INTRODUCTION
In discussing education portals and the Web, Richard N. Katz & Associates (2002) state that the Web is the ultimate frontier. Katz observed that this frontier is inherently messy and in need of guidance, “if not law and order.” In this context, a portal is more than a gateway. It has the potential of functioning as a unifying principle around which educational institutions can leverage their resources, talents, and vision (Richard N. Katz & Associates, 2002). The Milwaukee Professional Support Portal (PSP) is a case study in how the development of an educational portal can serve as an agent for district-wide reform, while at the same time responding to specific needs for collaborative online venues, data warehousing, and personalized access to online information. This article examines the conditions that motivated the creation of the portal, traces how human dynamics contributed to the portal’s development, and follows the interaction between portal infrastructure and culture change. It concludes with a discussion of district adoption and scaling.
BACKGROUND
The Milwaukee Public School District (MPS) is one of the largest and poorest districts in the country. The current enrollment is reported to be 97,359, with 72% being economically disadvantaged (schoolmatters.com, accessed 12/15/05). Eighty-two percent of the school population is non-white and a sizable portion of the population has a disability or limited English proficiency (Eddy-Spicer, Dede, & Nelson, 2004).
Milwaukee has been faced with low student achievement, high dropout rates, low graduation rates, and a high turnover of new teachers. The 2003 Enrollment Study indicated that almost 10% of the students in grades 5 or higher were academically at risk according to state standards. In addition, the district reported a graduation rate for 2003 of just 61% (Redovich, 2004).
The problem of low student achievement is exacerbated by the fact that teachers are leaving the district at ever increasing rates. In2001-2002, teachers were leaving the district at a rate of 37% a year. Notably, the highest teacher attrition is also at schools with the lowest academic achievement. It was clear that student achievement in Milwaukee could not improve unless the district did something to retain its teachers.
The poor retention rate among new teachers coupled with the fact that more and more veteran teachers were approaching retirement age meant that the problem of finding, inducting, and retaining new teachers was an ever-growing challenge. Further, as the number of new hires grew traditional face-to-face professional support programs were no longer practical, sustainable, or scalable.
In addition to these specific challenges, the district was also facing the pressures of preparing to meet the new goals for 21st century education. In order to prepare students for this “new world,” teachers also needed to become competent in using 21st century skills and in thinking like “accomplished novices” as opposed to “answered filled experts” (Bransford et al., 2000). Consequently, teachers needed a flexible mechanism through which to receive “just-in-time” information, access online administrative tools, participate in professional development, and collaborate with their peers.
THE MPS PROCESS
To address this critical situation, Milwaukee embarked on a strategic initiative to create a Web-based portal that was effective, scalable, and sustainable. The goal was to provide professional development that would increase teacher retention and productivity and thereby improve student achievement. In 2001, a Portal Project Team (PPT) was formed to spearhead the initiative. At that time, the team was comprised of two technology directors and one teacher. By 2005, the team had grown to include three teachers, one principal, and one independent consultant.
Despite its clear mandate, the portal experienced a difficult start. Shortly after the initiative began, Milwaukee encountered a change in leadership at the district level and with it a shift in priorities. The spotlight that placed the portal initiative at the center of district attention all but faded away. Since funds were scarce, support limited, and the concept new, the district elected to use a local company to build the portal from the ground up. This choice led to a major set back when it became clear that the project was beyond the expertise and abilities of the agency.
Although this discovery cost the project a year, the time was not completely lost. The district leveraged existing partnerships with business, national experts, local institutions of higher education, and parents to gain advice as to how best to address the problems at hand, as well as to gather suggestions for the development of the portal. They also forged new alliances with other groups, like the Harvard Graduate School of Education. With Joyce Foundation funding, academic experts using IP-based videoconferencing built collaborations across distance that facilitated new processes of design across institutional and geographical barriers (see Eddy-Spicer et al., 2004). With the additional support, the PPT was able to run focus groups to determine teacher needs, conduct surveys to gather content ideas, lead discussion groups to identify teaching challenges, and pilot test segments of the alpha version of the portal to gather feedback on content and user interface. The PPT provided informational sessions throughout the district to explain the concept of a portal and to field questions and gather additional ideas for content development.
Upon selecting a new vendor, Plumtree, the portal obtained an infrastructure that could support an expanded vision: that of a school district functioning as a learning community. As Bielaczyc and Collins point out, “The defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning, in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding” (1999, p. 2). In this spirit, the portal supported a significant paradigm shift within professional development. Teachers were not only being offered prescriptive courses, but an open opportunity to collaboratively construct their own definition of quality teaching and learning.
In turn, student achievement was seen to involve the entire community, not just teacher/student interactions. Therefore the portal’s development required extensive input from numerous stakeholders. In addition as a result of working within the various partnerships, MPS realized that the portal needed to function as a unifying force in the district where people could find not only the materials and information they needed but where they could exchange ideas and build knowledge and understanding.
To that end, the district leveraged a highly successful and well established face-to-face teacher mentoring program. This program was identified as a foundation for the creation of an online cadre system. By eliciting the help of the existing face-to-face mentors, literacy and math coaches, the PPT started to train and build a team of online facilitators. These facilitators then served as the core group around which cadres were assembled.
Milwaukee expended title IID funds and state competitive grants to provide new teachers engaged in the mentoring program with laptops and the training to use them. In exchange, these teachers agreed to provide feedback for formative evaluations of the portal, engage in online professional development activities provided through the portal, and participate in cadres. The mentoring program became a virtual community that interacted around and through the portal.
Cadre participation meant that teachers met online to engage in inquiry about pedagogy and best practice, discuss content issues, review strategies for classroom management, and develop ways of dealing with complex problems by drawing on different expertise within the community. The cadres were to seek information from the portal and to make suggestions for additional content to the developers. Over time, the cadre system swelled from its original assemblage of 150 teachers to over 41 cadre groups totaling 366 members with more than 82 facilitators. It became an important network for informing decisions about content and design issues for the portal, as well as advancing the goals of building a learning community in Milwaukee and addressing the needs of new teachers.
Although the cadre system was growing nicely, portal development lagged. It became clear that in order to develop a useful definition of learning and teaching, teachers needed a strong understanding of their core subject areas as well as appropriate pedagogy (see e.g., Wilson, Shulman, & Richert, 1987, p. 105). The challenge became delegating the responsibilities for finding, organizing, developing, and posting portal content to address these issues. Again the portal team turned to leveraging existing resources.
THE MPS PORTAL
The team selected pre-existing technology initiatives that could be easily adapted to the Plumtree (www.plumtree. com) portal environment. The portal itself was structured around easy-to-use customized work spaces, called portlets. These had a frame-like appearance and could be nested and linked according to end-user needs. Portlets accommodated documents, links, asynchronous discussions, bulletin boards, calendars, and so forth, and could be placed almost anywhere throughout the portal. They were made to function on an individual level, a group level, or a community level. Specific resources were linked to various portlets and collaborative tools were readily available. The Knowledge Directory, a unique section of the portal, provided an interconnected resource base of content and materials, including professional development opportunities. This portal structure easily accommodated the integration of existing technology and materials.
Several applications were integrated into and mediated through the MPS Professional Support Portal (http://mps-portal.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/portal/server.pt). The Curriculum Development Assistant (CDA), a pre-existing online tool, enabled teachers to create lesson plans that would go through a peer-review process before being posted for use by others. TappedIn®, an online professional multi-user virtual environment available on the WWW, provided the tools and virtual space that enabled teachers to hold online synchronous meetings, post documents, and exchange ideas with peers. Teachscape®, a commercial professional development process, provided teachers the opportunity to view, analyze, and discuss video-based exemplars of actual classroom practice.
This convergence of resources propelled the project forward. It provided the PPT with something immediate and tangible to show for its efforts. It also enabled the team to better convey the concept of the portal and its value-added to those who needed convincing. However, this approach inevitably left the most difficult challenges lying in wait. For example, a myriad of existing documents and procedures needed to be transferred to the portal. Many of these items resided in desk drawers or, even more elusively, in the minds of staff members located throughout the district. Alternatively, a lot of content did not yet exist. Since staff and teachers alike saw the portal as being somewhat unstable (due to its history) and lacking in consistent ease of use (due to its constant development), there was little incentive to place content on the portal. These perceptions, in addition to the natural human resistance to changes in ways of conducting business, yielded a dearth of content for the portal. Without content there was little to find on the portal and potential end-users came away disenchanted. These challenges called for extensive discovery, recruitment, cooperation, training, coordination, and contribution. In addition, technical issues such as a single login were also left unresolved. To date, the single login has been difficult to accomplish, but the plan is to have it in place by the end of this academic year.
The greatest challenge, however, was that the portal’s ultimate success relied on a district-wide culture change. All district information had to be channeled through the portal. The portal was to become the mechanism through which all processes, data management systems, and warehouses of forms, documents, and applications throughout the district were integrated. It was to be the first place one turned for information, support, and assistance. Such a major effort involved the establishment of new communication patterns among disparate departments and the compliance and commitment of a multitude of stakeholders on a number of different levels. Finally, the MPS community had to be made aware of the portal existence and buy-in to its value.
The fact that Milwaukee is still being challenged by continual changes in leadership and subsequent modifications in priorities and policies makes the actualization of this culture shift even more complicated. The constant changes sent mixed messages to those contributing to the vitality and functionality of the portal. Nonetheless, the vision remains focused on providing a portal that will unify the way the district works and bring disparate parties together to become a true learning community so that student achievement will increase. Now that the portal is in place, the district is con fronting and addressing a major paradigm shift from being a paper-based building-based district to evolving into an online learning community. The portal not only serves as the impetus for this evolutionary transformation but is also the mechanism of its progress.
LOOKING AHEAD
Sheehan and Jafari point out that “portals present unique strategic challenges in the academic environment. Their conceptualization and design requires the input of campus constituents who seldom interact and whose interests are often opposite” (2003, p. 1). Therefore, the future of Web-based education portal seems to hinge as much, if not more, on the ability of the educational organization to embrace a unified vision for a changed organizational structure and management process as it does on the advantages, limitations, quirks, and requirements of the technology itself. School departments, administrators, and teachers are not accustomed to collaborating closely. The implementation of a portal requires the coordination of databases, materials, procedures, applications, and even committees all answering to different administrative departments.
Neither top-down nor bottom-up approaches provide a problem-free method for the development and adoption of a portal. Top-down initiatives can enjoy the benefit of clear vision, commitment, and administrative sponsorship for the project. However these initiatives are often met with resistance at the building and classroom level. Staff, principals, and teachers tend to view such initiatives with suspicion, as another layer of time-consuming work that is being forced upon them. The development of an understanding of the value added to efficiency and effectiveness is often supplanted by an emphasis on compliance. Alternatively, bottom-up initiatives can suffer from a lack of support from the administration and therefore a lack of crucial sponsorship and implementation by those in power. Without administrative modeling of behavior change and overt sponsorship, departments are reluctant to embrace the initiative’s principles and practices since they are regarded not to be officially sanctioned and are thought to likely disappear. Richard N. Katz & Associates sum it up concisely: A portal strategy “is difficult and perilous because many on campus are weary and suspicious of another new enterprise-wide information technology initiative…” (2002, p. 4). Such a complex undertaking as the development of a portal within a large urban school district is best accomplished by a mixture of top-down and bottom-up initiatives. It is only through combined efforts that the portal will ultimately be fully adopted.
In addressing the issue of adoption of the portal, Milwaukee has been interested in scaling the portal’s use. Part of the challenge will be to make the 7,000 teachers in the district aware of its existence. An awareness survey conducted in the spring of2005, with over 1,000 teachers, administrators, and staff revealed that the majority of respondents (54%) had either never heard of the portal or had never seen it. This finding points to the reality that developing a portal is only half the job. Achieving adoption is the other half. Milwaukee is just beginning the second leg of this process. The substitution of the portal for the MPS Website this fall and the planned integration of the e-mail system into the portal should contribute greatly to general district awareness and use.
Although the portal is still in the development phase, the region around Milwaukee is looking at the MPS portal as an exemplar for planning initiatives focused on developing 21st Century Learning Skills curriculum and instructional strategies, as well as professional development. The Professional Support Portal played a large role in planning these initiatives since it is “an existing technology through which all of the services included in the 21st century initiative can eventually be linked” (CESA#1 Annual Report, May 17, 2005). The adoption of the portal by other districts will help scale the portal. In addition, an exchange of ideas between districts can facilitate the introduction of innovations that can empower teachers and build community. Further, the scaling to other districts will help MPS recoup some of their investment in the creation of the infrastructure and tools.
Although scaling up may leverage resources and ideas, portals that serve as unifying principles that reform the way procedures, data, materials, and people interact must set goals beyond scaling up. It is not enough to think in terms of increased numbers of users and additional venues. Portals like these are dynamic entities that are integral to the communities in which they reside. Therefore, they must be scaled out, as well as scaled up. This means that these portals should be malleable enough to integrate the contributions of ever divergent pools of end-users and be responsive to the needs of these stakeholders. The emphasis for growth should include the customization of features and information to the needs of different populations, as well as replication and accommodation to like-groups and similar venues.
It is through scaling out that stakeholders will cultivate a sense of ownership. For a portal to become a unifying principle and vehicle for reform each member of the community must be able to find “him or herself’ within the portal.
CONCLUSION
Portals provide the end-user with a single point of entry through which to access and customize a vast array of information and to collaborate with others. When viewed solely through the monocle of a gateway or an organizational tool, however, a rich potential of a portal has been minimized. By its very nature of being responsive to the needs of stakeholders while drawing on their combined resources, an educational portal can serve as a vehicle for systemic change. The portal offers the potential to facilitate paradigm shifts through literally trussing gaps between departments and staff, supporting new avenues of communication, reaching underrepresented and disenfranchised segments of the community, repurposing existing resources, and stimulating collective understanding. Milwaukee is a story of how one district successfully pooled and leveraged existing resources to create a portal that bridged gaps, transformed how the district works and changed the view of teacher professional development.
KEY TERMS
Accomplished Novices: When people are “skilled in many areas and proud of their accomplishments, but they realize that what they know is minuscule compared to all that is potentially knowable” (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 36).
Cadres: As used here, refer to small groups of teachers organized by shared interests or experience who have agreed to meet on-line at least once per month with a facilitator to discuss readings, classroom problems, and ideas.
Community: Refers to a group that recognizes connections among the participants within the group.
Learning Community: Is a community “in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. … the goal is to advance collective knowledge.. .in a way to support the growth of individual knowledge” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; Bielaczyc & Collins, 1999, p.2).
Sustainability: Refers to maintaining services, functionality, and outcomes without increased demands on external resources.
Scaling Up: Refers to expanding availability of the portal to more end users with the goal of increased usage and replicating proximal outcomes with new users, e.g., increasing the usage of the portal from 150 teachers to 7,000 teachers.
Scaling Out: Refers to expanding the segmentation of end-users and the features that are available to them, making the presentation appropriate to their goals and needs, for example, parents’ sections, administrators’ sections.
