TEACHERS IN TATWEER PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN SAUDI ARABIA AND INTERACTIVE WHITE BOARDS: TOWARDS A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT MODEL

Abstract

This study investigates the use of the Interactive White Boards (IWBs) in primary schools that participated in the Tatweer project in the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. It presents teachers’ attitudes towards using IWBs, evaluates their approaches in using this technology in classrooms, identifies the problems they encounter, and recognises their IWB training needs. It is a quantitative-dominant mixed method research study that mainly used a sequential explanatory strategy. 587 teachers (301 females and 286 males) completed a self-report questionnaire specially designed for this study, but also drawing on earlier research. Twenty teachers (10 female and ten male) were interviewed, of these seven female teachers were also observed teaching in their classrooms or the learning resources rooms. The TPACK model (Mishra and Koehler, 2006) and the CBAM Levels of Use (LoU) (Hall and Hord, 2006) were used in this study.
The findings of this study indicated that teachers within the sample reported a high level of the positive attitudes towards using IWBs in their classrooms. However, the majority of teachers reported that they used IWBs infrequently and only with a few interactive features, indicating that their choices were limited by their current technical capability. Moreover, they presented only a basic knowledge of pedagogy because they mainly used IWBs for whole class teaching. They occasionally varied this, such as when groups of students used the boards. Consequently, most teachers showed a limited range of IWBs use in their classrooms. However, in this study, teachers’ experience in using IWBs and the opportunity to receive training were the two important factors to determine teachers' capability in using IWBs. The top three difficulties reported by teachers in this study when using IWBs were the lack of training courses, technical problems, and the lack of assistance and support, which had important effects on their skills and their satisfaction about their level of training. Hence, they tended to depend on themselves or their colleagues to improve their capabilities. Gender differences between male and female teachers were also investigated in this study. These findings were used to design a Proposed Training Model for Teachers (PTMT) to help the transition of new technologies (including IWBs) into Tatweer schools. Theoretical and practical implications arising from this study, limitations, recommendations for improvement, and suggestions for future research are also presented.