Can the benefits of educational technology extend beyond the classroom? Can technology be an agent of change that spreads professional development and academic improvement from a district's high-performing schools to their lower-performing counterparts?
The San Antonio Inde-pendent School District is testing those questions with the Waterford Early Reading Program, a computer-based reading program for children in kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grades. In San Antonio, four schools are using the kindergarten level of the program as part of an experiment to find out whether well-designed educational technology can bridge the gap between successful and less successful schools.
Today, San Antonio is often cited as an example of how an urban school district can, through innovation and diligence, dramatically improve student performance. But back in 1994, it was a district in trouble. The Texas Education Agency ranked almost half of our 98 schools as low performing; that is, more than 75 percent of the students in those schools could not meet the state's acadmic expectations. Nearly 90 percent of the district's 60,700 students came from low-income families; 44 percent were classified as at-risk students.
To address the situation, our superintendent hired four instructional stewards to oversee instructional reform. One of our early findings was that reading was a big part of the district's problem.
In a mid-year assessment of 1st graders, we found that a majority of the children were nowhere near grade level in their reading abilities, a deficiency that promised to follow them from year to year. When we looked more deeply, we discovered little consistency in reading instruction in the district's 65 elementary schools; indeed, each school seemed to use a different approach.
In response, we restructured our district's program with Balanced Literacy, essentially a set of guiding principles that mixes whole language and phonics instruction. In the 1996–97 school year, we trained more than 3,000 elementary school teachers in the Balanced Literacy approach. Also that year, we searched for a way to reinforce Balanced Literacy with a technology-based reading program.
Selecting a Technology Program
Like most school districts, San Antonio had experimented extensively with educational technology over the years. We had a variety of programs, big and small, scattered throughout the district and used sporadically. Too often, teachers used classroom computer activities either to reward the advanced student or to isolate the disruptive student, not to deliver sustained instruction to all students in a core subject area.
Our search for a technology-based approach to reading instruction had four essential prerequisites. First, the program had to address our youngest learners. Second, it had to fit our Balanced Literacy approach. Third, its instructional design and classroom effectiveness needed a backing of solid research. Fourth, it had to incorporate a strong home component because study after study has found that the most successful early readers come from home environments rich in reading. We also wanted a program that would provide direct, systematic instruction; that would include a dynamic teacher support system consisting of lesson plans, activities, and consultant support; that would provide high-quality literature and incorporate music, art, and other creative activities; and that would be cost-effective.
The Waterford Early Reading Program met all requirements. Its kindergarten component contains a full school year of highly motivating daily computer activities that help students develop reading readiness. It teaches reading with a balance of phonics and meaningful, original text. It comes with extensive professional and technical support. Its development was based on research into how young children acquire literacy skills, and its classroom effectiveness has been well documented. And the program includes a wealth of creative classroom and take-home activities and materials, including 52 reading booklets and four videos for children to take home and share with their parents.
Pairing Schools Through a Buddy System
As we examined the Waterford program, we thought about ways to create a school buddy system. In successful schools, we found enthusiastic teachers and interactive teaching techniques; in less successful schools, we found the opposite. We wondered whether a formal buddy system could infuse underperforming schools with the enthusiasm and dynamic teaching practices of high-performing schools.
An earlier, similar experiment was unsuccessful, probably because the paired schools had little in common. Nothing catalyzed collaboration. Some of us thought that the Waterford program might be that needed catalytic agent, a common denominator that would get teachers in paired schools to talk to one another and share ideas, thus sparking informal professional development.
We began our experiment at the start of the 1997–98 school year. Our initial funding through the Texas Academics 2000 grant program allowed us to implement the Waterford program in four schools—two high-performing schools and two lower-performing schools. Although this pilot project was smaller than we'd wanted, it was large enough to teach us something valuable about the effectiveness of the program.
Each of the 14 kindergartens in the pilot schools received at least two dedicated Waterford computer stations. In a Waterford kindergarten, each child spends 15 minutes a day in self-paced computer activities. The computer tracks each child's progress through the curriculum and gives the teacher detailed assessment reports.
The program's distributor, Electronic Education, provided start-up training. But we decided to use ongoing informal training as the focal point of our buddy system for the four Waterford schools. In each school, the kindergarten teachers met weekly to discuss the program and to describe how it was helping them teach their young students crucial preliteracy concepts. In addition to those weekly meetings, the teachers met monthly with colleagues from their buddy school for further discussions about the Waterford program.
The process required complete acceptance by the kindergarten teachers, who were asked to change their approaches to both reading instruction and classroom management. It also required the backing of the four principals, who needed to give their kindergarten teachers opportunities to learn the Waterford program and time to meet with their colleagues.
The support came easily. The program so impressed the teachers that they looked forward eagerly to their weekly and monthly meetings. Soon the agendas at those meetings went beyond the scope of the Waterford program and began addressing broader issues of reading instruction and classroom management. Teachers moved out of an isolationist mode and into collaborative behavior that clearly fostered informal professional development. They actively engaged in stimulating discussions about best practices and enthusiastically learned from one another.
The Waterford program yielded other dividends as well. First-grade teachers found ways to use it with some of their poor readers. Teachers in other grades renewed their enthusiasm for using technology in their classrooms. All four schools experienced obvious new excitement about reading. From surveys of our kindergarten parents, we found new interest in reading at home.
Objective Results
Recently, we obtained a more objective measure of the Waterford program's success in our kindergartens. An independent study found that 90 percent of participating children had achieved reading readiness for the 1st grade. The program was especially successful at helping students who seriously lagged in preliteracy skills at the start of the school year catch up to their peers. On the basis of those results and the enthusiastic acceptance of the program at our four pilot sites, we hope to implement the Waterford program at other schools.
Today, the San Antonio school district stands a long way from the dark days of 1994, when 42 of our schools were ranked as low performing. By the end of last year, the number of schools in the district with that ranking had fallen to just 2. That improvement is not only a testament to the dedication and hard work of our faculty and administration, but also an indication of how a creative approach to educational technology and professional collaboration can yield wide-reaching benefits.
