A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Examples: Electronic Mail

At Northbrook Middle School, teachers reported using the electronic mail system to communicate with other teachers within their team about students they share in common:

The e-mail is wonderful because the whole concept of a middle school is to communicate and to try to have a core block of students going from teacher to teacher to teacher [within a team] . . . . So if I have a question about a child in my room . . . I can e-mail and find out who has them next, and say, "Look, I've noticed something, I'm not sure if it's just me or they've had a bad day, but let me know what you think." And we can get responses within minutes, they just e-mail us right back, and say, "I noticed the same thing yesterday," or "I'll keep my eyes open." - Middle school teacher

In addition to Northbrook, teachers at the West High School ACOT program made extensive use of electronic mail to communicate with each other.

Other single-school sites made less use of electronic mail for communication within the school. In most cases, they lacked a system at the time of our site visit. (Frank Paul, for example, brought in electronic mail after our site visit. ) But at several schools, teachers did not take advantage of the technology that was available to them.

In both cases, the existence of the technology infrastructure per se was not enough to overcome a general attitude of teacher independence and lack of widespread interest in group planning or coordination.