The Strategic Leadership of ICT
The Strategic Leadership of ICT:
Leading for Sustainable Change
In March 2003, describing ICT, Charles Clarke said, “It goes right through the education system from early years to higher education and helps boost standards. It can make a real difference to teaching and can engage and excite students of all ages.…whatever happens, how ever the education system evolves, we will find over the next few years that the role of ICT will become increasingly important.”
This is what is really happening in many schools and education systems around the world! The role of ICT is becoming “increasingly important!” The statistics of the information age Are astonishing! Technology is in the daily life of children. They spend 75% of their leisure time on an electronic devicesuch as PSPs, IPads, IPods, PCs, Laptops, Wii, Nintendo DS, and the list can go on forever! There was a crucial need that technology be introduced in schools.
Many initiatives were in place in Lebanon, the first of which was by the British Council, who started training teachers from the private and public sectors on ICT skills. These trainings included how to integrate word, excel, powerpoint and internet web tools in lesson plans… and this is where I got my chance to work as a trainer. That was back in 2005. Years later and after training many teachers, there was a common concernsome teachers did not find enough support from their principals! Some principals thought that ICT was just a tool and underestimated its potential to improve teaching and learning! What we thought of was that principals do not need a skills-based ICT course, but an opportunity to build on their knowledge and understanding of key issues around technology, so that they support other staff members to enhance and extend learning in and out of schools.
UK trainer Richard Pietrasik did the first Strategic Leadership for ICT (SLICT) in August 2007 in AlMir Amin in Lebanon.SLICT was originally developed in partnership by NCSL and BECTA in the United Kingdom. A year later SLICT was adapted with permission by Mrs Samia Abu Hamad and myself, so that it addresses the specific needs and contexts of the Near East & North Africa (NENA) countries participating in the British Council regional ICT in Education project. In 2008 our journey with SLICT began, with the support of Mrs Mayssa Dawi, ICT project coordinator in the British Council and the collaboration of the Center for Educational Research and Development (CERD).
But what is SLICT? And what is its goal?
SLICT is a 3 day training course that gives school leaders the tools to draw up a strategy which places technology at the center of learning,teaching, and administration. It combines analysis of key issues with thinking and peer discussion. In addition, it provides an opportunity for school leaders to work collaboratively with other leaders to develop their own whole school vision for learning with ICT. What we hoped is that it promotes clear synergies between school priorities and national agendas. What we stressed on was that SLICT is not an ICT skills course. It is neither technology-focused, nor about managing applications. It has nothing to do with knowing the ins and outs of how boxes and wires fit together and what bandwidth is required. It is about principals bringing their informed professional judgment to bear on the issues concerned with strategic leadership of ICT.
The SLICT training we gave brought together small groups of school leaders to share, challenge and support each other’s learning within a community of practice.Each group consisted of 20 to 25 principals from the private and public schools spread all over Lebanon- North, South, Beirut, and Bekaa areas, in addition to principals from the following networks of schools-Al Makassed, Al Mabarrat, Amal Educational Institutions and the Catholic schools.For more than five years of SLICT training, each group of principals looked at the same seven areas:
- The leadership role (of the principal)
- anagement of ICT
- Management with ICT
- Personal use of ICT
- Sustainability of practice
- Transferability of practice
- E-confidence.
The SLICT model
When considering Strategic Leadership of ICT (SLICT) it is useful to have the following triangular diagram in mind. The diagram exemplifies an approach that principals can take:
We can view the school as being composed of three elements:
Organization, which incorporates Management and the Curriculum
Resources, both Human and Physical
Pedagogy, composed of Teaching and Learning
Strategic Leadership is about understanding and being in command of all of these elements.The first step in developing confident strategic leadership in any area of the school is the process of reviewing current situation, in other words doing a SWOT analysis. Principals need to know what is happening now. What is the present state of ICT in their school with regard to all these elements – Resources, Organization, and Pedagogy?
In order to plan for the future and to be aware how the school is developing, principals must Audit, Monitor, and Evaluate. At a simple level, the audit might clarify that principals expect all staff to ensure that pupils are confident in the basic functions of ICT integrations.As we carry out this process, it is of course important for principals to be confident in making informed professional judgments about the use of ICT in the classroom, and in administration. This entails recognizing the positive impact that effective use of ICT can make on pupils’ learning but also being aware of when ICT adds little or nothing to a lesson or to school Principals need to be able to:
Understand how ICT can improve teaching and learning and administrative tasks
Evaluate and reflect on the use and impact of ICT
Observe and make judgments about the use of ICT in teaching and learningand administrative tasks
Understand how ICT can help to improve standards
E-confidence
After school principals developed a clear understanding of the SLICT model, we moved to our next key area which is developing econfidence. There is now a rich mixture of ways that schools are using ICT to improve teaching and learning, administration, and communication. We analyzed the variety of excellent practice that now exists in many schools to develop a picture of what a school that was using ICT to full advantage would look like. We called this an e-Confident School. We shared with the participating principals a list developed by NCSL and BECTA of ten features that would be found in such a school. This was put before them not as the description of an actual school but to help them set realistic and attainable goals and targets that they would hope to attain over the course of time. That list was not a prescriptive menu of changes that we are intending all schools to follow but use image to consider as part of the dialogue that needs to take place in the course of considering change. The suggested 10 key features of an e-Confident School are:
High levels of staff confidence, competence and leadership
Re-engineered teaching, learning and assessment, integrating effective use
Leading and managing distributed and concurrent learning
Effective application within organizational and management processes
Coherent personal learning development, support and access – for all leaders, teaching and non-teaching staff
Secure, informed professional judgment
Appropriate resource allocation to ensure sustainable development
Availability, access and technical support
Pupils/students with high ICT capability School as the lead community learning and
information hub
It was hoped that an e-confident school would have an influence on teachers, parents, and community in general.
Vision
Good strategic planning begins with a vision. Before principals start to develop their ICT strategy they should have a vision of how would see ICT in their schools. A good starting point will be to set out some of the ideas that they would want within their own vision for their school.
Some of the ideas focus on the technology for example - having an interactive whiteboard in every classroom. At first sight a simple aim for a school, but one based on educational and pedagogical concepts. Some of the ideas are straightforward educational visions such as “anywhere anytime learning” which is enabled by the technology. When developing a strategy for a school all principals will have education at the centre of their thinking.
After deciding collaboratively on school vision, principals have these questions to consider: What plans would you have with regard to ICT? How would you innovate, embed and sustain the changes that you would make?
Innovate – what do you want to do and how will you make it happen?
Embed – who will it happen with and what is the timescale?
Sustain – how will you keep it going?
Once an innovation is embedded, the focus must shift to ensuring that innovation is sustained, and the leader’s thinking must be around how that will be achieved.
What continuous professional development CPD is needed?
What cultural shift needs to have takenplace?
What monitoring and evaluation needs to take place?
What long-term planning needs to be developed?
Are we resourced?
The aim must be to achieve a situation where the leadership role is unnecessary to maintaining the change that has taken place. It becomes selfsustaining.
After setting the vision, planning an innovation, imbedding it and sustaining it, it was time to discuss leadership styles.
Leadership Styles
Principals were introduced to Hay McBer leadership styles that are as follows:
Coercive: “Do as I tell you”
Authoritative: “Come with me”, mobilizes people towards a vision
Affiliative: “People come first”, creates harmony and heals rifts
Democratic: “What do you think?” forges consensus
Pacesetting: “Do as I do”, sets high standards
Coaching: “Try this”, develops others
Then, they worked in groups to see which style fits best to lead a vision of ICT. Distributed leadership was the most convenient as agreed by principals, as it is none of the above but combinesdifferent styles.
After that, principals addressed different roles and responsibilities they might have.Within any organization or initiative of some complexity there is a hierarchy of roles that can be categorized as strategic, tactical, and operational. For each of these three levels of responsibility,they considered how the tasks are allocated to ensure innovations are embedded and sustained.
Action plan
The last step of the three day workshop was writing an action plan. Principals were required to write an action plan that they would implement as they go back to their schools. The plan will follow the SLICT model discussed earlier which includes a vision for ICT, allocation of resources,implementation, revision, and auditing.
The story did not end here. Follow up meetings in schools were done by Mrs. Samia Abu Hamad and the project coordinator, Ms. Mayssa Dawi, and in some instances me, where we visited schools and saw the implementation of the action plans.
On the personal level, SLICT aided me in my work as a principal. It helped me develop an ICT strategic plan for the school I ran Makassed KhalilShehab School. This school, supported by the directorate of information technology at Makassed, was able to get three international awards for innovation, the last of which was by Microsoft. As for me, I got promoted to serve another school within the same association- AlMakassed Philanthropic Islamic Association of Beirut.I am proud that such training takes place in Lebanon. It is a milestone. And I owe a debt of gratitude toAlMakassed, the British Council and CERD for giving me an opportunity to be part of this one its kind training in Lebanon.
SLICT was given for 5 consecutive years because of its success. 150 principals were given this training. The summer of 2011 witnessed the meeting of all these principals to share their success stories and what they have implemented since their training. It was a stimulating and useful day of information exchange and valuable reflection on progress and achievements that can inform future planning. This is in fact what was happening;members of the MEHE ICT Strategic Plan Committee were present on that day. We hope that our feedback provided them with information that will assist them in their planning of this major aspect of the MEHE Education Sector Development Plan.
To quote the words of Mayssa Dawi, ICT project coordinator at British Council,”I believe that the SLICT program has affected the attitudes of the school principals…they were able to develop new vision and understanding for education; they became capable of putting an ICT strategy for their schools”. As for us as trainers, we wish success for the MEHE ICT Strategic Plan Committee in their mission and that our efforts are contagious.