trip opportunities, etc.
The total number of sources far exceeds the experience of any single teacher but, through a network of colleagues, access to useful information increases exponentially.
Through our collegial program network, teachers also rely on each other as "experts" who provide extremely credible information in specific areas of mathematics, science, or technology. Teachers are the greatest sources of important information for their colleagues; unfortunately, there are too few opportunities for this kind of networking to happen.
There is hope, however, in the very nature of telecommunications technologies. On-line applications invite users to join networks of other users with like interests, and you can find just about any area of education being discussed in cyberspace. This can be done with colleagues across the country, even across the world.
Frequently, dialogue between colleagues across the hall in the same school is not encouraged. In the past, perhaps, the problem of teacher isolation has often been too low a priority, but the new technology demands that it end. Besides, school administrators who are responsible for staff development must enable their teachers to be partners in reform, rather than be reform's prime target.
In the institutes we've sponsored, we've seen staff development work extremely well as a joint effort by teachers and administrators because both are stakeholders. Yet I've come to believe that, when it comes to technology, teachers should take a leadership role in defining training programs and forming networks to develop their skills.
Realizing that adequate funding and government recognition of the need for staff support is not likely to improve soon, the teachers who recognize that technology accelerates changes in school curriculum should form their own networks to focus on subject areas, software, hardware, telecommunications, standards - whatever will enhance their skills.
Dialogue among teaching professionals will be increasingly important as the use of technology evolves and as hardware networks (Local Area Networks, LANs, and Wide Area Networks, WANs) are added to the infrastructure.
Unfortunately, that side of technology, by itself, achieves no educational goals. So, along with the "hard" networks that link people together on-line, "soft" networks - defined and directed by teachers and using the best available tools of the information age - are needed to achieve a transformation of school curriculum, instructional delivery, and learning structures. It's a lesson that, as educators, we can learn to teach ourselves.
