In the summer of 2018 I joined my current district in the role of Director of Educational Technology. The department primarily supports work focused on providing professional learning for effective technology integration, but when I came on board this work was being done with a rather small team and no campus-based ed tech coaches. As a result, most of the professional learning work was only reaching the innovators and early adopters in our district. In order to build more capacity across the entire district, we needed a larger team that would include campus-based personnel.
During my first year I presented a case for adding these positions, and I was overjoyed when our senior staff gave approval to create a new role in our district: Transformational Learning Specialist. I’ll be exploring more aspects of the structure for this new role and the work we’ve been doing with this newly expanded team throughout this first year, but today I just want to share some of the key resources that we have been using in the development and coaching of the dynamic and talented educators who are now serving in this role.
For this year we hired ten TLSs. All of them were highly skilled in creating transformational learning experiences for students, but only a couple of them had much experience in previous teacher leader roles. In order to support the entire team in developing solid coaching skills and strategies for supporting other teachers on how to leverage technology intentionally and in meaningful ways, we have used the following resources to guide the work of this team:
Instructional Coaching by Jim Knight to give the TLSs some foundational knowledge of general instructional coaching.
The Art of Coaching by Elena Aguilar. This resource builds on the foundational knowledge, but provides an approach that works much more effectively for helping coaches build trust-based relationships with teachers. The methods from this resource have helped us achieve more than we expected in terms of engaging teachers in one-on-one coaching experiences this school year.
Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning by Scott McLeod and Julie Graber. The coaching skills are the foundation to developing relationships with teachers, but our coaches also needed a resource that would help them guide teachers to a better understanding of more effective technology integration. In the past we had referenced T.I.M. and SAMR, but these models have been confusing to teachers and did not provide the level of solid, concrete look-fors in terms of instructional changes that could be made in their learning environments. The 4 Shifts Protocol developed by Scott and Julie has been extremely helpful — providing our team and district with common language that ties technology integration directly to solid pedagogy and rigorous learning experiences. We still refer to T.I.M. and SAMR, but the 4 Shifts helps everyone understand all of this more clearly.
Blended Learning in Action by Tucker, Wycoff, & Green. This is not necessarily a coaching book or one focused on a model or tool for technology integration, but it provides our TLSs with solid information to guide their work with school leaders. It offers very practical strategies and guidance for our entire team.
Everyday Instructional Coaching by Nathan Lang-Raad. This provides another layer of useful strategies and “drivers” to help coaches be more effective in building relationships with teachers based on trust and solid support. We use this in a supplemental way along with the two coaching books above.
Power Up Blended Learning by Catlin Tucker. We have not started using this one yet, but will be using it going into next school year to build on what our TLSs have learned this year in their role as coaches.
Stretch Yourself by McLemore & Passeport. This is a supplemental text that we have shared with our TLSs not so much to drive the coaching or technology integration work, but to help them continue deepening their instructional practice as it pertains to innovation and the ISTE Standards for Educators and ISTE Standards for Students.
The Innovator’s Mindset by George Couros. Another supplemental text to provide additional inspiration and innovative ideas for our TLSs that they can share with the teachers they are coaching.
FYI — if you are attending the ISTE 2020 conference this summer, some of our TLSs will be sharing tips and strategies from their first year as coaches! I’ll add the link to the session details as soon as ISTE publishes the program.