OTAN News

Integrating Technology and Pedagogy: A Starting Point

Continuing the theme of confronting the challenges of implementing technology in schools, Cisco has published two documents that can help those thinking about how to successfully marry technology and pedagogy and transform their institution.

The first document is a white paper from Cisco’s K-12 Executive Council entitled “Mastering Organizational Change Management to Drive Digital Transformation in Education,” published earlier this year. This guide is meant to help schools and districts take a practical and effective approach to digital transformation by applying organizational change management (OCM) principles to create next-generation digital learning environments. Important to this process are the shifts necessary to move from past to future practice, including:

• A shift away from the perception of leadership as a series of managerial tasks toward a perception of leadership as OCM.
• A shift away from traditional teacher professional development toward a more systems-based organization development the puts the leadership shifts into action.
• An instructional shift that moves away from privileging surface learning and rehearsal of that surface learning.
• A shift moving from a model of technology integration to a model of innovation.
• A shift from learning organizations as knowledge acquisition systems to systems of continuous growth and mastery.
• A shift from summative lagging indicators of measurement to systems that incorporate leading indicators that are illustrative of a highly desirable future state.

In order to address the challenges inherent in the digital transformation of schools and the educational system itself, Cisco published a second document entitled “Putting Practice into Action: Moving from Problems to Solutions and Outcomes,” a matrix of challenges, solutions that address the problem, stories of success, and outcomes and metrics across four themes:

• Moving from short- to long-term strategic visioning
• Shifting from a culture of minimum proficiency to a culture of innovation
• Going from reactionary to intentional infrastructure development and product use
• Using educational technology to positively impact student achievement

To obtain a copy of the white paper and matrix, check out the links below:

Mastering Organization Change Management to Drive Digital Transformation in Education

Putting Practice into Action: Moving from Problems to Solutions and Outcomes