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The Eiffel Project
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge
Version 1.2
September 1996
4) Money, Management, and Evaluation
Through the Challenge Grant for Technology in Education, the Eiffel
Project will receive $7 million between October 1996 and September
2001, and the consortium backing it will raise $11.2 million to
complete planned initial work. The summary budgets for the five
years are as follows:
[BUDGET INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON REQUEST]
The management structure for the Eiffel Project will ensure that
all aspects of the project are carried out effectively. This structure
includes four main management layers: a Directorship layer, an Implementation
Management layer, a Lead Teacher layer, and an Advisory layer. The
Directorship layer and the Implementation Management layer together
form the Project Management Group.
The Directorship layer consists of the three Co-Principal Investigators.
They will be responsible for the overall conduct of the project.
They will convene and chair the Project Management Group; hire and
appoint staff; convene Advisory Boards; submit annual reports; and
be responsible for preserving the vision of the Eiffel Project throughout
its operations.
The Implementation Management layer consists of three project managers:
the Project Infrastructure Manager, the Project Content Manager,
and the Project Support Manager. All three Project Managers will
be responsible for advising the Co-PIs and serving in the Project
Management Group. The Project Infrastructure Manager will be an
ILT position and will have lead responsibility for technology options
and decisions; for preparing assessments and technology plans for
project schools; and for managing the installation and maintenance
of the technological infrastructure of the project. The Project
Content Manager, also an ILT position, will have lead responsibility
for digital library resources and related educational programs;
for working with scholars and professionals to develop curricular
resources; and for collaborating with participating teachers to
ensure that these resources are effective at the school and classroom
levels. The Project Support Manager, a CCE position, will have lead
responsibility for professional development within the project;
for organizing Design Studios for Teachers; for utilizing the school
Media Centers to promote understanding of the project among parents
and community groups; and for implementing just-in-time support
via desktop videoconferencing.
The Lead Teacher layer consists of a cohort of Lead Teachers --
one will be appointed at each school added to the Eiffel Project
curriculum network -- responsible for helping the teaching staff
at each participating school develop confidence with new equipment
and become artful in using it in the classroom. Lead Teachers will
serve as on-site liaisons with Project Support Teams, scheduling
their visits and setting agenda for work with them. Lead Teachers
will regularly apprise the Project Management Group of relevant
developments relating to the organizational goals and pedagogical
objectives of the overall project. They should also serve as resource
persons for the evaluation teams. Each connected CBO will identify
a senior staff member to serve in a similar manner.
The Advisory layer consists of two advisory boards: the Parent-Community
Advisory Board (P-CAB) and the School-University Advisory Board
(S-UAB). The P-CAB will be formed of parent representatives and
representatives of participating community organizations. It will
meet regularly, sometimes with the Project Management Group, to
discuss community participation and to plan strategy for enfranchising
new community partners. It will also be responsible for coordinating
public events relating to the project and its exhibition. The S-UAB
will be formed of key teachers and university personnel associated
with the project. It will meet regularly, sometimes with the Project
Management Group, to discuss issues relating to interaction of the
schools with Columbia and its constituent schools and departments.
Eiffel Project evaluation activity has four key interrelated objectives:
- To guide the full extension of network connectivity to all schools
in New York City and the greater New York region in accordance
with models proven most appropriate through the project.
- To produce a clear and well-grounded statement of proven ways
universities can, through innovative use of new media, advance
their research and educational agendas in conjunction with a vigorous
and potent extension of resources to their surrounding communities.
- To substantially increase understanding of diverse pedagogical
possibilities emerging with the integration of advanced information
and communication technologies in schools.
- To provide leadership in the definition of effective policy
relating to all aspects of the educational enterprise as they
relate to the changing global information infrastructure and associated
digital media.
To satisfy these objectives, the project will integrate four varieties
of assessment work, each conducted by an organization skilled in
that domain of program evaluation: school performance assessment;
"sampling studies" of students' higher order critical skills of
analysis; formative process assessment relating to administration,
management, and execution at all levels of project implementation,
as well as evaluation of the overarching development process; and
school technology audits.
School performance assessments are an essential element of the
restructuring process for many Coalition schools. As the school's
curricular, temporal, and physical structures are re-engineered,
the school is monitored for effects on student and faculty, and
the implementation agenda is tracked as well. This assessment activity
has both a summative and a formative dimension. Part of the aim
is to document, through rigorous methods, the educational effects
of the restructuring of the schools; the school performance assessment
is also intended, however, to provide important formative information
to individuals leading the redesign effort of a particular school.
New York University is currently conducting school performance assessment
of many Annenberg-supported Coalition schools in New York City,
and this work will be extended through the Challenge Grant to encompass
the additional schools and particular technological issues related
to the Eiffel Project. In particular, NYU evaluators will seek to
identify ways that Coalition schools may benefit from participation
in a large network of restructuring schools. The effects of the
new media access and associated professional development activities
on faculty will form a second important focus of study. The Eiffel
Project's success is heavily predicated on its strategies for empowering
teachers with new skills, new tools, and substantial support resources.
Much of NYU's school performance assessment will examine the effectiveness
of these efforts, with both formative and summative objectives.
"Sampling studies" will help determine the extent and nature of
the projects' effect on students' critical skills. Much of the curricular
development associated with the project will be aimed at enhancing
students' abilities to address complex problems with sophisticated
tools in diverse disciplines and reflecting those abilities in digital
portfolios. As part of the Eiffel Project's assessment, the National
Center for Research on Education, Students, and Teachers (NCREST)
will investigate the effects of the project on critical thinking
skills. NCREST will conduct controlled studies with samples of students.
In these studies, students will receive a battery of unfamiliar
problem solving situations, testing their approaches to the problems.
The evaluations will consider a range of abilities, including students'
ability to orient themselves in a new problem area; to formulate
a well-conceived experimental plan; to understand implications of
findings and of new information; to consider a question or problem
from diverse perspectives; to use, make sense of, and dismiss evidence
of various kinds; and to communicate understanding.
In addition to formative evaluation of particular curricular initiatives
at each school, a project of this scale demands formative assessment
of the development process at the macro-level. Project leaders need
feedback relating to the strengths and weaknesses of the inter-institutional
collaboration; they need to understand which administrative structures
are encouraging good innovation and which are hindering it; they
need to be apprised of emerging patterns of difficulties at the
distributed school sites and of patterns of success as well. The
Institute for Learning Technologies conducts such process-oriented
formative assessment in the context of all its projects, and ILT
will implement this level of assessment for the Eiffel Project as
well. Because a primary goal of the project is to marry the academic
resources of a major research university to the restructuring program
of an established reform movement, it will be important to monitor
continuously the extent to which these interactions are occurring
with good effect. The Institute has substantial experience exploring
the use of networking technologies to support such inter-institutional
collaboration; a major focus of this area of assessment will be
building on that accumulated knowledge through prototyping of new
arrangements, including substantial use of desktop videoconferencing
over the Internet. Finally, the Institute for Learning Technologies
will conduct full technology audits of all schools entering the
project. These audits will be used to guide infrastructure and hardware
development plans at each site. The evolution of each participating
school's technological assets will be documented as it unfolds by
the institute, and this documentation will contribute to overall
evaluation efforts.
We plan to disseminate the findings of the project by drawing up
two plans to extend the Eiffel model to larger areas and by publishing
three detailed evaluation studies that will be accessible not only
to educators but to the wider public. The two plans we will develop
are:
- New York City Board of Education Plan: This will be a validated
model for extending technology to all schools served by the NYC
Board of Education.
- NY Metro Area Plan: This will be a plan for the entire New York
Metropolitan region, designed to maximize the use of its high-level
intellectual and cultural resources for the improvement of K-12
education.
The three evaluation studies are:
- Innovation Study: A study of the processes of innovation and
school change as driven by advanced technologies.
- Curricular Change Study: A study of the interrelationship between
technological change and curricular change, and the effects of
these changes on student learning.
- Teacher Development Study: A study of the recommended strategies
for teacher support and staff development.
We also plan to develop a Technology and Pedagogy Workshop, through
which we will work with advanced engineering groups and their collaborators
from engineering and technology firms, as well as from the New York
area software and telecommunications companies, to foster the process
of what we call "pedagogy transfer" - the transfer of pedagogical
experience from the schools to the advanced technology companies
- so that their technology-development work will become better informed
by our educational experience. In addition, we will organize one
or more conferences toward the end of the project. Web development
will proceed continuously throughout the project, both as a mean
of supporting internal implementation and as a means of making the
project available to a broader set of interested parties.
In our view, however, the dominant dissemination issue for project
work ensconced within the National Information Infrastructure is
how to scale the project up. As discussed in section 2a4, multimedia
portfolios representing students', teachers' and whole schools'
work will be used to share this work both within and beyond the
Eiffel Project's network. And participants will routinely interact
with peers and colleagues on the Internet in the course of their
work. Dissemination is part and parcel of wide-area networked project
work. The real question is how to extend the project itself.
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