What Didn't Work

There are only two Tuesdays left before the school year ends, and I finish my tenure as an Academic Integration Coach. That means I have only two more posts as a tech coach before shifting this blog over to that of a techie-English-teacher (slash-sports-fan-slash-rock-n-roller).

I figured I would use the last two entries to look back, first at what has not worked well, and finally at what has been successful in our district's experimentation with technology integration.

As I've mentioned in this blog, I have been ready for a change for several months. I am happy to be returning to the classroom next year, and excited to be putting into practice what I've learned over the past five years. As a high school CFF Coach, then a Learning Coordinator for K-12 Technology Integration, and finally as a K-12 Academic Integration Coach, I have had five years of non-stop professional development. I have learned so much from attending conferences, and especially from my colleagues across the state, who share their questions and ideas every day on the CFF Coaches' list-serve. It was very difficult, however, to put to practice what I've learned without any students of my own.

When I originally left the classroom with the CFF grant in 2007, I asked to be the half-time coach, which would have enabled me to continue teaching for half of the day and act as coach during the rest. I believed then, as I do now, that the best coaching (and administration, management, etc.) comes from people who are actually doing what they teach. Unfortunately for me, the half position needed to go to the math department, and I became full-time CFF coach with Tommy as the half. While I was able to work intensely for five years, and I am very grateful for the way things have gone, this brings me to the first thing that does not work in technology integration:

1) Tech Coaches should teach  -- teachers are more inspired by colleagues who are doing what they are teaching in professional development sessions than they are by colleagues who have done it in the past. Having coaches teaching for half of the day would enable...

2) MORE Tech Coaches -- We need more. ONE part-time coach PER BUILDING would be ideal. Just free up a small portion of someone's day by giving him or her one less class to teach. That would save on the travel costs of sending one person to 18 buildings, as I did for the past few years. More importantly, it would allow teachers and coaches to work together regularly and build a good rapport. Sadly, our district went the other way, starting with two coaches for the high school, moving toward one for elementary and one for secondary, then going to two and a half for K-12, then to two for K-12, then one for K-12, and now, in next year's budget, it looks like none.

3) Regular Communication with Faculty -- I can see the statistics on this one clearly. We sent a Tech Tip of the Week podcast to everyone in the district for half of the year. In the first half of the year, we answered 372 help requests for individual 1:1 tech integration assistance. Since January, when we stopped sending out our weekly tip, we have only answered 162. Every time we sent a message to our entire district, we would recieve dozens and dozens of replies, usually asking for us to come work. It was a great strategy. I recommend our district use this strategy in the future for technology integration. Once we stopped sending a link to the tech tip every week to everyone, our requests for help dropped off. We "fell off the radar" for the average teacher.  As I travel around the district now, teachers constantly ask why we don't make our amazing tech tips anymore. I keep saying, "We do! We post them on our website every week, just as we did all year last year. We only sent them out in the fall to raise awareness of our position and what we do, but we figured by now everyone knew where to find them, so we stopped flooding your inbox with them each week. " Well, raising awareness only works when it is continued. For any future iterations of technology coaching to be successful, these messages should continue. Administration should make it a priority to support regular communication from technology coaches to help busy teachers have an easy avenue to learn about and learn how to use new ed tech.

4) Interactive Whiteboards -- One complaint I have heard regularly from teachers this year is that we did not do enough training on SMART Boards, or Promethean Boards, the two IWBs we use in our district. I think my personal pedagogy got in the way of this one when I became the only tech coach left. I am a firm believer that a school district's funds are wasted on IWBs. To me, they seem a flashy public display that looks good to taxpayers, but is not a necessary expense. We don't need to train teachers in how to make notebooks and flip books! All we need is a way to project a computer so every student can see it, and connect that computer to the web-based applications that house the students' research, collaborative projects, original work, etc. Well, my belief is based on my own teaching style, but I think we missed the mark with the general teaching population. Perhaps a little more training on the basic operations of these boards would have been a big benefit to many teachers... and who knows? Perhaps they would have eventually seen the light and moved away from their Notebooks and Flipcharts down the road as part of a natural progression toward better integration. Looking back, we could have offered more IWB trainings. Whether they actually need it or not, our teachers are SAYING they need it, and I would have liked to give them more.

5) Believing one-size-fits-all -- It doesn't. Trying to cram a few select websites, no matter how good they are, into district-wide training sessions is bad. While this works for Internet safety, or daily operations like Office applications and our email, we don't need everyone in the district getting the same training on a private label wiki, or a teacher web-page, or our own private Google Docs, etc. I think we might be heading down the wrong path by only supporting and training a limited number of programs. Instead, having more coaches to assist teachers, we should do much more response-to-need training, and assist teachers in safely and effectively using whatever program meets their curricular needs and personal comfort levels with its use.

Sadly, it will not be next year that we are able to make these improvements. Tech coaching seems to be going away, for now. I am sure it will be revisited in the near future. I hope we are able to bring back technology (and all other!) coaches in a future budget. Teachers learn so much better from our peers, and the best way to maintain an excellent staff is to provide meaningful and excellent professional development in response to the needs of the individual staff members. I look forward to a day when our district will once again embrace this model, and hope we will improve upon some of these areas I mentioned.

Next week, on to a much brighter topic. I will reflect on so much that went right in technology integration over the past five years. See you next Tuesday. :)