Researching the influence of interactive presentation tools on teachers’ pedagogy

Dr Steve KennewellSwansea School of EducationHendrefoelanSwansea SA2 7NB

s.e.kennewell@swan.ac.uk

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005

Introduction

Teachers’ pedagogy – in the sense of ‘any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance learning in another’ (Watkins & Mortimore, 1999) – is influenced by (as a minimum) their personality, their experience, their knowledge, their subject culture, the age and ability of their children, the ethos of their school, national policies, curriculum specifications, and the resources available to them. It is this last feature that is of particular concern in this paper. The introduction of ICT resources to schools during the last twenty years has had relatively little effect on the ways that teachers teach (Cox & Webb, 2004). One possible reason for this is the feeling that ICT has most benefit for learners when they are working relatively independently of the teacher, and this approach to learning has been actively discouraged by recent initiatives designed to raise standards of attainment in England. It is of interest, therefore, to consider the effects of particular technologies which seem to be more teacher-oriented, such as interactive whiteboards. The term Interactive Presentation Tool (IPT) will be used to refer to this type of resource which allows the user to prepare material in advance, quickly place it on a display visible to the whole class when required, and manipulate items on the display in a way which corresponds to what can be achieved with an individual PC. IPTs are becoming very widespread in school classrooms in England and Wales.

Possible approaches for the analysis of ICT’s influence on pedagogy

The search for a framework within which to carry out an analysis of relationships between technology and pedagogy reveals a lack of generally agreed language and classification of variables in relation to pedagogy (Cox & Webb, 2004). We can, however, identify certain key ideas which seem helpful in analysing the relationship between ICT and pedagogy.

The literature on effective teaching (Stevenson & Palmer, 1994; Muijs & Reynolds, 2001) suggests a number of characteristics of successful pedagogy:• Structured lessons• Clear presentations• Appropriate pacing• Modelling skills• Conceptual mapping• Interactive questioning• Individual/group practice• Assessment and diagnosis• Matching learning tasks to student attributes

These characteristics, and other similar recommendations concerning effective practice, will be helpful to teachers planning to use ICT in teaching, but do not constitute a coherent analytical framework which can be used to characterise and evaluate changes in pedagogy.

In order to frame the analysis of pedagogy and its development when ICT is involved, Kennewell (1997) and Cox & Webb (2004) draw on the literature concerning teacher thinking, particularly the importance of pedagogical content knowledge of a subject: that is knowledge of how to represent the subject, how students learn the subject, how curricular materials are organised, and how particular topics are best sequenced in the curriculum (Wilson et al., 1987). This is combined with the process of pedagogical reasoning which involves• comprehension of the subject matter• transformation of the ideas for representation to students• instruction• evaluation• reflection, leading to new comprehensions (Shulman, 1987)Beauchamp (2004) has analysed how teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and reasoning incorporates IPTs progressively through experience and reflection.

Kennewell (2001) draws on Greeno’s (1994, 1998) framework of affordances and constraints in learning situations so as to analyse settings where learners are working individually or collaboratively with ICT. The role of the teacher is one of setting tasks which present some challenge to the learners and then orchestrating the features of the classroom, including ICT, so as to provide enough support for successful task completion whilst maintaining sufficient cognitive demand to bring about learning. This cyclical model incorporates both potential for action (corresponding to affordances

of the setting) and structure for action (corresponding to the constraints imposed by the setting).

Sutherland et al. (2004) find Perkins’ (1993) characterisation of ‘person plus’ helpful in analysing learning in activity settings. They see the classroom as one of a variety of settings in which children learn, and in this setting the teacher is one of the tools and resources available to the learner in supporting activity. Cox & Webb (2004) extend the analysis of affordances in the classroom to include the affordances of teacher interaction, of other pupils and of other resources as well as of ICT. These ideas complement each other effectively, and may be combined into a single framework for planning and analysing teaching and learning.

The development of an activity-based model for pedagogical analysis

A model which characterises teaching as the orchestration by the teacher of affordances and constraints for learner activity (Kennewell, 2001) was developed in order to help plan and evaluate teaching and learning which involved pupil activity, organised and supported by the teacher. It has also been used to analyse children’s activities with ICT outside school, and to compare characteristics of informal use with school practices (Kennewell, 2002). During whole class teaching, however, pupils are not carrying out the same sort of activity that they would during task-focused work in school or informal activity at home. With the whole-class strategy, pupils are predominantly expected to listen and watch the teacher, interspersed with answering the teacher’s questions individually whilst the rest of the class continues to listen. This scenario does not change significantly when the teacher is using ICT in whole-class teaching. Although sometimes a pupil may be asked to use the IPT to answer a question, the rest of the class will still merely be watching.

It is not immediately apparent that a model based on affordances and constraints is useful in this setting. However, despite the apparently passive nature of pupils’ experience during much whole-class teaching, pupils are still carrying out activities. These activities may be purely cognitive or perhaps metacognitive – apprehending, comprehending, memorising, assimilating, reflecting - for periods of time during whole-class teaching, but nevertheless they are activities and their actions can still be afforded or constrained by features of the setting, including ICT. Furthermore, the most effective teachers stimulate the cognitive engagement of pupils by posing questions and requesting contributions in order to minimise the duration of periods where they are behaving passively. They also set mental tasks which engage and challenge learners in an ‘active’ way (Muijs & Reynolds). Whole-class teaching can thus

be analysed using the orchestration of affordances and constraints in relation to learner attributes in the same way as for more independent activity. This will help us to evaluate the effect of using IPTs – by teacher and pupils - on the pupils’ activity and learning.

The proposed basic model for learning within activity settings is designed to cover all situations, whether there is a teacher present or not. This model assumes that learning is a change in attributes, and provides a framework for analysing how learning takes place during a task which is somewhat beyond the learner’s ability to carry out unaided (see Figure 1). In order to carry out the task, the learner’s initial attributes enable them to perceive the potential for action afforded by the features of the setting, and to pursue action sequences constrained by the features of the setting. In achieving the goal, their cognition has followed new paths, and this experience will either influence their attributes incrementally or (occasionally) effect conceptual change. Their new attributes can then be applied to related tasks in future, or to the same task with reduced affordances and/or constraints.

Figure 1 Outline of the activity-based model for learning within an activity setting

In this general model, the tasks may require physical, cognitive or reflective/metacognitive activity. They will usually require a combination of physical and cognitive activity at least, and will

Features of setting

Task

Attributes of learners

provide affordances and constraints

goal

produce

change

involve the carrying out of multiple individual actions in pursuit of a goal. The goal may be one of apprehending information or assimilating ideas, or it may be to produce a product (constructed to a specified brief or created with a degree of freedom concerning the outcome). A product may be a physical (or electronic) artefact, or it may involve performance (responding to questions, reporting on behalf of a group discussion, or playing a role, for example). The attributes required will be some combination of knowledge (factual and conceptual), skills, and dispositions in the target subject matter together with generic skills (such as literacy and ICT) and in other subject matter. For worthwhile learning to take place, there will be a gap between what the learner can already do independently and what is required for the task. In completing the task, with assistance when required, it is expected that the learner’s attributes will change and they will be able to achieve the goal with less help in future (Kennewell, 2001).

Assistance in the task is provided by the features, which may include:• The teacher• Other learners• Tools• Other resources• Cultural factors

The features provided by the teacher can be classified as knowledge, beliefs, values and behaviours. Other learners can provide these features, too (Cox & Webb, 2004). The tools may be those based on language, such as discussion, or physical tools such as pencil and paper, scissors and glue. ICT is a particularly versatile tool, and is not easy to classify in nature or function. The curriculum for initial and in service teacher training in the UK is specifies a number of features of ICT tools and resources which teachers should learn how to exploit:

• Speed• Automaticity• Capacity• Range• Provisionality• Interactivity

(DfEE, 1998)

There is an implicit comparison with other tools in identifying these; they are what makes ICT special as an educational aid. ICT can similarly be compared with other educational resources, such as books, posters on the wall, information sheets, worksheets, video and audio recordings which help stimulate, structure and support

activity in the classroom. ICT does not necessarily replace these more traditional tools and resources; in some situations the traditional medium may be more appropriate, or it may be used effectively in combination with ICT. Finally, we need to consider cultural factors such as school ethos, subject culture, classroom rules, and the home background of pupils.

The way in which all these factors interact is, at least partially, under the control of the teacher. The teacher’s special role includes:• creating an appropriate culture of learning;• provide helpful tools and other resources;• assessing learners’ attributes;• designing tasks which create a learning gap;• deciding what support is appropriate and providing ‘scaffolding’ for learning;• orchestrating the affordances and constraints of the setting in order to make success with the task feasible;• stimulate and maintain learners’ focus on the activity;• encourage learners’ reflection on their activity and on their learning• sequence activities in order to effect progression in learning (Kennewell et al, forthcoming).

Figure 2 shows how these factors relate in a cyclical fashion during activity designed for learning. The orchestration of features of the setting, contingent on the features of the learners, so as to provide potential and structure for activity, is a dynamic process involving continuous interaction between teacher and learners as individuals, in groups and as a whole class. Such orchestration is also carried out by the learners themselves, particularly during group work. We have named the set of relationships which characterise the nature of the interactivity taking place the Interaction Zone, to reflect the fact that it varies in size across classroom and across phases of the lesson depending on the way that the teacher manages the activity. We have also recognised the key role of reflection in the process of learning from activity. Reflection can be carried out jointly (that is in groups or as a whole class), managed by the teacher and within the interaction zone. It can also be carried out individually, that is as intra-action rather than interaction. Nevertheless, this is likely to be influenced by the nature of the interactivity in the lesson.

The overall framework has been labelled ATLAS (Analyzing Teaching and Learning in Activity Settings).

reflectionindividual joint

features of learners

features of the setting

affordances for action

constraints on action

orchestration by teacher and learners

Interaction zone

goal

activity

Figure 2 ATLAS Framework for analysing classroom activity

What can be learned by applying the model to IPTs?

Two small studies have recently been undertaken in South West Wales to investigate the impact on teaching and learning of the high levels of ICT resourcing in new schools. The primary school was a new building for an existing institution with an established staff. The model for classroom resourcing was a teacher’s desktop PC, linked to a projector and interactive whiteboard, and four networked pupil PCs. The secondary school was an existing building, vacated during a merger of schools with falling rolls, and being gradually refurbished to house a new Welsh-medium school. The staff was new and small, as they were only teaching the first year’s intake of pupils. The research was carried out at a time when the Welsh Assembly Government’s policy of providing an interactive whiteboard for every primary school and three for secondary schools had put resources in place but these had not yet been fully adopted by teachers (Kennewell & Morgan, 2003). There was thus particular interest in evaluating the effects of interactive whiteboards as IPTs. The research schools were well ahead of the standard provision, and matched the Government’s vision for all schools in due course.

In studying the effects of IPTs, there was a need to analyse learner-IPT interaction, teacher-IPT interaction and learner-teacher interaction through IPT.

In each school, the research involved a single lesson observation with each teacher (six in the primary school, seven in the secondary school) followed by interviews with the teachers concerned about how they felt ICT affected teaching, learning and attainment. Field notes were made during and immediately after the lessons, and audio recordings were made of the interviews. For the purpose of analysing the effects on pedagogy, the field notes were explored for evidence concerning effects of the technology on activity. This process probed learner-IWB interaction, teacher-IWB interaction and learner-teacher interaction through the IWB. The single lesson observation with each teacher was insufficient to identify patterns in their practice or in the effects on pupils, and further evidence was sought from the interview notes.

The actions noted as affected by ICT included general ones such as:• recall for recap and review• easy deletion and editing• range of activities can be help on task bar and/or bookmarks• annotation and highlightingor more particular ones such as:• colours to distinguish different items of text• controllable display of animated images, video etc.• arrows etc from drawing menu.

Each of the action noted, was characterised as afforded and/or constrained by features from the DfEE list above.

Analysis of data

During the initial analysis, criteria were developed by which each of the features could be recognised:

• Speed: making processes happen more quickly than other methods.

• Automation: making previously tedious or effortful processes happen automatically (other than changing the form of representation).

• Capacity: the storage and retrieval of large amounts of material.

• Range: access to materials in different forms and from a wider range of sources than otherwise possible.

• Provisionality: the facility to change content• Interactivity: the ability to respond to user input repeatedly

When applied to the data, the first five proved relatively unproblematic, but interactivity seemed to cover to a variety of types of effects, and did not prove helpful for detailed analysis. It was consequently changed to a more specific concept, that of

Feedback, that is the provision of an informative response by the tool which is contingent an action by the user.

The lists of actions and underlying features could not account for all the effects noted in the classrooms, however. The actions which were afforded or constrained by the resources were developed further through a number of iterations of the data exploration process, leading to the following list of distinct actions:

• Composing: ideas can be recorded accurately as they arise• Editing: The data stored and displayed can be changed easily

with no trace of the original• Selection: Choice of resource or procedure can be made from

a list• Comparison: Features of different items displayed can be

compared• Retrieval: Stored resources can easily be retrieved for use• Apprehension: the display (text, images, sound, diagrams) is

easy for pupils to see or interpret;• Focusing: Attention can be drawn to particular aspects of a

process or representation• Transforming: The way that the data is displayed can be

changed• Role play: Activities can be carried out in a way which is

similar to activity in the ‘real world’• Collation: the facility to bring together a variety of items from

different sources into a single resource• Sharing: the facility to communicate and interchange

resources and ideas easily with others• Annotation: Notes can be added to a process or representation

at the time of use• Repeating: an automated or stored process can be repeated

at will• Modelling: A process can be simulated by representing

relationships between variables

The following additional terms were devised through a similar process in order to account for features of ICT which afforded these actions.

• Timeliness: the information available is up-to-date;• Emphasis: highlighting particular aspects of a display or idea• Multimodality: the facility to combine visual, aural, and textual

display• Accuracy: items are constructed with greater precision that is

realistic manually• List: the facility to set out a choice of resources or actions• Template: the provision of a standard outline structure for

individuals to add their own ideas• Acquisition: the entry of data into the ICT device and storage

for subsequent processing and display.

• Dynamism: processes an representations can be shown in motion

• Simultaneity: different processes or forms of display can be shown together

• Library: data can stored in an organised way for easy retrieval• Linkage: Sets of information can be linked for easy access or

processing

For each one that emerged, a check was made concerning whether it could be defined in terms the existing features. This process revealed that some seemed fundamental to the nature of ICT whereas others were constructed from these basic features during the design of the hardware and software resources. The features identified were thus divided into those which were intrinsic to programmable digital electronic systems and those which were constructed in the use made of the intrinsic features by the software designer or teacher (see Table 1). The teacher, or even learners, may also construct these features in planning the lesson or dynamically during classroom interaction. The relationships between these features and the actions they afford or constrain are also shown in Table 1.

Intrinsic features

Features of ICT which are constructed

Related intrinsic features

Actions afforded and constrained

Features contributing potential and structure for action

Speed (Sp)Display (Di)Acquisition (Aq)Communication (Cm)Storage (St)Contingency (Cn)Repetition (Re)

Capacity (Ca)Range (Ra)Automation (Au)Emphasis (Em)Template (Te)List (Ls)Provisionality (Pr)Timeliness (Ti)

Dynamism (Dy)Accuracy (Ac)Simultaneity (Si)Multimodality (Mu)Library (Li)Linkage (Ln)Feedback (Fe)

Sp, Cm, StSp, StRe, Cn, StPa, DiSt, AqDi, Cn, AqSt, Cn, SpSp, Cn, St, Cm, Di, AqSp, Di, Re, StSp, St, DiSp, Di, StSp, St, DiSt, CnSt, AuCn, Cm

ComposingEditingSelectionComparisonRetrievalApprehensionFocusingTransformingRole play

CollationSharingAnnotatationRepeatingModellingUndoing

Aq, Te, Ti, Ac Pr, LbCa, Ls, Ln, LbSi, Mu, Li, CaRa, Au, Ls, Lb, LnAc, Mu, Si Em, Te, LsAu, Pr, Dy, MuCa, Ra, Te, Ac, Lb, Pr, TiCa, Ra, Lb, Ln, SiRa, Te, Pr, LbAq, Pr, Ti, Em, Au, LbAu, Te, Pr, Ti, Ac, LnPr, Au

Table 1 Classification of the features of ICT

Interactivity, however, does not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in these lists as it involves the orchestration of features in order to sustain a sequence of reciprocal actions. This characterisation of interactivity, based on sustainment and reciprocity, is discussed further in Kennewell et al (in preparation)

It is not expected that these lists will be final; they are based on small scale research studies and will be validated in a much larger study (Interactive Teaching and ICT, a prject within the Welsh extension to the ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme) being carried out from 2005-2007.

Use of the features in Primary classrooms

The teaching in the primary school tended to follow a ‘four phase’ lesson (Hughes, 2001). The first phase of the lesson generally used the IWB and involved repetition by the whole class together of familiar actions where full participation and joint success is expected. The second phase also usually used the IWB and involved the introduction or gradual development of individual children’s skills and concepts which require some scaffolding, carried out in front of the class in such a way that all children felt involved – watching a display/animation/annotation; experiencing a variety of representations; interacting physically with displayed information; responding to questions orally with/without display, including ‘what if’ questions.

The third phase required pupils to work in groups, individually or collaboratively, on activities which practiced skills or explored concepts in more depth or across a variety of instances. The teacher circulated to give support, or worked over the whole period of time with one group whilst other groups were supervised and assisted by learning support assistants or other adult helpers. This phase did not usually involve the use of IWBs; the normal pattern was for most groups to work on paper-based or practical activity and one group to be allocated to working in pairs on the desktop PCs at the side of the class.

The final phase involved revisiting key teaching points and reviewing any difficulties which pupils had found, and again usually used the IWB. This had potential for reflective activity on the part of pupils, but was generally teacher-dominated with a lower level of pupil participation than earlier whole-class phases.

A typical mathematics lesson which was observed concerned the development of simple addition operations with young children. It started with the teacher using a prepared Powerpoint presentation to display clearly a prompt such as ‘3+2=’ to the whole class,

asking a pupil to give the answer orally, giving feedback on the answer orally, and then displaying the result on the board. Ten questions were completed rapidly with the whole class in this way; all the teacher had to do was click the board to progress the display. The automation, accuracy and feedback features of ICT were used to afford repeating, apprehension and sustainment of the activity. The second phase involved use of a special piece of software for displaying mathematical symbols and diagrams on the IWB. The task for the class was to identify all possible pairs of digits which totalled 7; the teacher called pupils up in turn to display their suggested pairs on the IWB by dragging digits and symbols from a set displayed on the board. He corrected them orally when necessary and encouraged the use of the ‘undo’ button, and provided strategic prompts to help the class find the ones not yet identified. This utilised the features of list, accuracy and provisionality to afford and constrain apprehension, selection, comparison, and undoing. The third phase involved pupils completing similar tasks on printed worksheets, which provided the template feature to afford and constrain composing, but did not have the features of selection, clarity and provisionality. Five children using individual PCs to work with the same software that had been used for the whole class on the IWB, however, one of these being a child with cerebral palsy who would not have been able to carry out the task effectively in written form. The lesson ended with a plenary phase involving a similar activity to the initial phase, except that the teacher wrote the sums on the board by hand, choosing each one to revisit a point that had caused some children a problem during the lesson. This did not utilise any particular features of ICT.

Subject Teacher use of IWB

Pupil use of IWB

Features of ICT providing potential for action

Features of ICT providing structure or limits on action

Effects perceived as related to attainment

Maths Every lesson

Frequently

Accuracy, list, provisionality, library, feedback

List Differentiation, engaging less able, longer attention, visual and dynamic, focus on subject matter not teacher, motivation, pace and flow

English Every lesson

Frequently

Accuracy, provisionality, capacity, multimodality

Template, emphasis, list, acquisition

Same text display followed by whole class, retrieve material for review, pace and flow, keyboard slows writing

Science Every lesson

Occasion-ally

List, multimodality, dynamism

Template Multiple representations, visual and dynamic

Table 2: Summary analysis of ICT’s use in each subject with pupils aged 7-9 in a highly-resourced primary school

Table 2 summarises the full analysis of the data. There was a high degree of similarity in the ways that different teachers used the IWB in relation to activity in the classroom. There were some differences in practice between subjects, however. The involvement of pupils in activity at the board was the norm in mathematics and English lessons, but not so in Science, for which teachers did not generally have the same depth of pedagogical content knowledge and relied primarily on prepared Powerpoint presentations with which they could be confidently convey the planned content.

The subsequent interviews revealed that teachers felt the IWB to be effective in gaining pupils’ attention, keeping their attention for longer, stimulating thinking and maintaining a focus on the subject matter rather than on the teacher or other pupils. The large visual display was generally suggested as the main factor which brought about this difference. “They seem to be more interested in the lesson again because they’ve got pictures, visual, they’ve got things there to look at, they’ll stop and they’ll ask and answer questions because it’s there in front of them, as opposed to us just talking to them and not having anything for them to look at.” Powerpoint was a particularly important tool for the teacher: “it brings things over”.

Teachers recognised the importance of a variety of representations, particularly for difficult ideas, and the need for a number of activities in which the same skills and concepts were involved. ICT activities were felt to add to the teacher’s repertoire, even if they were not the most important ones. The degree of engagement and participation was felt to be increased; this was particularly important for the less able children. One way in which this was achieved was by calling pupils up to the board to interact with the material; it was important that the younger children were able to drag words and images as objects rather than writing or drawing. One teacher saw the ‘hands-on’ interaction was for this pupil was very valuable, but also thought that all the other pupils were cognitively engaged in the same task – indeed, they were considering whether or not the selected pupil might complete the task successfully, how they would do it themselves, and what mistakes the selected pupil might make. The teachers felt that it was valuable to be able to show pupils’ work on the whiteboard, and were eagerly anticipating a system upgrade which would allow them to do this from the network rather than transferring via floppy disk.

The most significant feature of teachers’ organisation with ICT was the speed and ease with which material prepared in advance was brought up onto the IWB to engage pupils. The material had been appropriated and developed by the teachers, and they were thoroughly familiar with the content which would appear. This was combined with the usual process of using established organisational

routines in order to maintain a fast pace to lessons. The flow of the lesson was not purely linear; teachers moved backwards and forwards through the content and process of the lesson by scrolling documents, selecting powerpoint slides, and ‘flipping’ through pages of the ‘flipchart’ software provided with the IWBs. They also responded to points arising from the class, although some opportunities were missed. This may have been caused by a reluctance to depart from the highly detailed planning employed when their subject knowledge was limited. This planning, however, together with their experience of pupils’ difficulties and detailed knowledge of pupils’ attributes, enabled them to select the right level of task for pupils when called to perform in front of whole class as well as for individual work.

The teachers interacted with the class by facing them all the time, and, aided by routines, preparation and human support, were able to effect continuous engagement on the part of pupils. This appeared to help in promoting strategic thinking. The high degree of engagement during whole class teaching, together with the shared visual display, supported a level of scaffolding which is often hard to find in primary classrooms (Bliss et al, 1996). The ability to replay events and review processes helped them to promote reflection. They were also able to demonstrate ICT techniques easily to the whole class.

There was a focus on the subject matter being discussed, rather than on the teacher, due to the teacher’s position which was more to the side of the board than with manual whiteboards, and also due to the pace and smoothness in organisation. There was a high level of teacher direction concerning the pupils’ tasks, but pupil choice during the task was supported. One particular teacher felt that when a selected pupil was working on the board at the front, the whole class were thinking about the task, considering how they would do it and what mistakes the selected pupil might make. Although this was not new with the use of the IWB rather than the ordinary whiteboard, the IWB made pupil activity at the front of the class easier because he could exploit their skill in selecting and moving objects on the screen rather than always requiring them to draw or write on the board.

The teachers also remarked on the extent to which they shared materials; this was more so than previously because they were all facing the same challenge of unfamiliar technology and felt that this increased their workload. They recognised that ICT helped with sharing. They also all remarked on the fact that they did not use the same materials year after year; with ICT, they realised that they could improve their presentations and activities as they learned more about the features and techniques of ICT, and they were

motivated to improve their materials because ICT allowed them easily to make changes.

Use of the features in Secondary classrooms

The patterns of lessons varied to a greater extent across different subjects taught in secondary school than in the primary school, reflecting the differences in subject content and culture, and pedagogical practices associated with each curriculum area.

The ways in which the teachers used the features of ICT varied, too. The subject-specific nature of the practice is illustrated by the following examples, drawn from observations and subsequent interviews:

The science teacher used dynamism, automation and accuracy to display a continually running image of what was happening during an experiment, which afforded apprehension of key features of the physical changes which were hard for pupils to identify in the real experiment that they were observing.

The MFL teacher used emphasis to highlight patterns and afford focusing on changes in verb endings when the subject of a sentence changed. She also used templates to create texts with gaps for pupils to fill, constraining their composing and affording focusing on the word endings.

The history teacher used the range, capacity and library features of ICT to afford collation of images and quotations from a variety of sources in different physical locations, and the list and provisionality features to afford selection and undoing when pupils attempted to classify causes of events under different headings.

The maths teacher used the provisionality of ICT to afford editing and undoing when pupils to try out their ideas concerning which pairs of hidden fractional and decimal values totalled 10, and to make changes themselves when they could see that they were incorrect. The list feature was used to constrain their selection in order to avoid frustration.

The English teacher used the acquisition and library features to afford the composing of pupils’ own ideas about characters in a play and subsequent retrieval for further points to be added. She also used multimodality and simultaneity to represent ideas in sound, images as well as written text and afford apprehension and comparison.

The D&T teacher used acquisition, automation, template and provisionality to afford composing, modelling, editing and role play when pupils represented 3-D objects as 2-D drawings for authentic design problems. They also used accuracy and automation to afford their transforming of designs into products of a better quality than if drawn manually.

The Welsh teacher recognised the pupils’ ICT capability and had high expectations for the ICT capability which they developed in specialist lessons. This enabled her and the pupils to use the acquisition, provisionality, and library features of ICT to afford composing, collation, sharing and role play in developing develop their own Powerpoint presentations and using them to support talks about their hobbies to the rest of the class.

Table 3 shows a summary of the full analysis. The variations between teachers partially reflected different levels of ICT capability (the science teacher, particularly, was highly expert in using Powerpoint), but also reflected differences in characteristics of the subject. The appropriate ways of representing subject concepts and processes with ICT in order to develop pupils’ understanding led to different features being selected to afford and constrain activity.

Steve Kennewell BERA conference paper 2004

Subject Teacher use of IWB

Pupil use of IWB

Features of ICT providing potential for action

Features of ICT providing structure for action

Effects related to attainment

Science Every lesson

When appropriate

Dynamism, automation,list, multimodality, provisionality, accuracy, library, timeliness

Template, list

Motivation, engagement (particularly lower ability)

Maths Provisionality, automation, feedback, list, library

List, emphasis,

Context for mental arithmetic, collaboration, problem solving, engagement, differentiation, hide/reveal to focus attention on steps in technique

History/Geography

Most lessons

Frequently

Feedback, list, linkage, library, range

List, emphasis

Attention, involvement, whole class contribution by pupils (especially less able)

English Most lessons

Frequently

Provisionality, automation, simultaneity, acquisition, multimodality

Template, emphasis

Motivation for less able, quicker/clearer creation of text, representation of words through sound and images as well as written text

Welsh Frequently

When appropriate

Capacity, library,multimodality

List, acquisition

Motivation, perseverance, responsibility for grammar and spelling, reduction in quality of thinking engagement, time on task, keyboard is slow for entering text, lower ability improve skills away from the computer.

D&T Frequently

Occasion-ally for sketches

Acquisition, provisionality, simultaneity

List Improves the quality of evaluation and encourages reflection on the design/make process, technical drawing ideas transfer to manual skills

MFL Every lesson – no OWB

Frequently

Feedback, list, capacity

Emphasis, template

Attention; retention of words seen dynamically; maintain interest longer, takes time to produce results

PE Rarely Never Automation, dynamism

Emphasis Developing technical skills in gym, athletics

Music Most lessons

Frequently

Provisionality, acquisition,

Template, All can participate using keyboards Complexity of software

18

Steve Kennewell BERA conference paper 2004

automation, library, simultaneity

Table 3: Summary analysis of ICT’s use in each subject with pupils aged 11-12 in a highly-resourced secondary school

19

Steve Kennewell BERA conference paper 2004

There were some important areas of similarity between teachers, however, and these also matched closely the practice of the primary teachers. By preparing resources in advance and loading the resources required for a lesson in advance, teachers generated a smoothness in their organisational activity, maintained a momentum to the flow of the lesson and kept learners engaged more continuously than with traditional resources. Teachers used the IWB software for focusing learners’ attention on salient features of the task and content – labelling, highlighting, colour coding, classifying. It was common for pupils to be keen to come to the board to write up ideas or drag an item into an appropriate position. At these times, the pace of activity slowed considerably, but the continued high level of engagement of pupils was evident and the reaction of the class indicated that all or most pupils were thinking along with the selected pupil about what the best action would be.

This reaction was also evident to the pupil selected to work at the board, however, so that when they were unsure of what to do on the basis of their knowledge or skills, they tentatively tried one possibility after another, gauging the reaction of their peers and undoing each time they perceived that they were wrong. The features of provisionality and feedback can be beneficial to learning in that they reduces the risk of failure for learners, but there is also a danger that students use them to achieve their goals through trial and error, thus avoiding the cognitive effort that would be expected to result in learning.

The main difference between from primary practice was that secondary teachers rarely used a Powerpoint presentation alone in order to convey content, and this more flexible and varied use of resources perhaps reflects a greater depth of pedagogical content knowledge. Secondary teachers were keen to incorporate materials produced externally, however, and the lack of sufficient resources was highlighted several times by teachers. This is another facet of the feature range which provides a constraint on activity. In that its source is external to the classroom setting, it is clearly a different sort of constraint from that which the teacher decides to impose on learners in order to direct their activity. This difference is important in analysing pedagogical practices.

Summary and conclusions

Although the results are not generalisable beyond the particular classrooms studied, the ATLAS framework has been valuable in analysing the ways that teachers orchestrate the features of the classroom activity setting. The features of ICT identified by DfES (1998) have been validated for the analysis of how ICT can provide potential and structure for action, but further attributes have been identified which are needed in order to account for all the effects observed. These include features intrinsic to ICT and features constructed by practitioners in software design and in classroom teaching. The extended list of features should provide assistance in software design, in planning professional development for teachers, and in developing teacher education programmes. Further work will be needed to validate the extended list of features across a wider range of technologies and practices, although it is to be

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expected that further technological and pedagogical development will continually create new possibilities which will need to be added to the list.

In highly-resourced school settings, where teachers have continual access to high quality equipment at school and at home, and are able to make frequent use of it in their teaching, the potential of these features is being incorporated into their pedagogical reasoning. Studies of typical teachers in such settings have provided evidence that most characteristics of effective teaching (see Kennewell, et al, in preparation) are aided by IWBs: clear presentations, appropriate pacing, modelling of skills, interactive questioning, smooth flow of activity, efficient resource management, assessment/ diagnosis/feedback and matching learning tasks to student attributes. Although not observed in these schools, conceptual mapping is also aided by ICT (Conlon, 2002)

There was a high degree of commonality seen in the features that were exploited in different subjects and phases, but there were important variations reflecting differences in concepts and culture between subjects and ages taught, and different pedagogical styles between teachers. Teachers recognised the value of working together to develop their pedagogical knowledge, and knew how to use ICT to communicate and exchange material, but the differences in perception were limiting the extent to which they shared ideas. This means that sharing was underused by teachers themselves. This may explain why it is also having limited impact in the classroom generally. There is much potential to exploit the use of both collation and sharing in pupil activity in the classroom and beyond which may require a pedagogical shift together with developments in resources and ICT capability.

However, teachers in both schools were achieving a considerable development in pedagogical content knowledge through their own individual and collaborative efforts, without systematic training. In this informal, self-help professional development context, it seems that the features of ICT were being incorporated into teachers’ existing pedagogical knowledge rather than ICT causing a shift in pedagogy. This is not surprising, given the other features of the setting in which the teachers were working; although the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies did not have the same status in Wales as in England, most of the principles and guidance had been promoted heavily in Wales and had reinforced a highly structured, teacher-centred pedagogy rather than encouraging alternative approaches involving greater pupil autonomy.

Furthermore, IWBs seem to reinforce traditional pedagogies. They do not in themselves afford learner autonomy in the way that laptop, or even desktop, PCs do. The long-awaited ‘transforming pedagogy’ for ICT (Somekh & Davies, 1991) clearly requires more than regular use of ICT by teachers; it requires a change in pedagogical knowledge and beliefs. The teacher’s orchestration of affordances and constraints is driven by their pedagogical reasoning, and much of the reasoning used by the teachers in this study reflected a ‘transmission’ view of learning rather than a ‘construction’ view. If pupils are to develop more independence in their learning, they need more control over the pace and flow of activity and over the process of collating and sharing resources which ICT

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affords. The potential value of playful activity for learning in an ICT environment has been shown (Morgan & Kennewell, 2005), but this changes the nature of the ‘task’ as external goals are absent. For this potential to be realised, teachers will need to design the classroom setting so that the features of IWBs are available more directly to learners during individual and group activity, rather than access to them being tightly structured by the teacher during whole-class teaching. All the learners observed in the classrooms studied were confident users of ICT, and had little difficulty adding IWB skills to their repertoire. They were able to orchestrate the features of the setting – tools within the software, more expert peers, learning support assistants, teachers, posters of the wall – in order to afford actions in pursuit of their goals.

Although this requires a shift in pedagogical perspective for many teachers, many of the prerequisites for such a change are in place. The current level of integration of IWBs into teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge is an achievement which should not be underestimated; it represents a development in craft knowledge and skills which afford more fundamental changes in practice. This does not require great technical confidence or competence; it was noticeable that the two secondary teachers whose learning management allowed greatest pupil involvement in the use of ICT were those with the greatest and least ICT capability. The science teacher used ICT flexibly to provide an initial conceptual representation of the matters to be studied, a continual animated display of the key features of the experiment being carried out, and a tool for groups of pupils to produce graphs of their results as soon as they had completed their readings. He was a ‘synergistic user’, at the top of Beauchamp’s (2004) scale of pedagogical ICT capability. The Welsh teacher, on the other hand, was at the lowest level on the scale, but was sufficiently confident with the pedagogical potential of the medium and the ICT capability of her pupils that she felt able to delegate the use of the IWB completely to pupils to represent their ideas to the class.

The research reported here focused on how ICT was being used and did not examine non-ICT settings. With no direct comparison with other resources available, it could be argued that there is nothing special about ICT. Indeed, one of the secondary school teachers interviewed, who was new to the school and had not used an IWB before, felt that his practice would not be affected as it already utilised the style of pupil involvement at the board which was seen by others to be characteristic of teaching with the IWB. However, a superficial consideration of ‘traditional’ classroom media – the ordinary black/whiteboard, the textbook, the worksheet, the blank piece of paper, even the analogue video recording - suggests that they are more limited in their affordances and much less flexible in their constraints than new digital media. As well as the intrinsic features of ICT, a large number of other features have been constructed which make ICT fundamentally different as an educational medium. More features may also be constructed in these transformed practices which afford different forms of action and interaction on the part of pupils; the communicative facility of networked computers seems seriously underexploited in schools in comparison to other organisations, for instance. The features of interactive

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presentation tools can be developed creatively to exploit new forms of interactivity in teaching and to support a more participatory pedagogy.

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