Key Take-Aways
Developing and strengthening equitable edtech systems takes time. School- and system-level edtech leaders should approach systems improvement iteratively and strategically build on progress over time.
Equitable edtech systems are driven by distributed leadership rather than individual edtech leaders. Edtech leaders can improve the longevity of systems improvement efforts by sharing leadership with key stakeholders.
Overview
This profile describes one school system team’s participation in The Learning Accelerator (TLA)'s EdTech Peer Learning Cohort offered in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Office of Educational Technology (MA DESE OET). This profile highlights one example of the real-world application of the EdTech Systems Guide and TLA’s Driving EdTech Systems resources that help leaders put this guidance into practice, detailing their participation and describing high-level takeaways for school and system-level edtech leaders.
Chicopee Public Schools is a district in western Massachusetts that participated in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 EdTech Peer Learning Cohorts facilitated by TLA in partnership with MA DESE OET. These cohorts brought together teams led by school- and system-level edtech leaders from across Massachusetts to develop and strengthen edtech systems and practices in alignment with the EdTech Systems Guide produced by TLA and MA DESE OET in 2021. With the support of a TLA coach, teams audited their edtech systems to identify challenges, then designed and implemented solutions to make system-level improvements. Throughout each cohort, participants reported on progress, shared their learnings, and collaborated with other teams in monthly whole-group sessions. Over the two years Chicopee participated in the EdTech Peer Learning Cohort, the team made significant progress in developing equitable, sustainable edtech systems. This profile details each of the following sections to highlight the team’s work during this time, and elevates themes, practices, and resources edtech leaders might adopt within their contexts.
Problems of Practice: This section outlines the specific problems of practice Chicopee identified in each cohort year, their reasons for choosing these areas to focus on, and the progress they made in addressing them.
Leadership in Action: This section highlights key leadership decisions that contributed to Chicopee’s success.
Conditions for Success: This section discusses the conditional factors that supported Chicopee's progress.
Demographics: This section provides an overview of Chicopee’s student demographics during the 2023-24 EdTech Peer Learning Cohort, offering context for their work and insights for other districts.
Problems of Practice
Participants in the EdTech Peer Learning Cohort were expected to identify a problem of practice that would strengthen the selection, implementation, or evaluation processes in their edtech systems. To choose their problems of practice, teams analyzed their needs by completing self-assessments of their edtech practices, engaging stakeholders, analyzing data, reflecting on their school or system goals, and understanding opportunities to promote equity. Ultimately, they organized their systems improvement efforts around a single identified problem of practice that simplified their improvement efforts into one question (e.g., “How can I use asynchronous supports to expand my capacity?” or “What are the characteristics of effective expectations for and instructional uses of edtech tools?”). The tables below describe the two problems of practice that Chicopee explored, why they chose each, and their progress in addressing them.
2022-23
| What was their problem of practice? | What are the foundational elements of edtech systems that set up a new leader for equitable edtech leadership? |
| Why did they choose this? | The leader was new to his position and was the district’s first Director of Instructional Technology. The district had some edtech practices in place but lacked unifying, systems-level practices or oversight. Because of this, the team felt it was important to strategically build the foundation for long-term edtech systems improvement and create resources to enable more focused work around edtech selection, implementation, and evaluation in the future. |
| What progress did they make? | Recognizing the need to understand what tools were deployed across their district, as well as how and by whom these tools were used, the team leader began by creating an edtech inventory. This inventory raised questions related to their instructional vision, highlighting disparities in technology use between classrooms and schools. To make this work visible and transparent for stakeholders, the team leader developed a public-facing website, which they planned to expand to include implementation support resources for edtech tools. Finally, realizing the need to expand their edtech leadership capacity, the leader assembled an edtech leadership team consisting of teachers and other leaders from several district schools. This team helped inform priorities, elevate practitioner needs, and add context to leadership decisions, building on the foundation the leader had established. |
2023-24
| What was their problem of practice? | How do we identify and support the use of better edtech tools? |
| Why did they choose this? | The team’s work in the first year provided a foundation on which they could build and work more directly toward actualizing their instructional vision for the use of technology. Building on this foundational work, the team chose to focus on improving both their edtech evaluation and implementation practices in the second year. By concentrating on evaluation, the team could identify the most effective edtech products, streamline the district’s edtech portfolio, and provide more robust support resources for the remaining tools to enhance adoption. |
| What progress did they make? | The team developed and tested an edtech evaluation rubric that incorporates stakeholder input, elevates historically marginalized stakeholders, and comprehensively examines technology tools for usage, cost, accessibility, alignment with district goals, and more. In addition, the team began building implementation support resources for key edtech tools, which they made accessible on their public-facing website developed the year before. While they were unable to surface the impact of these resources on edtech tool usage metrics or teachers’ ability to integrate tools into instruction, the team ended the second year of the cohort by planning to explore the impact of these resources in the following year. |
Leadership in Action
One of the many lessons covered in the EdTech Peer Learning Cohort is the importance of intentional leadership in driving edtech system improvements. Chicopee’s team made significant progress in addressing each of their problems of practice largely due to specific leadership decisions made throughout their participation. Among these, two key leadership moves, contributed to their success:
Distributing EdTech Leadership: At the start of the first cohort, Chicopee’s team consisted solely of the Director of Instructional Technology. Quickly realizing the need for added capacity to diversify perspectives, this leader assembled a team of stakeholders representing a broad swath of the district’s teachers, school leaders, and critical participants from other district departments. This significantly expanded the team’s capacity and allowed for collaborative design and shared ownership of the resources and processes the team developed.
Designing Systems with Transition in Mind: During the second year of the cohort, the team experienced a major transition in leadership when the original leader left the district. While this could have been a crippling blow to the team’s improvement efforts, the systems and practices collaboratively developed over the previous year allowed them to continue working under the interim leadership of another team member while the leader’s replacement was found. When the district hired a new Director of Instructional Technology, they were able to quickly get up to speed on the group’s work and continue building on the team’s systems improvement efforts.
Conditions for Success
Systems improvement does not happen in a vacuum – rather, it exists within and is influenced by several conditional factors. When considering Chicopee’s progress, it is important to consider the conditions that supported its success. TLA’s Innovative Teaching Implementation Framework provides a framework for considering the conditions that support the planning, adoption, and scaling of innovative initiatives and can be used to identify those that accelerated Chicopee’s edtech systems improvement efforts, including:
Visioning: Chicopee’s work began with and was centered around a vision for the powerful instructional use of technology. As they developed their edtech inventory, evaluation process, and implementation supports, each element was designed to surface how tools were used and to promote more effective uses of technology. This vision served as a throughline that tied together all of the team’s decisions.
Professional Development and Learning: Edtech leadership team members are stakeholders interested in technology but who might not have the expertise or perspective needed to engage in system-level improvement efforts. This required team members to engage in professional development and learning to help them zoom out to the system level when thinking about edtech practices and designing processes specifically for the system level.
Finance and Resourcing: Chicopee’s edtech leadership team is funded, and members receive a stipend for their participation. This encourages engagement and helps members to prioritize the time needed to participate and contribute to the work outside of structured team meetings
Technology and Data Infrastructure: The team licenses third-party tools to help track edtech tool usage on their school network. This helps them to see which tools are used, when, how, and by whom – even if they are one-off, free tools that have been adopted by specific teachers or schools. This made some of the foundational work of organizing an edtech inventory easier.
Demographics
The following charts represent Chicopee’s student demographics during the 2023-24 EdTech Peer Learning Cohort. This information may be helpful for other school districts understanding how they might apply similar structures, practices, or lessons in their own context. Additional information about Chicopee’s demographics can be found in MA DESE’s School and District Profiles.
This profile is a part of TLA's Driving EdTech Systems series, which accompanies the EdTech Systems Guide developed in partnership with MA DESE OET. Explore the full guide to find additional strategies, insights, and resources.
Strategy Resources
Chicopee Public Schools’ EdTech Evaluation Criteria Rubric
Chicopee Public Schools developed an edtech evaluation rubric as part of their participation in the... Learn More
Not Available
Chicopee Public Schools’ EdTech Website
Chicopee Public Schools developed a public-facing website to share key edtech information as part of... Learn More
Not Available
Chicopee Public Schools, located in Massachusetts, serve 7,800 students in grades pre K-12. The district consists of one early childhood center, nine elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools, and one alternative school.
