Tech Integration Coaches - our second meeting

The first few weeks of school have flown by and already we have had our second all school Tech Integration Coaches meeting.  This meeting was much more concerned with the "nuts and bolts":  the whats and the hows.  We talked about PD opportunities for coaches (in fact we are hoping we can share our experiences at the ISTE Conference next summer).  As we are hosting the 3rd Google Summit in India in November, and as this is also timely for India's first Google Teacher Academy, we talked about some of the benefits that this can bring us for increasing our own knowledge about technology.  Other things we mentioned that can be good sources of PD were webinars, books and online resources.

At the end of our first meeting our coaches still had several questions:  What do we do?  How do we start?  How often should we meet with the teachers we are coaching?  For what we do we revisited ASB's Tech Integration Standards for Coaches, which was based on the ISTE Standards for Coaches.  We had a discussion in pairs about where we were individually on this rubric - were we approaching, meeting or exceeding these standards?

Based on where we felt were areas of growth we then set our goals as coaches for our own learning. We wanted to give teachers a model as to how they could approach goal setting with their teachers, so we modeled a 10 minutes planning conversation, based on the cognitive coaching model:

• Clarify goals
• Specify success indicators
• Anticipate approaches
• Establish personal learning
• Reflect on the coaching process

We asked our coaches to discuss what they had observed and then it was then time for the coaches to sit in pairs to practice the planning conversation with each other, as they discussed their goals for the year as Tech Integration Coaches.

As the meeting ended we considered our next steps.  By division we will meet individually with our tech coaches to ensure that they are empowered to take the next step - that of coaching the teachers in their divisions.  We will be discussing them starting to set up meetings, the planning conversation around goals, how they can give input as teachers plan our their units and how they can start conversations about the artifacts that can be added into this year's Tech Audit.

Once again I felt that the meeting had flown by way too fast, but I was also very pleased at how much could be covered during the 10 minute planning conversations.  Next week our coaches start their individual meetings with their teachers.  I'm interested to see how these meetings go, so I have suggested that if the coaches want me to come along to observe them and give feedback about their coaching skills that I will be happy to do that.

Photo Credit: Sachmanns.dk via Compfight cc