July 2004 — SETDA
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Tennessee: Technology Coaches in the Workplace: Professional Development Takes a New Spin in Tennessee
Taking a year or two away from regular classroom teaching duties, Tennessee's technology coaches are the key people in a varied and innovative site-based professional development program launched with the state's competitive EdTech grant program. Like their athletic counterparts, these tech coaches are experienced players in the game that they teach their team. Despite what most people think, however, the game is not technology. Tennessee's EdTech Launch grant program sets out to enhance the education of children through technology. In this effort, technology is simply a tool that all the team members must learn to understand and use.
The technology coach's job is to make sure skilled professionals have structured opportunities to experiment with technology in the context of curricular goals and to adapt their own teaching practice to make use of technology in ways that support student learning. The program is implemented differently in every school, but each shares certain characteristics such as:
- A full-time technology coach;
- Professional development designed around curriculum;
- Individual and small group meetings to share practices;
- Regular reflective journaling with individualized feedback; and
- Celebrations of success that highlight student results.
All of this sounds well and good, but why has Tennessee opted for this approach to EdTech?
Like many other states, Tennessee has seen technology initiatives come and go. It even structured its Technology Literacy Challenge Fund (TLCF) grant program to encourage a large number of teachers to use Internet resources in everyday instruction. But Tennessee saw no wholesale embrace of technology as an effective tool for everyday teaching. Tennessee invests its funds in statewide Internet access for all schools, but technology funding at the local level remains a discretionary item. We needed something to break the ensuing stalemate - to get all teachers in a school using technology as part of daily practice to enhance student learning. We needed something that would cling to a school's bones once the program was over. We needed something that would become part of a school's character - much as technology has become an undisputed presence in today's business world. We believe that technology can play a critical role in enriching every child's opportunity to become master of his or her own learning.
To do this, the state asked the question, "What could we do to get an entire faculty integrating technology on a commonplace basis?" The first and obvious answer was simple: having enough technology to make it possible. But behind the obvious answer lay a far more daunting challenge: We repeatedly saw that teachers who already had a wealth of teaching methods only tended to dabble around the edges of using technology. Even when it was a professional research, communication or presentation tool for teachers, technology still was not something the students were regularly using as a creative learning tool. The state hypothesized that a full-time indigenous technology coach, working all year with the teachers in their own classrooms, and in small planning teams examining the curriculum, might bring about school-level systemic change.
