Through The Eyes--September Edition

11:47:00 AM



Teams Overview

Each month the technology coaches meet with the various Junior High teams. We spend one day at each of the Junior Highs and create learning experiences based on the needs of teachers. Each month we showcase a different ISTE standard as well as digital tool that teachers can bring back to their classes.


What is a coach?


Our goal for the month of September was to re-define our role as technology coaches. We created a coaching iBook that you can download for free from i-Tunes here! We wanted to create a clear mission and vision for technology integration and the support that we can provide. We also shared with teams a quick innovation video that we made to showcase this vision.





Prior to meeting with teams, we thought it was important that we take a closer look at our process that we work through with teachers as coaches. It was through those conversations that we created our coaching cycle you see below.

Time is a teachers most valuable resource. It is also one that teachers have very little of. So, we felt it was important that the coaches had a defined coaching cycle or process sin order to make best use of the time we have with teachers.


Standardizing Our Practice--literally



Option 1:


Next, we shared the standards we reflect on when thinking about our team time. We shared this ISTE Standards in the Classroom video with teachers to give them a look into how our role is broken down. 

We then wanted teachers to have some familiarity with the ISTE student standards.  We had two methods to do this. The first way we introduced the standards was having teachers order them based on how much they were already integrated within their classroom (see image on right.)






Option 2:

The second way we introduced the standards was much more interesting. We decided to have an old fashioned debate! Each teacher or pair of teachers received one of the ISTE student standards. We blocked out the word "technology" on each standard so teachers would focus on the instructional practice more so than the digital creation.

Teachers were given 3 minutes to create an argument as to why their standard was not only the best one, but THE most important standard for students to learn and understand.

Here is where it got interesting! Teachers began relating the standard back to their own experiences and classrooms. They connected their thinking to another persons argument and what we ended up with was one awesome idea: None of these standards should be taught in isolation. They all feed into the next one and are of equal importance (perhaps that is why the ISTE standards logo is cyclical).


Summary: The groups that anticipated being the quietest, were actually the most passionate. And by using this common language ie. Knowledge Constructor, Empowered Learner, etc., teachers were able to better connect to what we were sharing technology wise. Overall, sharing the standards this way, was quite successful.

Setting SMART Goals


Finally, we wanted to be sure that we got some information from teachers to plan our next team meeting. As we already said, time is a valuable and fleeting resource. So, we wanted the time teachers spent away from their classrooms to be purposeful. Therefore we had each teacher fill out a SMART goal setting sheet. This was just one idea or standard they wanted to focus on at our next session. Each teacher wrote it down on paper and we asked them to have it displayed somewhere they spent a lot of time so they could add notes or ideas or even examples of how they were accomplishing their goal down.


Reflection: After each teacher wrote down their goals, we reflected as a team and decided that we would have liked to have copies of their individual goals instead of just taking notes in a running Google Doc. Because of this, we created a digital version of the SMART goal setting sheet to share with teachers at our next team meeting.






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