An Interview with John Albert

Conversations with technology leaders will often stress the importance of the tools as being a vehicle for amplifying voices. This dialogue with Dr. Albert is no different. He expresses his desire to have our students gain access to the same opportunities as other young people, regardless of their backgrounds.

Dr. Albert recognizes the vitality of voices. As leaders, we need to hear from our students and other stakeholders and integrate those perspectives into the plans we make. He emphasizes the need to start with a strategy before ever looking at how technology fits into the puzzle.

Talk about your current leadership role and how you are using technology to influence engagement.

I am the primary instructional leader at California Elementary School, home of the iInspire Academy, where technology and language flourish. We are a one-to-one iPad school from grades kinder through fifth. Our students take the devices home with them. We have been doing it now for three years and have had huge success with it.

We really set out a purpose for our school and why we utilize technology from the very beginning. It revolved around three primary principles.

The first principle dealt with the fact that our kids could not read. We had 15 percent of our students reading at or above grade level when I came in five years ago. We also had (and continue to serve) 85 percent of our students as English language learners and over 97 percent qualifying for free and reduced lunch.

There was a lot of need.

When we looked at what our purpose for technology was going to be, we wanted to first address the differentiated needs of our learners. We had kids who were reading three or four levels below their grade. But we also had kids who were reading at grade level and even some reading above.

We wanted to be able to provide a platform that teachers could customize relatively easily to differentiate instruction.

That was one of our first goals. The second goal related to the high propensity of English language learners. We wanted to ensure that we were engaging our students with language development. Being able to have a device where students could record themselves over and over again to replicate language became critical.

Considering that we had 97 percent of our students on free or reduced lunch, we wanted also to ensure that we were bridging the technology gap for our kids. We felt very passionately that even if we created great programs for our students and got them up to grade level, the challenge would always be that our kids didn’t have access, whereas students from more affluent areas had multiple devices at home.

We projected out 15 years when they would be applying for college or to the job market. That gap in technology would be a huge hindrance for their success as leaders in the world.

For equity and access purposes, we felt very deeply that we needed to be able to utilize the technology to bridge the gap.

We wanted to give our students opportunities to get involved and engaged with their learning and creativity.

Talk about your experiences supporting your teachers in integrating technology into their pedagogy.

When we started our professional development efforts, we began with a voluntary program. We worked together with the leadership team and identified  our vision. We eventually looked at integrating technology into a one-to-one level, but my timeline was going to be a five-year implementation plan.

We rolled out a voluntary, optional pilot program for teachers to get involved in. We named it the ‘iInspire Academy’ – a reinvention of our name, as we wanted to create some buzz around what we were doing both in the community and with our teachers.

With only 15 percent of our kids reading at or above grade level, the reputation of our school wasn’t great. Teachers weren’t feeling good about themselves or what they were doing because they had heard so many negative comments.

We started the iInspire Academy and created an application-based system for teachers. I was expecting to get two teachers to apply. We had two iPad carts at the time and they were in a corner collecting dust.

Surprisingly, we had half of our staff volunteer the first year.

These teachers were volunteering to have one-to-one technology in their classrooms and a great deal of customized training. At the time, it was twilight training and their commitment was to use iPads in their classrooms at least fifty percent of the day. They were also committing to using some blended learning platforms that we adopted.

The great part about it was that because it was all voluntary, there was a huge buzz and we only had people in it on the first wave who wanted to be involved. We called it iInspire 1.0.

Our first wave of teachers demonstrated authentic excitement. They were the ‘go-getters.’ We were able to build a lot of success right off the bat with this approach.

Talk to us about the philosophy behind the program.

Technology lends itself so easily to becoming like a babysitter. That is the model that is used for a lot of families at home. Kids are set-up on the iPad because it will occupy them.

We adopted a very purposeful philosophy, centered around usage.

We did a lot of training on pedagogical backgrounds, particularly with the SAMR model (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition), looking at the purposeful integration of technology.

All of our training centered around great instructional strategies. I know that sounds weird, but our workshops did not focus on the technology.

We never said, “We’re going to show you how to do Google Docs” or “We’re going to show you how to use an app like iMovie.” It was always, “We’re going to be learning about incredible writing strategies” and “We’re going to be looking at things to support your writing programs. And by the way, here are some technology components that we are going to fit into this.” Or, “We’re going to be learning about GLAD strategies and we will see how Cloud strategies can benefit English learners. And by the way, here are a couple of apps that you might want to utilize to benefit your kids.”

It was always the strategy first before we ever talked about the technology that would be beneficial in supporting our goals.

Was there any particular educational technology that you saw profound results from?

We adopted a program called Lexia Core 5. It is a blended learning program for language arts and reading and it gives students customized pathways based on their abilities, what they’re doing, and how they’re responding.

It is very responsive to what students are struggling with and what they are accelerating with. It creates a customized pathway for them, but the great part is that if they struggle, it provides an alert for teachers to be able to get an individualized lesson plan to provide intervention for that child.

We did a pilot study for three months during the first year with our students who were involved in the program. In just those three months, students in the experimental group had a 33 percent gain over the students who were in our control group.  This was the beginning of seeing huge gains.

Then we rolled that into year two and presented to the rest of the staff. Teachers who had participated in the pilot included their findings regarding how they saw student engagement increasing in the classroom and disciplinary issues decreasing. Their results also identified that student achievement was improving and that families were more satisfied with how their children were benefitting.

Next, we rolled-out iInspire 2.0. I was expecting to get approximately three more teachers, but the entire rest of the staff volunteered. That group included two teachers who were signing up for the very last year of their teaching careers; they were going to retire after that next year. It was absolutely amazing to see!

Talk to us a little about how you utilized professional development to support iInspire.

One of the things that we learned a lot about that first year was when we started blending applications of learning theory into our coaching, what we call ‘coaching cycles’ now.

We have our professional development, and again it is always centered around strategies, not the technology. Then the next day we get a roving substitute and we have the teachers reflect on what they learned. They also reflect on the prior month’s cycle.

We ask, “What did you see that you want to try?”

Then we formulate a plan to do just that. Our instructional coach goes out and demonstrates in the classrooms for the teachers. It used to be that our instructional specialist would simply ask teachers, “What are your needs? How can I help you?” She was approaching the professional development from all different angles. She was running herself ragged with 24 different plans. Nothing was sticking.

Now, we have entire grade levels working on the same strategies. Their approach might be a little different but the strategies are the same. After the coach demonstrates the strategy, she goes back and then they co-facilitate the lesson together. Then when the teachers demonstrate mastery, the coach comes back in as support.

Our coaching cycles are working on certain strategies that support the school-wide and individual teacher priorities.

This means that everyone is working on the same things, like an oar attempting to keep us going in the same direction.

How long did it take to truly turn around the school?

This is my fifth year here and we have had different levels of success at every point. One of the things I believe that contributed to the success was by starting smaller, with a pilot. We had success in those classrooms and then scaled it up quickly. Year two was our school-wide integration and we had our year one teachers coaching and mentoring our year two’s.

We started seeing huge success within the first two-and-a-half years. We had our students’ reading proficiency levels on our reading inventory increase from 85% reading below grade level to 15% below grade level.

It was in year three that we started seeing absolutely huge gains in our standardized assessment reading scores. We had increases in our scores every year, but in year three we started seeing big jumps. Keep in mind that our state standardized test assesses only grades 3, 4, and 5. So, in year four, when our younger students began testing, we saw really big gains in our standardized test scores, really big gains.

How do you work to ignite curiosity in the classroom?

It is essential that our kids are able to share their voices. We say that a lot here, especially because our kids come from very tough backgrounds. We have a high percentage of students from poverty who get pigeonholed into thinking, ‘This is how life is supposed to work.’ ‘This is my specific role and position in life and these are the rules.’ These learners enter settings where they start to believe that their voices don’t matter.

However, one of the great things about technology is that these students realize that their voices are just as important as everyone else’s. They have the ability to tell their stories and even publish what they have shared.

They can share these stories with real audiences and exercise their creativity.

They no longer view themselves as just living in the world but they start perceiving themselves as people who can change the world.

I think that is the important thing about technology. It is not just a tool. Technology is a vehicle that allows kids to amplify their voices so that their stories can be heard.

This student-centered communication occurs not just during school hours, but they know that their voices can be heard even when they are out of school. They recognize their capacity to have influence in the world and they are able to take their place among leaders everywhere.

We want our kids to have the same opportunities as other kids, regardless of where they came from, where they grew up, or their socio-economic status. We want to have those voices be heard because they matter.