Overall, ILT's work with teachers in the Eiffel Project illustrates the folly of trying to impose any one set of professional development directions on the subtle, unpredictable and irregular conditions that constitute the New York City Public Schools. A glance back at our years of professional development activities in these educational institutions reveals that there are as many messages as there are people in our project. Nevertheless, these lessons tend to fall into several non-discrete categories:

Technology integration requires a different kind of organizational system and a new vision. The changes required to implement an educational vision incorporating the new technologies cannot be imposed from the outside but rather must be managed from within. School leaders must commit to and disseminate a new vision for how education is to be supported and how learning will be assessed.

Teachers, especially those who are in the early stages of using technology, need on-demand technical support. If they have to wait to get assistance, the curriculum moves on, time is lost, and the opportunity passes. In advocating the use of technologies, school leaders will need to provide the resources that assure a dependable technology environment. However, a school's technology vision must include room for both a technical coordinator and a technology integration facilitator. Sound uses of technology for learning may require active support for the implementation of pedagogical practices that differ significantly from traditional methods previously employed by teachers. Generally this means that in addition to assuring a technology- rich teaching climate, educational leaders will be required to promote an instructional community that:

Teachers, like their students, are "Prisoners of Time"- and, as The National Education Commission on Time and Learning reported in April 1994, "…Our time-bound mentality has fooled us all into believing that schools can educate all of the people all of the time in a school year of 180 six-hour days." In our Eiffel workshop evaluations, time was mentioned again and again by teachers as a major obstacle to both their own learning and to the implementation of improved technology skills. Pressed by discipline issues, demanding content standards, high stakes testing, meetings and other after-school activities, educators are losing control over their personal lives. An organization that values learning must model what it esteems. Time for professional development must be viewed as a critical component of the school's internal operations. Despite occasionally required conference days, very little thought or energy seems to be devoted to teacher learning. One-shot workshops with little or no follow-up are destined to fade into meaningless and inconsequential exercises leaving the faculty frustrated with feelings of irrelevance. Finding time by providing incentives and making professional growth a main concern are among the necessary priorities for effective and visionary school leadership.

Successful school administrators recognize that leadership is not the same as management. Administrators who are able to avoid the hero-leader model of school organization and recognize the existence of leaders in all corners of the school organization are best situated to improve the learning environment for their students. Successful teachers as well as their students need to be recognized and feel encouraged to try something new. Because improvement implies change and change requires stepping outside one's comfort zone, encouraging risk taking while providing for a safety net for failure are critical elements of successful organizational leadership. Risk-taking will not flourish in the pressure-filled atmosphere of intimidation produced by vague notions of accountability. Ideas and initiative are the essence of school improvement and school leaders must find formal and visible ways to provide for their actualization.

4. The importance of school culture

The culture that is nourished inside the school organization must reflect the common vision that unites its various elements. Among the aspects of school culture that seem to be forceful in fostering professional development aimed at advancing technology integration we found that the following were particularly compelling:

Collegial sharing is very important among teachers. Teachers need opportunities to work and learn together, to exchange ideas with colleagues, to share successes and failures, and find solutions to mutual problems. Collaborative work helps teachers stay focused on their task, take advantage of other teachers' expertise, overcome obstacles of time, access, and availability of resources. A recent report from Becker and Ravitz supports that: "…teachers who are most broadly engaged with their teacher peers in collaborative and leadership roles, and who thus influence their peers more than most, are much more likely than the average teacher to have their students exploit computer resources during class". Our experience with Eiffel taught us the same lessons.

Schools and districts vary considerably in the nature of instructional problems they face, the availability of resources they have, and the socio-economic context of the community. Successful professional development should provide teachers with models that can succeed in each and every context. It's not adequate to introduce teachers to technology and make them aware of the kinds of things they can do with it. Oftentimes teachers need specific models of how they can do things in the classroom in order to make the technology work for them. Eventually, teachers as professionals will be the ones who would decide which of those models they will adopt, which of those models they will adapt, and which of those models they will drop. But providing them with models of practice is important.

Teacher change is a complex and slow process and requires on-going professional development that focuses not only on helping teachers acquire the skills to successfully use technology but also helping them to acquire a repertoire of new practices that are aligned to the inquiry approach to learning. A teacher's teaching style very often determines the nature of the projects they work on, the kind of technologies they use to implement the project in their classrooms, and how they assess their students. Many teachers require complete control of their classroom and believe that students will miss important instruction if they don't listen to the teacher. Allowing students to work on computers requires teachers to refrain from exercising some of the control they might otherwise desire. The role of professional development then, should also be to help teachers gradually move from the "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side". This requires time and an environment that values the fulfillment of its staff's potential in a continually evolving community of learners.