Bullock, D. (2004). Moving From Theory to Practice: An Examination of the Factors That Preservice Teachers Encounter as the Attempt to Gain Experience Teaching with Technology During Field Placement Experiences. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. 12 (2), pp. 211-237. Norfolk, VA: AACE.
The study investigates the factors influencing the pre-service teachers’ teaching with technology in their field placement experiences in secondary schools. The authors chose case study approach to describe the enable and disable factors the pre-service teachers encountered during their field teaching. Data collected from surveys, group and individual interviews, and written reflections was examined to help identify enabling and disabling factors, and gain an understanding of how those factors influence practice. There are five categories of factors that influence pre-service teachers’ decision to use technology in teaching.
1. Factors influenced by the instruction they received through the training program and their mentor teachers. If mentor teachers give them opportunities to use the technology or collaborate with the pre-service to develop technology enhanced lessons, the pre-service teachers are more likely to integrate the technology in their teaching regardless of their previous attitudes about technology.
2. Factors influenced by their own personal expectations, those of the teacher preparation program, those of their mentor teachers, or those of students and parents. If the program expects to see the trainee use technology in their lessons, the requirement should be mentioned explicitly, or they will address the technology as an add-on lesson.
3. Factors influenced by mentor teacher, school, district, or state requirements. The supports from stakeholders in teacher education play an important role in classroom technology use.
4. Factors influenced by the type of technical support for technology use in the classroom. The access to technology, software and technical support are all influential to teaching with technology.
5. Factors influenced by the attitudes, fears, and experiences that the pre-service teacher had before or during their field experiences.
- The desire to use technology as an integral part of instruction rather than an “add on” will be the enable factor.
- The trainee’s successful experiences working with technology will led pre-service teachers to see technology-enhanced instructions valuable and worthwhile.
Overall, there was no single factors appeared to be an overwhelming disabler of enabler for the technology use. Instead, the combination of factors especially the combination of attitude, experience, and modelling appear to have had the most influence on the decisions about how and when to use the technology in their teaching.
My Perspectives:
The authors selected two trainees from a larger survey who displayed both similarities in terms of their participation in the course and their field teaching sites and difference in terms of their attitudes about technology prior to the study. It was surprised to know that the person who had expressed enthusiasm to use technology didn’t use any in her teaching while another person who was sceptical in technology eventually adopt the technology in classroom teaching. This evidence has strongly suggested that there are something more than individual beliefs in technology enhanced approaches. What was found here has contradicted to the Handal's assumptions in the previous article who claimed that personal beliefs are the strongest influences on technology adoption.
I found this study very helpful for my interview phrase with tertiary EFL teachers. Although the participants of this study were teacher trainees having their field placement experience. The methodology and findings from this research act as a mirror for my future analysis of in-service teachers who adopt technology in their every day teaching. The author developed this case study from the previous larger survey engaged in teaching with technology preparation course. If the in-depth case study had not been applied here, there would not have found the underlying complexities that each trainee had encountered during their field teaching.
This research approach corroborates my research methodology which will take off with a larger survey and then be narrowed down to individual interviews and observations. The enable and disable factors found in the context of pre-services teachers in this study has shed some lights on my assumptions about the potential factors influencing in-service teachers’ use of technology. The conclusion that there is no dominant enabling disabling factors on the technology use also confirm my predictions about what may happen in the Thai tertiary context. It is more interesting to understand how factors varied from individual to individual rather than making a generalization.
Imagine what would happen in a study with in-service teachers with some changes of these variables:
mentor teachers ---> senior teachers / co-teachers
teacher training course ---> course description / curriculum
preservice technology experience ---: in-service technology experience
faculty expectations ---> professional expectations
The same variable for in-service
- students' expectation
- technology supports
- access to the technology and related facilities
- pressure from standard tests
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