My Seattle Pacific University (SPU) class in the Digital Education Leadership master’s program spent this quarter working with a peer to improve an existing lesson plan. We are currently studying coaching standards defined by the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE). I was looking forward to this quarter for several reasons. In this article, I get to share my experience and do a little reflection on what I learned.
I teach the same computer science courses as several other faculty at my school. I have fixed some issues and added new content to these courses that I wanted to share with my peer faculty but have not yet found the best method for sharing course content. Our school requires faculty to put their syllabus and course content in the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS). This includes lesson plans, assignments, quizzes and exams. It also includes defining the flow of the entire course – the order of the lesson plans, when student work is due, and the day/time of the midterm/final exams.
My first approach to the SPU coaching project was to figure out a way that two or more faculty could share the same Canvas course definition. This meant that any changes or additions made by one faculty member could easily be picked up and used by another faculty member. I wanted to start with the C# programming course, as I had to teach this course in 2 quarters and I knew that there were two other faculty teaching this course in the current quarter. The motivation to use this course came from the fact that the C# programming community had seen a lot of change in the last two years which requires substantial updates to the existing curriculum. I could help myself and my fellow faculty by becoming an educational coach on updating the C# programming course. Easy, right?
Well, maybe not so easy. In the first SPU lessons for this quarter, I realized the importance of building trust in any peer relationship. The best way to do this with my peer faculty is a face-to-face meeting. The two other faculty teaching the C# course are adjuncts – like myself. This means they have work other than teaching that keeps them busy. Setting up a face-to-face meeting is a challenge with adjunct faculty. Nonetheless, I did not give up, and eventually found a time and place on campus that four faculty members (me, a tenured faculty member that taught the C# course in the past, and the two adjunct faculty) could meet.
“Team Building” by BhaduriAbhijit is licensed under CC BY 2.0
I realized the importance of this first meeting. I wanted to get to shared goals with the group but also start building a strong, trust relationship with this important set of peers. I limited my version of the agenda to just 5-10 minutes and then wanted to go into listen mode to see if my agenda resonated with others. We spent the body of the 1-hour meeting discussing our teaching experiences as well as our observations of our student’s learning experiences. We did question whether we were properly preparing students to get a job in industry. There was a sense that the student’s coding skills were not at a level that any of us felt comfortable and that this must be addressed in any changes or additions we make to the course. In the last 10 minutes of the meeting, I asked how we could best collaborate to make these changes. I got a bit of silence at this point, but then the faculty member sitting next to me mentioned that this was probably the most time he could spend outside of his classroom and job. The other adjunct faculty quickly agreed and informed me that we could maybe meet one more time, but more likely it would be at the end of the quarter. My peer faculty were certainly willing to look over my work but did not have the time to contribute or collaborate on any course changes.
This was a pretty big setback for me. I quickly realized that the course as well as the peer faculty I had chosen were not going to work for this project. There was also another, more basic lesson that I got out of this first meeting. We talked about how we could eliminate the problem of having teachers develop similar content in isolation, with little to no sharing, even on the same course. I learned that my peer faculty used Canvas in very different ways. Some used Canvas simply as a file share and calendar that students could use to pick up course content and discover upcoming deadlines. Other faculty developed their entire course as Canvas pages, using the Canvas quiz features to automate the grading process as much as possible. My approach of developing a single Canvas course that would work with more than one faculty did not seem practical or desirable.
I came out of this first meeting feeling pretty lost. The tenured faculty from this meeting immediately picked up on this and asked if I could talk for a bit more. He wanted to talk about another course – the mobile programming course that he had taught in the past and that I was teaching in the current quarter. He wanted to investigate whether a flipped classroom would work for this course. He was doing this already in a different course and exploring the use of an interactive textbook. He suggested we flip one lesson and see if we liked the results and could apply this approach to the remaining lessons.
This is the course and instructor I picked for my SPU project. The other posts in this blog present what I learned along this process. In particular, my previous blog pointed out the importance of collaboration and communication skills for a peer coach. The blog post also pointed the need for patience and iteration. I still feel that an educational coach can never stop learning when it comes to new ways to collaborate and communicate. Upon further reflection, I have also discovered another skill that is crucial to an educational coach’s success – flexibility! Not all educators are going to teach the same way, and there is no one way that is better than another. For an educational coach to have impact, the coach has to embrace these differences and provide content and technology that can be adapted to any teaching style.
“Robot toy concept: Mono” by Iancu Liviu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The impact on me is profound. Rather than sharing a complete Canvas course with my peer faculty, I am exploring how to break a course up into re-usable pieces that can be adopted by many different Canvas courses. This means developing standalone lessons, assignments, quizzes, and exams that other faculty can pick and choose, modify, and adapt to their course. This was not my original path but something I now feel more confident will be successful with my peer faculty. As an aside, the first meeting I chronicled above did have another very valuable outcome for me. The other faculty agreed to participate in a faculty learning community that we can use to discuss course changes and improvements. I hope to leverage this community in the coming quarters to continue to develop my coaching skills!
REFERENCES
- Foltos, L. (2013). Peer Coaching : Unlocking the Power of Collaboration. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin. Chapters 9 & 10.
- ISTE | ISTE Standards for Coaches. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2019, from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-coaches