An Interview with Julie Evans

Getting to converse with Dr. Evans gives us a macro lens as to how technology is transforming the educational environment. Her experience leading the Speak Up Research Project has exposed her to data from over 35,000 schools across the entire United States and beyond.

As Dr. Evans analyzes the perspectives of over 500,000 K-12 students, parents, and teachers each year, she has much to share about leveraging technology to drive equitable educational opportunities for all.

Please tell us about your leadership and technology background and a little bit about your journey.

My background is in the technology industry. I came up through joining a large computer company in sales and marketing management, doing a wide range of different things within the organization. I worked with the company for over a decade, and I served as the internal start-up person; whenever they had a new initiative, I tended to be the person who lead the process.

Then I left to join a small start-up company which began in a woman’s basement in Concord, Massachusetts. The company was established to help parents identify what types of technology their children should use at home. We used Howard Gardener’s learning styles as a foundation for that evaluation. We focused on studying the integration of technology in the classroom with curriculum material, textbooks, and hands-on activities, particularly in the area of science.

Then I joined a second education technology startup. Our product or solution was to develop ways for teachers to use online resources to assist them in identifying different types of reading differences in elementary students. Our technology platform was a video streaming model, which was very innovative back then.

In addition, I was also doing all of the venture capital presentations. Candidly, it was pretty intimidating. As I took these risks, I was connected with an investor who also served as the chairman of the board of directors for a nonprofit called NETDAY. Unbeknownst to me, the organization was looking for a new CEO.

I always considered myself a technology person, particularly a startup person, but I never thought I would become a part of the nonprofit world. I ended up taking the role, and in my tenure, we have reinvented the organization multiple times. During these years, we have experienced changes in the social environment and in the public schools’ operational practices. The most exciting part of this journey was to transform the way nonprofit organizations can effectively support school districts and meet their technological needs.

In 2003 we created the Speak Up Research Project, which is our large-scale research project that collects feedback from anywhere between four and five hundred thousand K-12 students, teachers, parents, administrators, and community members across the country each year. The data that we collect are utilized to inform federal, state, and local level policies and the development of programs about the effect of technology in the classroom. Since we started the Speak Up Research Project in 2003, we have had a little over 5.4 million K-12 stakeholders who have completed our surveys.

Currently, many educational institutions across the country participate in the Speak Up Research Project every year, and many school districts use the information as their standard data collection system. This is because we don’t just collect the data; we also provide feedback to the participating schools and districts. In addition, we produce aggregate data that can inform national policy and program development. Remarkably, the Speak Up Research Project is a one hundred percent free service that we provide to schools and districts across the country.

Many teachers are supplied with technologically advanced devices, but they are not using them consistently or to their full potential. How can we level the playing field and maximize the investment made in the tools?

Since 2007, we have deeply investigated how technology is utilized in the classrooms. Mainly, we have studied the efficacy of the teachers’ evaluation and feedback delivery processes concerning the effective implementation of technology.

Part of our work is to tour schools in order to evaluate the effectiveness of how teachers are using different technology tools. The inconsistency or the lack of uniformity of using technology in different classrooms is due to teachers’ different personal approaches on technology.

Some teachers are early adaptors who are willing to utilize new technological instruments as soon as they come in. They jump right in whether they are offered a new strategy, methodology, instructional material, or piece of technology. Then, on the other side of the spectrum, we have the laggards, who can be reluctant, tend to hang back, and are less enthusiastic. Sometimes, these teachers can be naysayers or defensive towards anything new that is proposed to them.

The rest of the teachers are somewhere in the middle.

The adoption of technology, such as mobile devices, digital content, and online resources, follow this very standard pattern. The leadership challenge for an assistant principal, principal, or a district administrator is to manage the new technology implementation process to meet the needs of all of the different people who are involved in the process.

Most leaders have teachers who are coming from all sorts of different experiences and motivations.

There are three areas that are important to highlight when we are talking about technology adoption: teachers’ readiness, differentiated professional development, and patience in measuring outcomes.

First, it is essential for school and district leaders to understand the readiness of their teachers to try something new. It is crucial to understand that not all teachers have the same readiness level when it comes to utilizing new technologies, and that, at the same time, there is not a one size fits all for readiness. Readiness speaks to personal values, prior skills, and prior experiences.

An administrator might have some teachers who are very ready to try something new and also some who are not comfortable in the pedagogy proposed, or who are not comfortable in their current classroom management. Furthermore, some teachers might have a new assignment this year; they may have a challenging class, or they may just not be ready for the change.

It is essential that a leader is cognizant of where the teachers stand on the readiness spectrum when planning to introduce new technological tools.

Second, professional development needs to be differentiated. The idea of ‘one size fits all’ does not work anymore, and we need to be able to modify professional opportunities that we offer to our staff members to fit their learning needs.

What might work for one group of teachers may not work for others. Leaders need to maintain their focus on differentiating professional development. Quite often people say that the real secret to an effective change in practices is professional development. In reality, any development endeavor that is proven to be highly effective is also highly differentiated. Moreover, it is very carefully aligned with teachers’ level of readiness for change.

Leaders need to have patience.

We have done much research around the incorporation and integration of mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and Chromebooks into learning environments, and when I consult with school districts leaders, I tell them right up front that they need to be ready for the fact that the implementation of new technologies is a three-year adoption process. It is not a thing where one year devices are put in the hands of teachers and students and then ‘bingo’ in the spring strong gains will be seen.

The process of adoption and adaptation of new technologies in schools is a lengthy process. Leaders need to have patience throughout the process, which is sometimes the hardest concept to understand. Usually, the district has made significant investments in technology and teacher professional development, or they have shared with their school communities a new vision or direction to enhance student learning while proposing immediate results in a shorter time frame than what is realistic. When implementing new technologies in classrooms, the process often requires that teachers rethink their instructional practices to use technology effectively. This requires time.

Another related struggle for school districts comes from attempting to measure outcomes too soon. As a result, they are not able to identify dramatic positive outcomes derived from the implementation of the new technologies. They don’t get to verify greater student engagement, teaching effectiveness, or academic outcomes quickly enough.

The implementation of new technologies in a learning environment is a multi-step process. The goal is to get to the point of efficacy, where teachers are very comfortable using and incorporating technology into their instructional practices without even noticing it.

In many cases, this process can take three or even more years to be implemented. Being patient and understanding that the change in practices is a lengthy process is something that school leaders need to be more aware of.

What aim is most paramount for you in the work you do?

My work is focusing increasingly on equity as a determinant key to implementing technology in the classrooms.

I genuinely believe in the promise of the effective use of technology to drive equitable educational opportunities for all students.

Teachers, parents, and stakeholders might have different and divergent opinions on how to utilize new technologies in the classroom, and when we start thinking about equity, we should be focusing on bringing all of these diverse voices into the conversation.

It is really important for educational leaders to appreciate the diversity of the voices coming from within their school communities and to celebrate those differences.

Leaders should not be fearful of naysayers or parents who are against some aspect related to the implementation of new technologies in the learning environment. Leaders must celebrate the diversity and the variety of voices and also include students’ perspectives.

What unexpected results have you encountered as you have conducted your research?

There is an exciting trend that is happening right now that we have been able to identify from the data that we collect from parents. Through our Speak Up Research Project, we collect data from around 30,000 parents every year. This is possible thanks to the new cohorts of digital-savvy parents.

In analyzing the data, we have been noticing generational differences between parents of elementary students and parents of middle and high school students. Parents of elementary school students, for the most part, tend to be younger parents who probably grew up with more access to technology in their own learning than the parents of middle and high school students.

Thus, younger parents have different expectations for the use of technology in their children’s lives. In particular, they utilize different communication methods with their school leaders and children’s teachers. This behavioral pattern is pushing school and district leadership to think differently about parent engagement, school to home communication, and the boundaries between home and school. This new communication pattern will profoundly impact in the near future how teachers communicate with parents and the quantity of time that teachers dedicate to fulfilling this duty.

Our data show that overall, 45% of parents said they want to receive text messages from their children’s teachers with information regarding their children’s behavior, and only a quarter of the parents want to go to a school portal with a password to get the same information. When we look at the parents of elementary students, the percentage of parents who preferred to receive a text message as a mean to communicate with their children’s teachers jumped to over 50%.

One explanation of this trend is that maybe many of us are used to getting information pushed out to us, and we are less eager to have to search for information. Just four years ago, these numbers were reversed, and parents were pleased about going to a school or a classroom website to get information about their children. Now, they want that information pushed out to them. That is just one leading indicator of how parent-to-school engagement is changing.

Another concern coming from the parents’ perspective is regarding how much screen time children are exposed to, which is really interesting because parents are very interested in the personalized education that is being enabled by technology, and they are also sincere believers in the value of their children learning how to use technology effectively as a workplace skill.

Mainly, parents are interested in the effective use of technology, but it has to be within certain boundaries. 

One of the things that we are starting to see as an exciting trendline and it applies to leadership is the value of technology and how to measure the outcomes of implementing technology in classrooms. In the past, when we talked about the value of using digital tools or content resources in the classroom, it was crucial to highlight that students were more engaged in the learning process when there was some technology involved. If I had polled teachers, parents, principals, community members, etc., they would have stated that the most valuable outcomes of having technology in the classroom were correlated with a higher level of student engagement in the learning process.

Fast-forwarding to the current times, how do we identify which outcomes will justify the return of investment that we have made in technology and professional development opportunities for our teachers? Engagement is an outcome, and it has been for a long time. When I observed a classroom and saw students with shiny eyes and happy faces, I knew that there was some kind of technology involved, and I put that down as a good use of technology.

Currently, we have been increasingly finding that school boards are becoming much more knowledgeable about technology. I attend a lot of conferences, including speaking to the National School Board Association every year. Six or seven years ago, most school board members did not know anything about technology, but now they know a lot about the technology and they are using it themselves.

They have opinions about technology, and they might have children or grandchildren who are utilizing technology. Therefore, they are more focused on learning about the specific outcomes and learning benefits of implementing technology in educational settings. Policymakers are also saying that engagement as the sole metric is no longer sufficient, and we are looking for a return on investment that speaks to student outcomes. These outcomes could be related to the preparation of students for college, the development of certain types of skills, more time on tasks, better academic scores, an increase in homework completion, an increase in learning behavior, more self-directed learning behaviors, etc. Whatever those outcomes are, stakeholders are increasingly looking for better and more specific ones.

I think that one of the trends that we are going to see shortly is a greater emphasis on looking beyond student engagement and thinking more concretely about the tangible outcomes from the use of technology in our classrooms. This approach will also help educators get beyond the idea that technology is just a nice thing to have in the classroom as a supplemental activity, and we will start seeing more of an emphasis on the seamless integration of technology and active learning strategies in classrooms. This new way of looking at outcomes will again cause more anxiety amongst our teachers, but, as we move to greater effectiveness, we will see better outcomes coming from the investments that have been made by schools and districts.