Education Week - Calendar of Events - August 21, 2013 - C5

Study Aims to
Evaluate Tech-
Related Teacher PD
By Michelle R. Davis
As technology is integrated into teacher professional
development in new and different
ways, researchers are working to answer a key
question: What approaches featuring digital
tools work best?
A research project on professional development
in the 103,000-student Memphis school
system in Tennessee is working toward some
answers.
The initiative is evaluating two different technology-related
methods of professional development
to see which may have the more significant
impact on student achievement.
In one group, teachers are videotaping themselves
in class and then working with coaches
by telephone and email to boost their skills.
In the other group, teachers are tapping into
an online community that features discussion
boards and resources for improvement.
Evaluators will use a student survey and achievement
data to determine the impact of each form
of professional development. A final report on the
findings is slated to be published in 2014.
The project is important because there’s a
serious lack of data about online and other
technology-related professional development,
said Stephanie Hirsh, the executive director of
Learning Forward, an Oxford, Ohio-based nonprofit
focused on educator learning. Learning
Forward is not involved in the Memphis study.
“Fundamentally, we need to do more research
around the impact of these different, new learning
opportunities for teachers,” Ms. Hirsh said.
Video Analysis
The research has received $2.7 million in funding
from the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which also helps support Education
Week’s coverage of business and innovation.
As part of the research project, teachers in one
group, which include elementary, middle, and
high school educators, videotape their lessons
for about 30 minutes at least eight times during
the school year and send those recordings to a
coach. The mentor evaluates a teacher’s skills
based on principles set out by a coaching model
called MyTeachingPartner, which emphasizes
approaches to help teachers improve interactions
with students.
Those principles are based on the “seven
C’s”: care, control, clarify, challenge, captivate,
confer, and consolidate. Coaches highlight the
C’s in which the teachers are performing well
and point out areas for improvement, then
work with teachers to change practices, said
Monica W. Jordan, the coordinator of reflective
practice and instructional support for the
Memphis schools.
Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry
School of Education at the University of Virginia,
who helped develop MyTeachingPartner,
is training the coaches working with the Memphis
teachers. The coaches are being provided
by Cambridge Education, a Westwood, Mass.based
nonprofit education consulting company.
Mr. Pianta said some teachers were worried
at first that they might feel disconnected from
a mentor they didn’t see face-to-face, but those
worries have largely dissipated.
In the second professional-development sce-
nario, teachers were presented with access to
an online environment that features instructional
materials, videos, articles, and links to
information, which all line up with the categories
laid out by the seven C’s. The online environment
also provides opportunities for interaction
through discussion boards for sharing best
practices, lesson plans, and new ideas.
“There’s content there, but teachers can also
build the content they want to see,” Ms. Jordan
said.
Tracking the Results
The initiative has its roots in the Tripod Project
for School Improvement, a survey that questions
students about their experiences as viewed through
the seven C’s. The survey has been found to be
highly reliable in predicting student achievement,
according to a report by the Gates Foundation.
Ms. Jordan said there are few results from the
initiative so far, but she said teachers who are actively
participating in the intensive video training
have called it “the most transformational form of
professional development they’ve ever received.”
Brittany Clark, an English teacher at Middle
College High School in Memphis, said the
coaching “made me more reflective and attuned
to certain things.”
For example, the coaching highlighted a need for
multiple checks of student understanding. Now,
Ms. Clark said, she’s incorporating several methods
of determining whether students are catching
on, from using clicker devices to a thumbs-up or
thumbs-down system.
This article originally appeared in Education Week.
Sharpe Elementary
School teacher
Ikeysha Hall works
on a lesson with
her 4th graders.
She is participating
in the Tripod
Professional
Development
Research Project,
a study in the
Memphis schools
that is comparing
two different
methods of
technology-related
professional
development.
Online Tools Playing
Greater Role
In Teacher PD
By Sean Cavanagh
Teachers and principals are becoming increasingly
comfortable using online tools to hone their professional
skills and are turning to options from social networking
to Web-based classes to do so, a nationwide survey reveals.

The findings, which cover a lot of ground, are included
in the Speak Up survey, “From Chalkboards to Tablets:
The Digital Conversion of the K-12 Classroom.” Speak
Up is an effort led by Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit group
based in Irvine, Calif., that seeks to improve students’ academic
preparation through technology and other means.
The survey found that the number of principals who
said they support professional growth through some form
of social networking more than tripled, from 8 percent in
2008 to 25 percent today. The proportion of teachers who
reported using social-networking tools also jumped, from
22 percent to 39 percent, during that time period. The
percentages of teachers and principals participating in
online classes and virtual professional learning communities
also rose significantly, the survey found.
With some specific technologies, the evolution in usage
is particularly striking. In 2008, just 26 percent of principals
used webinars for professional growth. The number
is 63 percent today.
At the same time, the opinions of teachers, principals,
and others were, perhaps not surprisingly, divided on
whether educators’ job evaluations should include a measure
of how adept they are in using technology to boost
instruction and student achievement. While substantial
proportions of parents, principals, and district administrators
support including that information in evaluations,
just 43 percent of teachers backed the idea.
The survey also appears to reflect parents’ growing
ease with some forms of technology as tools for communicating
with schools. Thirty-seven percent said they would
like their children’s schools to communicate with them
via text message, compared with just 5 percent two years
ago.
The results are based on responses from a nationally
representative sample of 364,240 K-12 students, 39,713
parents, 53,947 teachers, 2,399 librarians, 1,564 district
administrators, 3,947 school administrators, and 500
technology leaders, from 8,020 public and private schools.
The survey was conducted online using a customized
data-collection tool.
The results also underscore school officials’ mounting
worries about ensuring teachers’ and students’ access to
the Web, as demand for online capacity increases. In survey
results from five years ago, just 12 percent of schoolsite
administrators regarded concerns about digital equity
as a primary challenge; now 41 percent say that is
so. And while only 10 percent of technology leaders in
the survey identified Web capacity and bandwidth issues
as a critical issue in 2010, 34 percent say it is their most
challenging tech issue today.
This article originally appeared in Education Week Digital
Directions
EDUCATION WEEK 2013 CALENDAR OF EVENTS & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTORY www.edweek.org/go/calendar 5
DIGITAL PD TAKES OFF
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Education Week - Calendar of Events - August 21, 2013

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