Personal development. This was the thing you into great detail on. Whenever I interview people I ask, What are you passionate about? What do you feel like you can speak the most into? And this is the topic you brought up.This is a massive district and you’re going to get into some of the details of what you guys have gone through. I think this should be a huge focus top down on personal development, not just for technology staff and instructional staff, but also just for the teachers in the classroom and giving them those resources. So I love to hear, number one, maybe what you learned when you were a teacher for that. And then how have you as granite schools worked together to create this culture of bettering and getting more education around that?
Yeah, I’ll start with maybe my experience with that as a teacher and professional development and culture of my schools. I had some great principles as a teacher that helped model I when I was at the STEM school, there was this culture of everyone was excited to share what they were doing in their classroom. Everyone was excited about, you know, what they were doing for kids. If they did something that worked, they wanted to tell the person next door. And I, I really thrived in that and I liked that. But it was so small scale that when I got into this role, it was kind of like, how do I build that into something that spreads further? I’ve been in schools where there would maybe be pockets of innovation, where two or three teachers were being innovative, but it wasn’t the main thing that the school was focused on. So some of my efforts started with we’ve been very lucky in Utah. Our state legislature has what’s called the digital Teaching and Learning program, and they allocate per pupil funding for technology and for technology initiatives. When I started in this role, that program was starting, so I wrote a grant plan that involved training whole schools, training principals and leadership in blended and digital learning and personalized learning and starting with leaders. And if I could get the leader on board, then it becomes less of one innovative teacher in a building and it becomes more unified. The whole building is working together towards a common goal and coaching is super important to that. So some of the requirements of the grant were that each teacher had to work with their technology coach and it was exciting because we were pairing devices. Those schools received 1 to 1 devices, but I knew that the devices alone weren’t going to be effective. You know, looking at what are all of the things that I need to have set up in order to have success with. You know, if you throw poor technology, use at poor teaching, it’s not going to have an impact. It has to be effective tech use paired with effective teaching. And so I knew that we needed to build coaching so that teachers would have the resources and teachers would have opportunities to grow and someone by their side, because that can be an intimidating process to learn new things. So that was one spot where we started. I don’t know, I could go on and on.
I did that start with like a marketing campaign to your teachers that start with you or your staff, you’re like, Hey, this is a new opportunity. I just know in education, like you said, it’s like, it’s like a train. It’s not quick, right? How are you getting the information down to your people? Is that through your principals you said just because what I want to do is listeners who have this to maybe even have a plan, Hey, we did this. It didn’t work, but we figured out that this worked.
Yeah. So something that I’m pretty sure my staff would probably roll their eyes to hear me drop this framework. But I use Napster’s model for managing complex change. It. Basically there are five indicators and I wrote them down so I wouldn’t forget. But basically, you need to have vision skills, incentives, resources and an action plan. And when I found early on that when I was trying to push something forward, I was probably missing one of those pieces. And so I’ve tried to plan things in a way that I make sure that I have those things. So in this case, the incentive was how do I get schools on board? Not everybody just has all the time in the world and wants to adopt everything. So the incentive was we would provide schools that signed up with 1 to 1 devices.So there’s a pretty big carrot dangled there for principals of your whole school can get 1 to 1 devices if you participate in this program. If you’re willing to go through this professional development, come to these nightly classes, ensure us that your teachers are willing to be coached. You know, the teacher gets a laptop and they get 1 to 1 devices for their class. If they’re willing to learn more and spend some of their own time developing these additional skills. So I tried to build in incentives, build in training. So we knew they had the resources they needed. I tried to share with them the vision of where we wanted to get, which is we want your students to have authentic opportunities, to have real world learning and be connected to each other and collaborate so I try to assess ahead of time, do I have all of these things in place? Do people are people resistant because they don’t know how? Because they don’t want to? Because they don’t have time? I find that the majority of teachers, in fact, every teacher I’ve ever met wants to do a really good job and wants to help kids and wants every student in their class to learn. Yeah, but often there are limitations that are out of their control. You know, they don’t have time. They have to balance family like you mentioned. So are we paying them for the extra time? We’re asking them, are we building their skills so it becomes less of a lift for them to implement things that we’re asking? So I try to think through all of those things. Any time we’re implementing something new.
So going through that personal development, can you talk a little bit about maybe like a hierarchy of what that personal development looks like? Maybe for administration and maybe your tech staff and what they have done personal development wise? And then and then maybe at a teacher level, what those kinds of levels look like.
So for administrators, we did three years worth of cohorts where we had about ten schools. So we ended up with 31 elementary schools that have 1 to 1 devices. All 30 of those elementary principals went through a university level program called Leadership and Blended and Digital Learning. That was through North Carolina State University. And so they came out of it with their EdTech endorsement. Teachers were being coached every month, at least once a month. My tech staff, we pull them for training at least once a month. So we do a lot of training. The trainer type stuff. So we started focusing on things like the Tripoli framework, building their capacity in what is coaching, what is instructional coaching, look through a tech lens. And so at the same time, we needed to build teachers to have incentives and skills I needed to make sure I was taking my staff from more of a technical support role to a coaching role. So am I providing them with opportunities to build their skills and build their confidence so that they can coach their teachers? Because I can’t. I don’t have the ability to have face time with 3000 teachers, so I have to do a really good job of developing my staff and hiring staff that are willing to move the ideas forward that we have as a district. And so we do a lot of training the trainer and we rely a lot on the talent and expertise of our school level coaches to implement that with teachers. Yeah, And then moving to the teacher level, To your point, teachers are busy. We ask them to do a lot of things. We ask them to be everything to everyone in a lot of ways. And so I needed to be sensitive to how I have a program where I compensate teachers for their time and where I show that I understand and that we integrate this into something that is individualized to meet the needs of their. Not every teacher needs the same thing. Not every teacher. Students need the same thing. So last year we took my whole staff. They all became Google certified coaches. We facilitated that, we put a structure in place and they put a lot of hours and a lot of work into that. But now I think they’re seeing the benefits for that. We’re now having opportunities to coach and they’re prepared for those opportunities. We built on that and we’ve taken the dynamic learning projects, impactful technology use indicators, and we are incentivizing teachers through monthly challenges to to implement those effective practices with their students. So for example, they will implement a technology lesson that helps their students to collaborate with each other or helps to build critical thinking. They work with their coach to plan that lesson. They work with their coach to debrief on how it went, and they complete a reflection and share artifacts with us at the district level. And they’re paid a stipend for completing those. And that was us trying to take all of these things that we felt were amazing, that we were learning about impactful technology use. How do we get those down to the student level? How do we incentivize teachers? Because it’s not the teachers who don’t want to do things that are going to have an impact for our students. When do I have time? How do I take the time to learn how to do this well? And so we tried to address those factors by providing some additional pay, knowing that they’d have to spend extra time outside of contract and additional training by making sure that our coaches were prepared to meet their needs with those different challenges. And it’s been really positively received. We’ve had over 500 different teachers participate this school year and we’re only, you know, three or four months into it. So we’ve been really pleased with the kind of the response to it. And like I said, we’re fortunate we’re using that digital teaching and learning money that we’re provided through the state of Utah. And that’s been, you know, the leadership of our state superintendent, Sid Dixon, and our DTL department at the state level. They’ve prepared us to be able to really take advantage of a lot of these opportunities, I think.
Yeah, I think I want to maybe dig in a little bit and I love what you said. It wasn’t just we provided the training, it was we provided the training and then the teacher would go do the lesson and then they would report back to the person who were just training. How did it go? And then it sounded like there was a refinement period. And then once that’s all done, there’s like a completion. I think so many things I’ve seen is, All right, we got the money, let’s buy this stuff. And it’s just kind of cast into the void. There’s no record of is this actually benefiting? And I like that.There’s like a step by step process of like, we’re going to make sure our time spent here is going to be valuable both for us and both for the teacher, both for the student. And that multi-layer. You have to have that to be successful.
And I’ve definitely learned from making some of those same mistakes in the past approach others, you know, this is my seventh year, like I said, and some of those first grade experiences, I had the expectation that if we just create the environment or just provide the devices, that the rest will take care of itself. What we found is coaching is what has the most direct impact on getting that to actually be implemented with students and the joys and showers. Research on coaching where it showed like classroom implementation. If it’s just an event, it’s almost no implementation. If it’s just a PTA event with a follow up, there’s a tiny bit of implementation, but you see this huge spike in implementation when there’s actual job embedded coaching and that individualized follow up.And so we’re seeing a lot more impact with a coaching model than we were with like a, Hey, come after school and I’ll show you how to use this tech tool without follow up, without hearing from the teacher what their learning objectives are. This coaching approach has been much more effective at getting classroom implementation.
So you had mentioned like earlier, about 500 and some teachers have already gone through this. I mean, about 3000 teachers, District one
Yeah, it’s a little bit over that. Yeah.
Yeah. So at this point in time, you’re seven years into this position. I’m sure this has been a few years of really being on top of this. I want to hear from you. What does success look like in the next 3 to 5 years? And then what impact do you expect it to have on the students?
I think success for me looks like students having a personalized and differentiated classroom experience that really prepares them for the real world. The workplace, you know, they’re collaborating. Critical thinking is a more necessary skill than it’s ever. Then I think we’re seeing this significant shift of I come in or it’s here, you know, and that’s going to shift the way that we teach, the way that we assess. And I think that these skills are those uniquely human skills that we want kids to have, being able to collaborate with each other, being able to create original work, being able to critically think, to know what a good source of information is or to know what is human created, or to know if something that I generated as a quality artifact or not. So success for me is pretty big. I think it’s looking at how none of this matters If we’re not impacting the student experience and know what our students are learning. So for me, it’s getting things from this maybe high level idea phase down to are we having a positive impact? And I’ve heard, you know, we have some spots in our district where we’re seeing some really powerful things. We had a tech coach last year who went through some coaching cycles with their writing and their English teachers and they saw significant assessment improvements, significant language acquisition improvements. And we’re excited to start seeing those results. But coaching is gradual and it’s incremental. So we have to remind ourselves that like making the right moves repetitively and doing those over and over again, it might take two or three years before we start seeing the fruits of that. But it’s still important to stay consistent and not get distracted and move from one thing to the next quickly
Yeah, that’s amazing. So to to close out, how can a tech or a technology director get started, like doing like personal development? What advice would you give them to have a successful launch of this? And maybe I know you talk maybe reiterating those five steps of you know you know, I know a lot of people call like one third, two thirds, right? One third planning, two thirds execution.
But yeah, I think being patient and being consistent, there were plenty of times where I thought, like, this is moving so slow, we’re not going anywhere. But then there will be these events that occur that all of a sudden everything lines up and you see the positives of what you’ve been, maybe pressing forward and pushing against and feel like you’re banging your head against the wall. So I think incremental change is the lasting change. And I think building I think just reflecting on like if we’re getting stuck, is it because my people don’t know where I want them to go? Is it because they don’t have the skills to get there? Is it because I’ve distracted them with a bunch of other superfluous things? So it’s providing, I think, clarity, opportunities. And I think the biggest thing that I’ve done and I say I have because everything else I think is my team hiring the right people is the most important thing. I’ve been very fortunate to have really good applicant pools for our position. Our department is a place that people want to work, and that’s led me to be able to find really great people. Yeah, and I think your ideas are only going to be as good as the people around you. So I think hire good people, listen to those people, get their input, get there, buy in and move forward with the people that are ready and the people who aren’t ready will either start to see the value and come along or they’ll find something else that makes them happy. And I think that I am just my staff right now, I have just a lot of amazing coaches that are all bought in and the pace at which we’re able to make positive change has increased because the people that work for me are amazing and willing and want to help teachers. And they were great teachers themselves. So yeah, I’m excited about what we’re seeing. We have great teachers in our district as well. I mean, as you can see by the buying that we have to this excitement you know reading their reflections, looking at their artifacts, I’m constantly impressed by what they’re doing with kids.
You know, I think that’s great advice. You know, just even, you know, we were small. We’ve got 70 some employees, but it’s just like one person can drag down a big group of people and one really good person can uplift a lot of people. And strong culture will purge the people who aren’t in line because they’ll leave like, I don’t fit in here.
Yeah, and that’s really true. I found that I haven’t been very successful at teaching adults new social skills. I think you can teach them how to do a job well. I think you can teach them how to learn a new skill. So I do try to hire for culture. You know, that resiliency, that positive attitude, the kind of believing that you can have a bigger impact on your having, those are things that are hard to teach. So I try to hire based on culture and we can build skills. So sometimes people might be surprised by hiring this really amazing teacher with not much of a technology background.Those things can be taught passion for teaching, passion for doing what’s best for kids. Those are harder to teach. Those are things that are intrinsic. So yeah, yeah, I think culture is huge.
That’s awesome. Well, Chris, thank you so much and thank you for all the hard work you’ve done for granted and for the students here. Yeah, thanks for having me as a lifelong thing that you’ve done for people. I appreciate that and thanks for being on.
Thank you
In Episode 33, Hope Davis, MA, CHC takes us on a journey from personal challenges to leading educational innovation at Teach Tech U. Discover how her experiences fueled a passion for transformative technology in education, shaping the future with Project LEAR. An inspiring conversation for anyone intrigued by the power of tech to change lives. […]
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With guest speaker Marsha Maxwell, PhD, CETL, join us for a reflective journey on the advancements of AI through the years, focusing on how we can further develop these technologies to bridge educational divides.
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