| This study identified teacher concerns during the implementation phase of three software programs: CLASSROOMxp, InteGrade Pro, and Blackboard 5.5. The identified areas of concern are categorized beginning with those that focus on the effect of the change on teachers, through concerns about how best to perform each task, and concerns affecting impact of change on students. By understanding the impact of CLASSROOMxp, InteGrade Pro, and Blackboard 5.5 on teachers in a large public metropolitan high school currently using these innovations in the classroom, administrators will gain insight into what is and is not working with current implementations and have new information to plan future training sessions that meet the concerns of the teachers involved. The Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ) and a demographic study were used to collect descriptive data from 100 high school teachers. Analysis of the data was accomplished by interpretation of the peak scores, the secondary peak scores, and profiles with the group data and MANOVA. The group profile analysis revealed that teachers had three high concerns related to awareness, personal, and management stages. Teachers overall were not intensely concerned about the innovation's consequences for students and did not have other ideas that would compete with the innovations. Teachers with the least amount of teaching experience had awareness and informational concerns, while teachers with the most experience had awareness and management concerns. All departments had high awareness concerns except the Foreign Language department, which had high management concerns. The analysis of peak concerns by the teachers revealed that they had intense concerns about the innovations and wanted more descriptive information about each innovation. The results of this analysis are consistent with Fuller's (1969) theory of concern development, which hypothesized that during the first two years of implementation, teachers have self-concerns with the implementation of an innovation. No significant differences in means were found among age, gender, teacher experience, and department. Results of this study suggest that identifying and understanding the concerns teachers have are more critical in developing interventions than age, gender, teaching experience, and department. Based on the findings and conclusions of this study, the following recommendations were made: (a) invite district leaders and administrators to the school to visit classrooms to discover what is happening in the classroom with technology and the teacher, (b) extend a communication initiative to the teachers to prepare them for change, (c) develop a positive marketing plan for technology to gain support for using new innovations by showing how technology will enhance the school's purpose and goals and solve organizational and educational problems, (d) advertise a technology implementation plan that gives both short- and long-term goals for the implementation of technology, (e) administer the Stages of Concern Questionnaire as a diagnostic tool twice a year for three years, (f) provide training on each software program, and (g) assemble a support system for teachers in the use of instructional and course management systems. |
