Making Iranian Schools Smart: From Policy to Practice

To assess both the essence and ways of operationalization of a recently adopted policy by the MOE with the aim of making Iranian schools smart, four such schools were purposefully selected, observed, and questioned. The collected data have been analyzed using the open coding and continuous comparison techniques. Findings can be categorized into two sets of structural and procedural factors related to smart schools. Structural category includes factors such as the number of computers and software in a school, and the extent of their use, instructors’ knowledge of computers, and courses in which computers are more often utilized; while the procedural category covers things like student-teacher, student-student, and teacher-teacher interactions. The findings indicate a significant gap between the observed reality and what can be found in the documents related to the adopted policy. This gap especially in the procedural category is much more evident.