Professional Learning Facilitator

4.5 Professional Learning Facilitator

Coaches plan, provide and evaluate the impact of professional learning for educators and leaders to use technology to advance teaching and learning. Coaches:

4.5.a

Design professional learning based on needs assessments and frameworks for working with adults to support their cultural, social-emotional and learning needs.

4.5.b

Build the capacity of educators, leaders and instructional teams to put the ISTE Standards into practice by facilitating active learning and providing meaningful feedback.

4.5.c

Evaluate the impact of professional learning and continually make improvements in order to meet the schoolwide vision for using technology for high-impact teaching and learning.

Indicators

• 4.4.a Collaborate with educators to develop authentic, active learning experiences that foster student agency, deepen content mastery and allow students to demonstrate their competency.

• 4.4.b Help educators use digital tools to create effective assessments that provide timely feedback and support personalized learning.

• 4.4.c Collaborate with educators to design accessible and active digital learning environments that accommodate learner variability.

• 4.4.d Model the use of instructional design principles with educators to create effective digital learning environments.

Description 

The Technology Professional Development Plan is a document that explains the need for technology professional development for Buena Terra Elementary School by describing the school’s background and teacher population, interpreting results from a technology needs analysis survey teachers took to determine the trajectory of technology professional development (4.5.a), a literature review to ground the professional development plan in research, goals, learning objective, and assessment for the professional development plan, a nine-month timeline with scope and sequence of the planned instruction.

Implementation

As indicated in the document’s scope and sequence, teachers at Buena Terra participated in the first two professional development sessions. I taught the teachers what the Technology Integration Module (TIM) was, how it would impact our school, why TIM would be beneficial for our teaching practice, examples of how TIM creates active transformative environments, and time for teachers to develop lesson plans with the skills they learned, and then a follow up session for teachers to share their success and challenges with implementation (4.5.b).

Impact

The Buena Terra School Plan for Student Achievement states, “Teachers need additional training for effective implementation of technology to increase student learning and engagement.” After completing the 2-hour training with me, teachers can integrate technology by facilitating higher-order learning activities using technology daily. Teachers shared their lessons, successes, and challenges with the rest of the staff after the professional development in a follow-up meeting to reflect on what they used to think about technology integration and what they now think about it (4.5.c). Teachers shared that they used to believe that technology integration needed extra planning and there was not enough time in the day for it. Still, they shared that they now think technology integration is a tool they can use to leverage their current instructional strategies to make students more engaged through active learning rather than passive learning. The impact of this 2-hour training has helped teachers take more control of technology and use it as a tool during their instruction, where the instructional strategies guide the learning activities rather than setting aside time to use technology passively outside of instruction.