Coaches plan, provide and evaluate the impact of professional learning for educators and leaders to use technology to advance teaching and learning.
I enjoy this ISTE standard because it relates so much to the work that I’ve done in IT support to fix and resolve various technical issues. I feel like this is the closest standard that aligns with my day to day work as a CIS Help Desk Manager, but also through all of my previous work and volunteer experiences.
Below you will find evidence, spread across three different subsections (indicators) of how I believe I am a professional learning facilitator where I work.
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Design professional learning based on needs assessments and frameworks for working with adults to support their cultural, social-emotional and learning needs.
I talk about this indicator in more depth in my post Is a survey good enough? In my post I talked about how surveys can provide part of the picture necessary to determine faculty needs, but that administrators should also use other methods of data gathering to supplement the survey in order to have the full picture. Things like informational interviews, regular meetings with departments or staff and administrators to share needs, as well as reading through ticket history in systems to see interactions and identify areas issues (maybe a lot of people submit issues or questions about the same topic to the IT Team).
In addition identifying faculty needs, administrators also need to introduce new and innovative topics that are also of interest – sometimes these topics may be pulled from Professional Learning Networks or by asking faculty to share new and interesting things they’re doing in the classroom with others.
When I took a Learning Lab through Educause, I was so inspired by listening to the presenter, Flower Darby, and the topics that other EdTech Administrators shared, that I wanted to bring back the things that I learned and create my own learning labs for campus. These manifested in the Winter Academy for 2022 as well as the introduction of a social emotional learning (SEL) activity at the beginning of all ETM’s professional development trainings that were offered in August, 2021. This was a powerpoint slide with a variety of images and asking participants to chose which image best illustrated how they were feeling or how their weekend was and then an opportunity for us to acknowledge that every participant was joining with different feelings and experiences and that those experiences helped enrich our community and discussions together.
Powerpoint slide with five different images that allow people to choose an image that best represents how the might be feeling.
Build the capacity of educators, leaders and instructional teams to put the ISTE Standards into practice by facilitating active learning and providing meaningful feedback.
In addition to being a knowledgable and trustworthy administrator in ETM, it was also important for me to be a good active listener. This also serves me as an IT Administrator too, because it allows me to truly hear a person’s concerns and develop thoughtful and meaningful responses.
When my office first started creating online courses for professional development, one question I wrestled with was how much interaction was appropriate for me the “instructor” to have in the course. The pandemic wasn’t the first time that I had considered this, but it was the realistically, the first time I thought out my own interactions in a professional development offering that wasn’t face to face or on Zoom. It quickly became clear that the “normal” presentation methods weren’t going to work for an asynchronous class and that we needed to find creative ways to keep people engaged both with the content and with our office. Things like thinking through how “active” are the active learning activities in the course and how we could Affirm our Colleagues with Meaningful Feedback were incredibly important. If we didn’t structure our Winter Academies well, our faculty weren’t going to feel invigorated and excited about the possibilities for their course and would instead dread the work that needed to be done overhaul their courses for emergency remote teaching. In ETM we did our best to build capacity for both our small team and faculty by creating resources and focusing on key components of emergency remote teaching.
For example, when the pandemic hit, we were near the end of the term. Rather than introducing full course design, we focused our professional development offerings on quickly switching finals so work wouldn’t be drastically impacted. Then we decided that for fall, we would “run the full gamut” of offerings to help faculty develop their courses for being fully online.
Evaluate the impact of professional learning and continually make improvements in order to meet the school wide vision for using technology for high-impact teaching and learning.
In HIPS x Digital Transformation, I talked about three big ideas – these ideas in particular came from my experience as an associate director. I think those points are still important, just like the work done to create Digital Learning Mission Statements and Vision Statements.
These statements are important because they’re what give our work a foundation and reason to happen. However, just like in good course design where alignment exists – there also needs to be alignment of work practices with the mission and vision statements. I also think it’s important to come back to these statements periodically and reflect on if they’re still true and if it’s appropriate to make adjustments.
One thing my current supervisor talks about is while it’s good to know what we’ve done previously, that shouldn’t be our only focus and that we should also be thinking about what our current and future needs are going to be and figure out how to incorporate these needs into our work. He was mostly referring to adapting and adjusting work processes like what computers are supported, but I think this also applies to the overall team goals too.
In addition to regular reflection, it’s important to get in put from stakeholders – whether this be through surveys, informational interviews, collaborative meetings with various departments, or something more creative – to capture attention and support, we need as many voices as possible.
Return to ISTE Standards.
