Tech Request

A Guide for Coaching Educators in the Digital World

Emily L. Davis, Brad Currie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429941757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In this much-needed book, experts Emily L.Davis and Brad Currie draw on their extensive experience in coaching and instructional technology and provide concrete, research-based strategies to help coaches in their day-to-day role. Whether you're beginning a coaching initiative or looking for practical insights on coaching in a variety of settings, including in groups and one-to-one, you'll find the resources you need to overcome challenges and grow your coaching skills.

Topics include:

• The basics of tech coaching

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• How to clarify on the expectations and objectives of your role

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• Tips for recruiting teachers to work with you

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• Guiding educators in planning and implementing meaningful technology integration

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• How to plan and facilitate effective team coaching

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• Strategies to gather and share data to communicate the impact of your coaching work

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• How to stay ahead of the curve and keep learning for the future

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Every chapter includes practical tools, templates, and illustrative vignettes from the field to help you ensure the success of your technology coaching initiative.

Join the conversation! Discuss the book and your coaching questions on Twitter with the hashtag #TechRequestEDU.

1

I’m a Tech Coach . . . Now What?

Gone Are the Days When I Was Just an Instructional Coach

Picture it, a veteran teacher who has taught the same subject in the same classroom for the past 15 years, walks through the front door of school and will no longer walk down the same hallway and sit at the same classroom desk. This year, this veteran teacher is working as an instructional coach. While this is not a new role in schools, the role of instructional coach is changing dramatically. Coaches are now tasked with combining their strong instructional and pedagogical knowledge and skill sets with the world of educational technology.

This new coach will start her day by providing instructional support for a small group of seventh grade teachers as they try and navigate their way through a brand new one-to-one Chromebook initiative. Each teacher is eager, yet apprehensive of how these devices will enhance student learning experiences within their own subject areas. The coach is aware that they are at different comfort and readiness levels when it comes to technology integration and has been thinking about how she will support each of them in the best possible way. She is excited, yet daunted by this undertaking that could ultimately transform the school’s learning culture.

How did this role change come about? Towards the end of the previous school year, this veteran teacher approached her administration and spoke about her interest in the newly created instructional technology coach position. The school had made a major investment in Chromebooks the previous year, but found they were not being used consistently across the staff. To support stronger implantation, the school decided to hire an instructional technology coach who could help teachers integrate these new devices in meaningful ways that would enhance their instruction and student learning.

This teacher felt confident in her own education technology use and, over the last several years, the teacher took great pride in being a risk-taker with innovative instructional practices that were well ahead of the times. Now, she was excited about the opportunity of helping her colleagues to also find confidence and success in integrating effective instructional methods with engaging technology use in those same ways.

From an administrative standpoint, appointing this teacher to be the first technology coach in the building was a no-brainer. In addition to her proven skills, she is also well regarded by all school stakeholders. While it was clear they had found the right person for the position, the administrators were unclear about what, exactly, an instructional technology coach would do and how she would be supported in the weeks and months to come. Being a coach of adults is different than teaching students. How will she go about supporting teachers? Should she push into classrooms? Set up appointments? Meet with colleagues before, during, or after school? Will she find success? What does success look like? Would the role support the change they desired? How would she continue to improve as a coach?

As you can tell from this story, coaching can be a fulfilling, yet overwhelming, experience. The questions listed above along with many others consistently arise for both school leaders and instructional coaches from around the globe. Successful coaching is tough work and setting up a coaching program for success requires a lot of careful planning, communication, and implementation to really make it fly.

If you already coach teachers, and are now also being asked to support with technology integration, don’t be dismayed. While it is critical to understand technology’s role in how students learn and teachers teach, there is no expectation that you will be an expert at every new app or technology that arises. Rather, your job is to coach your colleagues—to listen, to learn alongside them, and to support them in iterating and deepening their practice over time.

This chapter will include critical information coaches and leaders should consider when setting up an instructional technology coaching program. Topics include:

◆ the requisite skills and knowledge effective tech coaches should have;

◆ defining the role of tech coach for all stakeholders; and

◆ how to begin coaching work.

Throughout this chapter, there are concrete tools and strategies for helping tech coaches, program leaders, and other stakeholders answer questions such as, “What am I expected to do?”, “What outcomes am I expected to produce?”, and “What level of confidentiality do I have in my role?” It also provides guidance for explaining coaching to teachers, strategies for building relational trust, and getting a yes from potential coaching clients. The chapter concludes with a checklist to help you get started confidently and smoothly with this new and exciting venture.

What Skills and Knowledge Should a Tech Coach Have?

Like all professional development endeavors, successful instructional technology coaching programs live or die on the quality of the people who enact them. Through their role, tech coaches directly influence how colleagues perceive the value of the initiative or technology they are working to implement and the professional norms and practices of teachers related to the use of technology. They do so by serving first as models of what successful use of technology can look like—how they think about technology, the way they go about implementing it, their attitude when things don’t go smoothly, their willingness to network to share ideas and learn from others, and their ability to keep learning in a constantly changing field. You will note we did not say that tech coaches need to be experts in any one particular technology, but rather that they have a way of thinking about technology integration into education that is replicable. So, their own schemas for tech use coupled with their positive and collaborative attitude and willingness to help other adults learn mean that they are able to translate their own success into success for others. Successful interactions with tech coaches can positively influence the teacher’s own sense of efficacy, and encourage teachers to persevere in implementing current tools as well as increase their willingness to try new tools. Further, technology coaches can also help bring educators together and model new norms of collaboration, curiosity, inquiry, and ongoing learning related to technology that can spread across an entire school or district. This positive, empowered, and professional learning model, coupled with deep expertise from the coach, can reinforce positive attitudes and beliefs about the power of technology in the classroom both for teachers and students. For all of these reasons, it is crucial for program leaders to be very careful about the selection tech coaches in order to ensure the successful implementation of their vision.

One of the first things a school or district needs to consider when building its coaching program is to ensure that the right people are becoming coaches. It is important, therefore, to consider the selection criteria being used to locate potential tech coaches. If you are tasked with finding educators to serve as technology coaches, below is a list of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that you may find helpful in your selection process. Or, if you’re already a coach or considering becoming one, consider using this checklist (Figure 1.1) as a tool to self assess your current strengths and areas for growth.

Figure 1.1 Top Ten Skills and Dispositions of an Effective Tech Coach

In addition to having the right people in place, there are two key constructs that are critical for new tech coaches—getting role clarity and enrolling coaching clients.

Clarity is Key

Brad is the Director of Planning, Research, and Evaluation for the Chester School District in New Jersey and has worked very closely with the district’s six instructional coaches for more than six years. Clarity is very important to him and, because of this, he sets up two monthly meetings with the coaches: one meeting with the technology coaches and one meeting with the literacy and mathematics coaches. The agenda is sent out a week prior to the meeting on a Google Doc and items can be added by Brad or the coaches. During the actual meeting Brad and the coaches will have open and frank conversations about what they are experiencing out in the field.

It’s also helpful, and greatly appreciated by the coaches, that Brad shares insight on what he is seeing in the field. Maybe there are certain ways that teachers could enhance their lesson with various forms of technology integration or instructional methods. It’s imperative that insights are shared from both sides of the aisle in order to make our great schools even greater. On the same note, it’s equally as important for our coaches to reach out to teachers and gauge their insight of how they can help them enhance their effectiveness. Conducting online surveys, attending grade-level or subject area meetings, and having a presence at faculty meetings are some of the ways that helpful information can be collected.

In this vignette, it is clear that both the coaches, the district leader, and the teachers are all quite clear on the roles and responsibilities of the instructional technology coaches. They have a clear scope of work and have support in implementing it as well as continuing to learn and evolve both as individuals as well as members of a strong tech coaching program. Clarity is key.

What is role clarity? A common challenge faced by those tapped to be tech coaches, as well as by those organizing coaching programs, is figuring out what it is instructional tech coaches are expected to do. Each district, school, and institution has a different reason for creating coaching roles. Sometimes coaches are asked to help roll out a specific initiative, system, or technology. In other contexts, coaching is voluntary and coaches must find ways to engage colleagues to work with them. It is critical in both situations to start by getting some clarity on this subject.

In 2015, the Hanover Research Group reviewed the field for best practices in building successful instructional coaching programs and came up with a list of seven key factors in their report, Best Practices in Instructional Coaching. We have paraphrased that list here and added some additional information given the unique responsibilities of technology coaches:

1. Establish clear roles and responsibilities for coaches and participants. Successful coaching programs have clear goals. These goals help all stakeholders to make programmatic and resource-related decisions, help coaches focus on the most important activities, and create a clear way to evaluate the success of the program. Further, “clear explanations of teacher, coach, and principal roles helps to set participant expectations and supports the development of trusting, collaborative relationships between teachers and coaches” (p. 4).

Coming into a tech coaching role, it is critical that coaches ask questions about what the goals of the program are and the scope of their roles. For example, is your role to help a team implement a specific new technology? If so, what does success look like? How are coaches expected to support this implementation? Is there a timeline for implementation? If the answers to questions such as these are not yet established, working with school/district leaders to establish these expectations early will support all stakeholders in experiencing success. Further, if there are other coaches working in the building or district, it is critical to consider early the varying roles of these different people. It is easy for coaches to “overcoach” the same person or to provide mixed messages unintentionally. Discussing with whom each coach might be working, in what capacity, as well as when and how coaches will communicate with each other about what they are doing is also crucially important to establish initially and then ongoing throughout the year.

Once you have defined what the roles and responsibilities of the tech coach are, it can be useful to develop a document or graphic like the one below (Figure 1.2) to support others in understanding what your role is (and is not). Having something like this to reference in early meetings with new potential coachees, school leaders, etc. can help ensure everyone is, literally, on the same page from the beginning.

Figure 1.2 What Ed-Tech Coaches Do

Reproduced by permission of the creator, Krista Welz

2. Create a system of non-evaluative, respectful adult learning. Coaching adults requires coaches to be able to build trust with those with whom they are working. Without trust, there is generally very little buy-in, risk-taking, or forward movement of practice. Generally, resistance occurs when teachers feel coaches are imposing upon them a system and reporting back to others about their success or failure. Adults learn best when they feel respected, autonomous, and safe.

Furthermore, because trust and respect are critical for ensuring receptive and meaningful teacher participation, coaches must not be involved in the teacher evaluation process. When coaches act as partners in improving instruction rather than as supervisors or evaluators, teachers will feel more comfortable having open discussions about their practices and taking risks to improve.

(p. 4)

There are some additional consideration...