Strategies for sustainable professional development programs to promote effective pedagogical use of instructional technology in teaching

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine a set of common strategies employed by sustainable instructional technology professional development programs that are found to successfully promote educators' high-level use of technology in their teaching practice. Two questions guided this study: (a) Research Question 1: What do successful instructional technology professional development programs recognize as indicators of high-level use of technology?, and (b) Research Question 2: Which instructional technology professional development strategies successfully promote high-level use of instructional technology in participants' teaching practice? An online questionnaire consisting of close-ended questions and open-ended questions was used as the means of data collection. The online questionnaire was completed by 70 instructional professional development programs' directors or their designees. The professional development programs participating in this study were awardees of PT3 1999 and 2000 implementation grants. The data from the close-ended questions of the questionnaire were analyzed using central tendency measures and were used to answer to Research Question 1. For each survey's closeended questions there was a corresponding open-ended question. The open-ended questions were analyzed using qualitative content analysis and the data coming from this section of the questionnaire were used to answer to Research Question 2. The results from the analysis of the close-ended section of the questionnaire indicated that the majority of instructional technology professional development programs participating in this study were successful in preparing their participants to address 22 out of the 27 indicators of high-level use of technology presented in this study. The analysis of the open-ended responses indicated that out of the 26 strategies mentioned by participants the most successfully used strategies across indicators were: