Summary

Lake Washington School District serves 25,000 students in and around Redmond, Washington, a region entrenched in high-tech—25% of parents work for Microsoft. Starting in 2008-09, LWSD launched an ambitious five-year plan to drive more deeply into teaching the practice and use of technology as a day-to-day tool to encourage students to develop 21st-century skills. Via its ambitious, innovative program, LWSD has achieved the support of 96% of its teaching staff, putting the district firmly on the road to successfully reaching its long-range goals.__________________________________

Case Study: Lake Washington Schools

At Lake Washington School District (LWSD) we serve 25,000 students in and around Redmond, Washington, a region firmly entrenched in high-tech—25% of parents work for Microsoft. Since 1996, the district has successfully passed levies for a fabulous selection of technical resources in every classroom, including interactive whiteboards, projection systems, and desktop technologies for students.I came on board at LWSD in 2007, noting that—despite large-scale staff development—classroom teachers were not leveraging the benefits of interactive technologies as widely as one would expect in such a technically rich environment. That is, while LWSD had embedded technology into teaching practices as deeply as any district I’d seen around the country, there was a lack of depth in comparison with the vast resources available.
That same year, 2007, we began to re-craft expectations district wide—teachers, administrators, etc.—refocusing teachers, curriculum, and resources from what students need to know—the standard approach—to what skills and abilities they need to have—an approach based on the 21st-Century Skills Coalition, actually redefining our functional description of “future-ready student.” We decided to start on the instructional level, reorganizing the work we do, and the way we present the work, and the training and expectations for teachers. At the same time, I was looking at how I could further the use of technology as a learning and instructional tool, which led us into our current project—an ambitious five-year plan to enable safe interaction, collaboration, and communication among our students and their instructors.

To the bargaining table

In 2007, we went to the bargaining table with our teachers, explaining that, from a district perspective, we needed to embed into teaching practice the use of educational technology as a day-to-day tool to encourage students to develop 21st-century skills. We described our view of the future-ready student: prepared for college, prepared for the global workplace, prepared for personal success.In presenting this definition, we actually turned the standard paradigm upside-down. On our student profile, we place the interdisciplinary content knowledge at the bottom of the profile, and we put the interdisciplinary skills and attributes—everything from collaboration to persistence—up at the top.

Year one

As part of these negotiations, we put in place a program starting in 2008-09 that offered teachers an optional stipend if they were able to acquire certain skills using collaborative technology—and then demonstrate the use of those skills with their students. In that first year, we got 96% voluntary participation from the teachers; that is, 96% of the teachers were able to demonstrate the use of the technology and to develop a plan on how to use it in their day-to-day instruction.

Year two

For the program’s second year, the skills acquired voluntarily in year one became an expected practice for our teachers—a “look-for” during formal review. This is how the cycle will continue throughout the program’s five-year run: first year, voluntary with stipend incentive; second year, required core competency. Also in 2009-10, we moved forward from collaboration technology to interactivity, asking our teachers to take on any type of interactive media, develop a set of tools using that media, and then share them via our portal. As a result, we now have a set of nearly 1500 teacher-produced interactive resources, and, as with the prior year, we got a 96% buy-in—a sterling participation rate. After decades of working with teachers’ unions, I find this to be a remarkably successful situation.

Years three and four

For this, the third year, the goal is communication, sharing information and resources among colleagues, parents, and students in a secure environment. Building on systems developed several years ago, we’re deploying a robust communications portal where parents, teachers, and students—and eventually staff—can see into grade books, view assignments, collaborate on projects, run wikis and blogs, etc. in a controlled, mediated, safe space. The product we’re using for collaborative communication is Learning Platform from RM, a large U.K.-based company. The platform is based on Microsoft SharePoint, on which our original portals also were based. We’re building this system this year because next year, 2011-12, we want teachers to dive into it with their students, in preparation for year five.

Year five

By 2012-13, we want to go to go 1:1 with the students, and much of their work will take place in that secure learning environment developed over the previous two years. By 1:1, we mean that every student will have a computer as a tool for collaboration, connection, communication, and that tool will be linked into this safe system. One catch is that we’d like to enable our students to use their own devices; we’re headed there, although this presents security challenges.

Teachers first

Our plan is relatively unique. We’ve started by focusing on the teachers first—on effective 21st-century instruction—with the end goal of enabling successful 21st-century learners. This is different than the approach taken by many districts—where they start from the bottom up, with the computers, and then try to figure out how to use them. We’ve been really careful about not jumping into 1:1 until we see what the rest of the world has learned—and one of the things we’ve learned from observing our colleagues is that instruction is still under the control and influence of the teacher, and so if the teacher doesn’t understand how to incorporate the tool, that tool always will be ancillary.As for the students, they’re digital natives, and as such, they’re ready to take advantage of all that technology has to offer. With our plan, we believe that when kids bring tech to class, their teachers will “get it,” and learning will thrive.–John Vaille
Chief Technology Officer/Assistant Superintendent
Lake Washington School District #414
Redmond, Washington, U.S.