Engage in continuous learning to deepen professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions in organizational change and leadership, project management, and adult learning to improve professional practice. (ISTE, 2011)
A challenge that I have noted several times in my posts concern communication and collaboration with my peer faculty. I am an adjunct faculty member of the computer science department and most of my peers are also adjunct faculty in the same department, some of which teach the same courses that I teach. None of the adjunct faculty have an office on campus or a business phone number. This makes communicating and collaborating with adjunct faculty very difficult, particularly when trying to sustain innovation in computer science education.
When successful, I have found conversations with peer faculty to turn into a coaching session that provides me many benefits. I originally had only email as my collaboration tool and sometimes had, what seemed to me at least, entire meetings over email. This is not a great experience, and something I did not want to do frequently. Instead, I wanted to have more of a free flowing conversation with my peers that would allow more reflection between both of us on what went well and what we could do differently when the same course is offered in the future.
Any reflective conversation between a Peer Coach and collaborating teacher needs to be focused on evidence about teaching and learning. (Foltos, 2013)
There are some things that can be done across all computer science courses. In these cases, it makes more sense for me to meet with several members of the computer science faculty. This is the reason that I joined a faculty learning community. However, the mechanics of organizing a meeting with three to five people quickly becomes overwhelming. If I was serious about continuous learning from my fellow faculty, I had to find a way to solve this problem that did not involve a lot of work for each participant.
I realized that administrators at my school often hold meetings with more than four people. I approached the administrator assistant of my department about how these meeting are organized. I had already been through orientation as a new faculty member at this point, and I had not been given any tool other than email to solve this problem. However, the administrator pointed me to a 25Live tool that is used to organize larger meetings. It allows one to not only finding free/busy time on people’s schedules, but free/busy time of campus conference rooms. This has been an invaluable tool in schedule meetings with my fellow faculty, and something I even use to schedule one-on-one meetings with students.
References
- Foltos, L. (2013). Peer Coaching : Unlocking the Power of Collaboration. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin. Chapters 9 & 10.
- International Society for Technology in Education. (ISTE; 2011). Standards for Coaches. https://id.iste.org/docs/pdfs/20-14_ISTE_Standards-C_PDF.pdf.