Fostering Teacher Relationships in Rural Schools

As an instructional coach, I am fortunate to work with three forward-thinking rural school districts in Ohio. The superintendents, Dan Leffingwell, Adam Pittis and Ryan Caldwell understand the challenges facing their districts to provide quality professional development to their staff and to build a sense of community

Often rural educators feel isolated from specific resources and benefits offered in other districts. One of the ways to negate the feeling of isolation in a rural district is to create strong relationships.  To do this, we are bringing together educators of neighboring districts to pool resources and knowledge to grow their professional learning networks. These opportunities are available now more than ever with the growth of social media and the sharing of resources through technology. Through the use of technology, I have been able to continue a coaching cycle with teachers through Google Hangouts which keeps them in their buildings and allows our work to continue. I will also soon connect teachers in the three districts through Hangouts to discuss and share thoughts on a reading and writing curriculum.

I enjoy traveling to schools and providing professional development to educators based on their needs. I provide ongoing support for teachers as they implement new strategies in their classrooms. What makes this rewarding and beneficial is that I am in classrooms and have the opportunity to experience many amazing strategies and implementation of ideas that I can share with others to help them grow.  

When I am working with teachers from another school district, I am able to say, "I believe you would benefit from visiting a teacher I am coaching in another district." With the assistance of the leadership in these districts, we were able to bring together three third grade teachers to share and learn about best practices in the classroom.

While it may seem like a small step it is one that is very powerful as we continue to grow our efforts to build opportunities for teachers to connect and learn from their peers, which is one of the greatest professional learning opportunities teachers have.

I share this today because it brought a lot of hope and joy to me as a former student and educator of a rural district. My hope is that these teachers will continue to connect and feel hopeful and inspired by each other.

A Professional Learning Challenge

This week I finally received and read Catlin Tucker's new book, Power Up Blended Learning: A Professional Learning Infrastructure to Support Sustainable Change.  She shares that professional development should be practice based and that "all professional development should strive to employ the strategies it advocates." It seems simple enough and a no-brainer, but often that is not what we get from professional learning days.  We've all been there. We've attended and even facilitated "sit and get" learning sessions. 

This weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the @RewireYou #Rewire Conference sponsored by Glenn Robbins and Barry Saide at Tabernacle Schools in New Jersey.  I attended Kate Baker's session on Flexible Learning Environment and Protocols for Flipped Learning called, "Get Flippin' in Here!"  The title alone sounds fun, right?

What I loved about her session is that while she was teaching us about flipped learning, we, the participants, were acting as students in an in-class flipped lesson.  Now, I do coach teachers on flipped learning, but being the student and actually getting a feel for what the learning is like for the student is a game-changer.  Experiencing the lesson from the student's point of view gives the participant a better idea of the impact of the lesson.  I believe this is true especially when we are introducing technology tools. 

In her presentation, Kate shared EdPuzzle and Formative.  EdPuzzle allowed for the videos to be viewed with a formative quiz at the end of the video.  The teacher, Kate, would receive our scores as well as how long we viewed the video and if we even viewed it at all. 

I challenge all of us to think about how we provide professional learning.  Do we want to passively "sit and get" or do we want participants to experience the learning as we challenge our teachers to teach every day?