Driving EdTech Systems: Engaging Stakeholders

Overview

Powerful edtech systems are driven by the voices, experiences, and input of the stakeholders who use technology for teaching and learning; this a central tenet of the EdTech Systems Guide created by The Learning Accelerator (TLA) in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Office of Educational Technology (MA DESE OET). This guide establishes a vision for equitable edtech systems in which stakeholder input and feedback play a critical role in guiding technology selection, implementation, and evaluation.

Practices

This resource provides an overview of foundational engagement practices to support users of the EdTech Systems Guide in reflecting on their capacity to authentically and consistently engage stakeholders with their edtech systems.

How to Identify Key Stakeholders

Leaders must think expansively about who is impacted by edtech (including students, teachers, system-level administrators, or members of the community) and who should be engaged in decision-making. When identifying your key stakeholders, consider each of the following stakeholders:

• Students: Which of your students are most impacted by your edtech decisions? Which students are currently having the most positive experiences with technology? The least positive? How do you know?

• Classrooms: Do your decisions impact instructional practices or resources available at the classroom level (e.g., online supplemental instruction supports, devices)? Which classrooms are most impacted?

• Schools: Do your edtech decisions impact coaches, technology specialists, principals, or other school leaders? Do your decisions impact what resources are available at the school level (e.g., online curriculum, virtual tools supporting school operations)? Which schools or school-level stakeholders are most impacted?

• School Systems: Which systems-level leaders (e.g., assistant superintendents, department leaders) must be at the table to help you make edtech decisions and facilitate systems-level change? This group is particularly important because they ensure that your work happens across departments, teams, or other traditional silos, considers additional context that impacts technology and its use, and can help you design more effective and longer-lasting solutions to improve your edtech systems.

• Community: Do your edtech decisions impact community members outside of your school? Which stakeholders (e.g., parents and families, local business owners, edtech vendors, service providers) need to be at the table to help you make decisions?

When to Engage Stakeholders

Powerful stakeholder engagement must be embedded across edtech selection, implementation, and evaluation processes. The list below describes several points at which you should engage stakeholders:

• Conduct a Needs Analysis: Engaging stakeholders is crucial in identifying challenges within your edtech systems, identifying gaps in your current edtech portfolio, and surfacing pain points in how you support technology implementation.

• Develop an Edtech Inventory: Asking your stakeholders about the edtech tools that they use (both those your school or system pays for and those stakeholders adopt on their own) can help you to identify tools that might not otherwise be captured in your edtech inventory or provide context about how tools are used that might not be captured elsewhere.

• Engage in Product Research: Tapping your stakeholders and their networks to learn about edtech tools can help you navigate the edtech marketplace, formulate selection criteria and priorities, and learn about tools used elsewhere – or tools used by your stakeholders that they have sought out and adopted independently.

• Run Pilot Programs: Engaging stakeholders before, during, and after pilot programs can help you identify and mitigate potential pain points and identify functionalities or use cases for edtech tools that might not be visible until the tools are used in your context.

• Support Rollout and Implementation: Creating multiple opportunities for your stakeholders to share their thoughts, feelings, and findings about edtech rollout and implementation can help you iteratively improve the support you provide to encourage adoption of edtech tools in your portfolio.

• Evaluate Edtech: Incorporating stakeholder voices, experiences, and perspectives into your evaluation processes adds context to other data points (e.g., usage, related academic outcomes) and helps you more fully understand whether tools are achieving their goals, as well as what factors are supporting them or preventing them from doing so.

How to Engage Stakeholders

How you engage stakeholders (i.e., the methodologies to collect and process their input and feedback) depends on several factors – including what you’re trying to learn, how this information will be captured (e.g., quantitatively vs. qualitatively), and both your capacity and that of your stakeholders to meaningfully and authentically interact. Depending on these variables, you might consider any combination of the following tools:

• Assemble an Edtech Leadership Team: Perhaps the most time-intensive option, assembling a team of key stakeholders to help you make edtech decisions, offers several spill-over benefits. Not only can you train and develop the capacity and knowledge of this group (which allows them to provide better insight), but they can also serve as ambassadors to their peers and build buy-in and support for your edtech decisions. This engagement strategy does not work in all contexts or for all stakeholder groups. Scheduling obstacles may prevent students, teachers, and school administrators from actively engaging in this way.

• Conduct Empathy Interviews: Empathy interviews are one-on-one conversations that use open-ended questions to elicit stories about specific experiences to help uncover unacknowledged needs. These are powerful tools for unearthing the root causes of complex problems. They require significant time and energy and are best suited for diving deeper into issues you’ve identified using other data sources.

• Conducting Focus Groups: Focus groups are a great way to obtain deep qualitative insights from a small group of stakeholders, either in person or virtually. Because focus groups happen live, they encourage organic exchanges of ideas and allow facilitators to request clarification and ask follow-up questions. Focus groups involve a time commitment, requiring recruitment of participants, coordination of times, facilitation, and hands-on synthesis of findings. Due to their small size, it is critical to consider the extent to which your participants represent your stakeholders.

• Circulate Surveys: Surveys can efficiently engage many diverse participants at once and can be written to provide instant visualizations and allow for quick findings. This makes them a go-to stakeholder engagement tool across the K-12 sector. If you choose to circulate a survey, help your stakeholders avoid survey fatigue by ensuring that it takes no more than 10 minutes to complete, and design your questions carefully to gather critical information, knowing you will not usually have the opportunity to follow up.

Regardless of how you engage stakeholders, ensure these engagements promote authentic sharing and collaboration. Accomplishing this means creating a culture where your stakeholders feel comfortable sharing honest reflections. Conducting in-person meetings may require mitigating power dynamics by organizing sessions around role-alike groups and designing sessions to be peer-facilitated. For asynchronous engagements like surveys, this may mean allowing anonymous participation.

Capture and Share Your Findings

Finally, consider how to collect, organize, and share the information gathered from your stakeholders to drive edtech systems. This may include producing publicly available reports of survey responses or drafting a memo for your school or system's governing body that details a thematic analysis of the focus groups you conducted. Regardless of how you choose to capture your findings, be sure to include information about each of the following:

• Analysis and Findings: Share details about the data collected and the most important findings. What were the most frequently shared or widely held perspectives? What key data points highlight your most important takeaways?

• Equity Implications: Share information about notable disparities and commonalities from your analysis. What were the perspectives of individuals or groups who will use the tool most? What are the perspectives of individuals or groups from communities positioned furthest from opportunity? Are these different from the broader picture of stakeholder sentiment (and if so, how)?

• Broader/Additional Context: Stakeholder engagement always occurs in a broader context. You are engaging stakeholders to learn about something – what are you trying to learn? Why now? How might actions taken before this engagement in your edtech selection, implementation, or evaluation processes have impacted your findings?

• Next Steps: Stakeholder engagement should lead to action. What are the implications of your findings, and how do they inform your next steps related to edtech decisions, processes, or systems?

This strategy 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.