Megatrends in Communication, Technology, and Change bring with them strong implications for today’s leaders global education leaders and leaders of tomorrow. The technology sector is vast. Indeed, it’s a veritable universe of information and an exciting frontier open to all (Templeton, 2016). This frontier can bridge the educational multicultural proficiency gap by providing ways to model, inform, and evaluate teacher quality.
Increasing our multicultural competence as educational leaders requires us to rethink our prior assumptions and consider life’s issues through the lenses of people who come from cultural backgrounds different than our own. According to Banks & McGee-Banks (2013) “multicultural education incorporates the idea that all students—regardless of their gender; sexual orientation; social class; and ethnic, racial, or cultural characteristics—should have an equal opportunity to learn in school” (p. 3). If designed and used properly, information and communications technology has the potential to make education training more effective, affordable, and flexible at the local, state, national, and global level.
As Harris (2013) concluded, cultural proficiency is a deep, personal introspective work one undertakes before attempting to influence the behavior of others. “Multicultural competence is the process in which a person develops competencies in multiple ways of perceiving, evaluating, believing, and solving problems” (Ameny-Dixon, 2004, p. 5). Danielson & McCrea, (2000) acknowledged, the teacher development and evaluation processes must represent an equity of objective, standardized, and extremely defensible data about teacher performance, which influences outcomes in local pedagogical practice (Danielson, 2012). In fact, evaluation systems which include both accountability and personal growth dimensions are both desirable and necessary for evaluation to productively service the needs of individual teachers, the school, and community at large.
The most effective approach to quality teachers is to “grow” their own within their schools by encouraging meaningful involvement, accessibility, quality instruction and cultural competence. Improvement through change is a process vital for instruction and has been examined and supported at the regional level through the integration of improved technology resources and support. The Regional Service Centers in their current incarnations, provide support to educators within the state and at the district level, through targeted professional development, proliferation of resources and tools for multicultural inclusion, and clarification and reference for the State’s teacher and curricular standards. The improved technology-infused teacher training construct, represents a process built around a cyclical ideal that form denotes function and the removal of spatial limitations and time constraints at a training site. In order for these systems to be effective in the introduction of technology relevant applications for teacher development and support, this process must be link to a broader scope of educational reforms (Kyriakides & Demetriou, 2007).
At the state level, the procedural linking of educational reform, is defined through uniformed goals and standards. These goals and standards are used to evaluate efficiency through the identification of students’ learning needs; development of performance objectives; professional development; and summative assessment of teacher performance. Educational training at the state level has been affected by technological trends through the implementation of technology focused multi-dimensional teacher evolution systems. Through the creation of these multifunctional systems the State has an evaluation framework that provides the proper basis for refinement of teacher’s skills and support for ever-growing multicultural influences.
As described by the National Council on Teacher Quality, (2016) the fidelity placed on teacher quality, is significantly affected at the national level by technological trends. The distribution of efficiency and equity of highly qualified educators is dependent, in large, on ensuring that educators are highly trained, adequately resourced, and well informed on the multicultural communities they service. Maintenance of teacher development and evaluation systems describe a unilateral division of systematic procedural evaluation rubrics tied to common educational goals; scaffolded by the responsibility of educational stakeholders through clearly defined standards and reliable technological integrated instruments (NCTQ, 2016). The National Council on Teacher Quality (2016) reported that 42 of the 50 United States have currently implemented some sort of teacher evaluation system that incorporates high-quality, flexible technology based-instructions with appropriate resources and services to meet individual educator needs.
Outside of the national perspective, there is sufficient depth and details into the theoretical influence of technology on equitable teacher quality as to how global education leaders must apply, implement, and accept new conceptualizations of effective teacher pedagogy and reflection. Strategies for promoting collaborative decision-making and retaining employees are consistent themes of improvement found in the globalization of educational practices.
According to Jung (2001), from a global education prospective, there are several principles needed to develop a system of teacher preparation, including but not limited to enhanced computer literacy, efficient and equitable program evaluation, ongoing teacher incentives in continual individual learning, moving teachers on a path of continuous improvement and integration of technology throughout their careers.
In closing, the capitalization of information is the direct result of the evolution of how information is delivered and accessed by individuals. Today’s educational leaders will not see the future for which they are preparing themselves and the multicultural communities they service; therefore, it is imperative that they have the ability to communicate through cultural boundaries and equitable channels to create the conditions, solve the problems, and develop a vision for educating our students for today and tomorrow with technologically relevant tools. If we care about our students, we must prepare the people preparing them, to a world with increasing globalization; a world, heavily molded by the technology and communication tools we utilize.
References
Ameny-Dixon, G.M. (2004). Why multicultural education is more important than higher education now than ever: A global perspective. International Journal of Scholarly
Academic Intellectual Diversity, 8(1), 1-9.
Banks, J. A., & McGee-Banks, C. A. (2013). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (8th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Danielson, C. (2012). Observing classroom practice. Educational Leadership, 70(3), 32-37.
Danielson, C. & McGreal, T.L. (2000). Teacher evaluation: To enhance professional practice. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Harris, S. (2013). Conflicts in culture: Strategies to understand and resolve the issues. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jung, I. (2001). Issues and Challenges of Providing Online In-service Teacher Training: Koreas experience. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2(1). doi:10.19173/irrodl. v2i1.30.
Kyriakides, L., & Demetriou, D. (2007). Introducing a teacher evaluation system based on teacher effectiveness research: An investigation of stakeholders’ perceptions. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 20, 43-64. doi: 10.1007/s11092-007-9046-3.
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2016). State of the states 2012: Teacher effectiveness policies. Washington, DC: Author. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED536371.
Templeton, N. R., Willis, K., & Hendricks, L. (2016). The Coaching Principal: Building Teacher Capacity Through the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (T-TESS). International Journal Of Organizational Innovation, 8(4), 140-145.