Intel Teach to the Future: Lessons learned from the evaluation of a large-scale technology-integration professional development program

This paper draws on findings from an evaluation of Intel Teach to the Future (http://www.intel.com/education), a professional development initiative focused on helping K-12 teachers integrate project-based technology use into their everyday curriculum. The initial U.S. implementation of Intel Teach to the Future was designed to be delivered on a very large scale, reaching over 100,000 teachers in three years. The goal of this paper is to outline some lessons learned from this evaluation about how “scalability,” often cited as a desirable quality in effective educational interventions, can both advance and inhibit program impact within the individual school districts that participate in such a program. This paper presents information from two years (20002002) of external evaluation of Intel Teach to the Future, conducted by researchers from the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology (http://www2.edc.org/cct). This evaluation provided a rare opportunity to closely examine an ambitious, large-scale professional development initiative, and to study a diverse population of teachers and administrators as they experienced and implemented this program.