ISTE Coaching Standards
ISTE-C Standard 2: Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
f. Coach teachers in and model incorporation of research-based best practices in instructional design when planning technology-enhanced learning experiences
Standard 6: Content Knowledge and Professional Growth
b. Engage in continuous learning to deepen professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions in organizational change and leadership, project management, and adult learning to improve professional practice
c. Regularly evaluate and reflect on their professional practice and dispositions to improve and strengthen their ability to effectively model and facilitate technology-enhanced learning experience
Inquiry Question:
What essential skills do tech coaches need to be successful and how they can keep up with their own professional learning?
Relationship Comes First
When I start doing peer coaching project in this course, I realized that as a tech coach, rich and solid technical skills and strategies are not the only crucial factors for sustained success, but relationship and partnership is the key to the effective coaching cycle. The strong trustful partnership will support the tech coach collaborate with teachers to initiate and implement creative ideas into classes to meet learning and teaching goals; teachers won’t feel uncomfortable when they take risks to try something new.
Effective Listening with Understanding
Deepen Listening without interrupting not only can help tech coaches to anchor teachers’ needs but also an important protocol to show respects to teachers even most content of conversation is only complains. We believe that there are benefits to hearing complaints from teachers because each complaint contains an underlying request. My coachee complaint to me that it is impossible to have his student leading collaborative learning. The underlying request might be short of time or need panning or digital divided. Focusing on these potential difficulties, probing complaints with tailored questions to gain deeper understanding rather than trying to fix it immediately can help move the coaching to a productive opportunity for growth.
Identify the Comfortable Area and Perfect time to Offer Solutions
When the tech coach paragraphing teachers conversation and pinpoint the teachers’ real needs, it always has many strategies and digital tools in the tech coach’s mind which can support the coachee to improve student learning outcomes. All different cues and different ideas that the teacher has presented in coaching conversation can come together to create intuition in the tech coach’s brain. The intuition is about the teacher’s characteristics and preferences with which the tech coach can choose the best solution to support the teacher in the appropriate time rather than overwhelming and rush the teacher.
Keep Up with Professional Learning
It is important for the tech coach to keep growing up their technological and coaching expertise to provide teachers better. Exchanging experiences via the tech coach network is a helpful way to learn from each other and refresh coaching skills and abilities. The tech coaches can attend the face-to-face conference to build a professional network with other coaches, such as EdCamp, ACAMIS. This is the link from my former blog introducing EdCamp. Most of EdCamp hosted in United Stated which is beneficial to the tech coaches and teachers nearby. ACAMIS stands for Association of China and Mongolia International Schools which is a non-profit membership organization hosted technology conferences every year to gather educators from across China and Mongolia to share best practices on technology integration. I attended the ACAMIS Shanghai 2019 technology conference. In this conference, I met and talked with many productive tech coaches who are glad to share their experiences with people. Several workshops on ISTE standards can benefit the new tech coaches to reference coaching standards and deepen understanding of SAMR or TPACK. Several workshops provided by veteran tech coaches from whom can help you jump out of the stuck loop and widen the vision to improve your coaching to be effective and meaningful.
The virtual communities are also another convenient way to connect with each other, such as ISTE Connect EdTech Coaches Network, Future Ready Schools and Twitter hashtags. There are a few PLN resources in my former blog which also can help tech coaches to build connections. There are some EdTech Podcasts created by educators as the great resources for tech coaches, TED Talks Education, House of #EdTech.
As the tech coaches, we need to strengthen our interpersonal skills and deepen coaching standards understanding from our professional development to capture teachers’ issues, preferences and needs to provide diverse help to facilitate them achieve learning goals with technology integration to improve student learning.
References:
Racines,D. (2019). 4 Tips for Instructional Coaches. Retrieved from:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/4-tips-instructional-coaches
Hill, M. (2018). Resources for EdTech Coaches. Retrieved from:
https://medium.com/inspired-ideas-prek-12/resources-for-edtech-coaches-e543ef7b1e20
Evercoach. (2019). . Coaching Skills Every Successful Coach Needs to Master. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFrtJ1SVng
Davis, E. L., Currie, B. (2019). Tech Integration Comes Alive Through Coaching. Retrieved from
http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol14/num17/tech-integration-comes-alive-through-coaching.aspx
