5b Facilitating active learning

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The ISTE Standards for Coaches 5b, “Build the capacity of educators, leaders and instructional teams to put the ISTE Standards into practice by facilitating active learning and providing meaningful feedback,” highlights what facilitated professional learning should do for participants. It should build the capacity of all involved when it comes to putting the ISTE standards into practice through active learning and meaningful feedback.

Source: PBL for the Teachers?

Evidence: “By applying research-based approaches in combination with standards-based practices like the ISTE Coaching Standards, we, as an educational community, can greatly increase the value and effectiveness of year-round professional learning experiences and opportunities. There are many ways to approach this, but why not start with something that most adult learners have at least heard of like PBL?”

Explanation: PBL is an excellent way to put the ISTE Standards in practice because the PBL approach centers around actively learning and the PBL structure lends itself to providing meaningful feedback because it’s provided within an authentic context.

Source: Puzzling Over Protocols

Evidence: “Who, when, and where we teach are often set by extenuating circumstances. Whereas why we teach is both deeply personal and different for every educator. What we teach can be set by state level standards, curriculum guides, and a number of other external factors. Sometimes we have some level of control and sometimes not. As instructors, we arguably have the most control over how we teach. Deciding how to teach content can be both fun and overwhelming because so often we reinvent the wheel in education and therefore put a lot of extra work into designing the how. Sometimes this is fine. However, it’s nice to choose when we as instructors invest so much energy in teaching versus utilizing prepackaged options. Sometimes curriculum provides a prepackaged option, but having a library of possible prepackaged choices to choose from can make a big difference by saving time, effort, and headache. Combine this with technology considerations, and there are some helpful connections to ISTE Coaching Standard 5 (adults in this case but also applies to kids).”

Explanation: Providing instructional protocols for educators, leaders, and instructional teams increases the proverbial tools in an educator’s tool belt that they can utilize and apply in a variety of contexts in order to quickly structure and focus learning activities. The content is flexible for protocols so they can easily be adapted to ISTE Standards-based content.

Source: Professional Learning Can Be ‘Squirrelly’ Business

Evidence: “Recently, I was asked to ponder the following questions:
What is an example of professional development that has worked for you?
What is an example of professional development that has not worked for you?
What does research say about planning professional learning?
The first two questions are relatively easy to answer as they bring to mind all sorts of examples as I’ve experience a lot of professional learning over my 20-year career in education. Reflecting on what the research says about planning professional learning requires some more thought, reflection, reading, and research. There’s a lot written about professional learning and sorting through any of it takes time. All three are guiding questions are applicable to the following essential question and relevant ISTE Coaching Standard: How should we plan professional development that utilizes educational technology?”

Explanation: Utilizing research-based and standards based practices (e.g. ISTE) are critical to providing active learning and feedback that builds the capacity of educators, leaders, and instructional teams.

Source: Encoding Creative Communication

Evidence: “Successfully addressing ISTE Standard 6, Creative Communicator, requires aspects of all four C’s from the core set of 21st Century Skills. Creativity is obviously required in order to be a creative communicator, as are communication and collaboration essential skills for creatively communicating with others. Lastly, and perhaps less obvious, is the need for critical thinking as creative communicators (i.e. students) evaluate tools, mediums, and resources to use effectively in order to accomplish their goals as supported by this standard. This last part comes out through the third component of the standard to “communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively…” and forms the basis for my essential question and the focus of this blog post.”

Explanation: Providing educational professionals with the ability to support students in all four areas of communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking with respect to 21st Century Skills builds significant capacity for putting ISTE standards into practice.

Source: Computational Thinking Across the Content Areas

Evidence: “These four pillars are also explained well in a video for educators created by Google. With these four pillars in mind, we can look at how the ISTE Indicators of Computational Thinking quantify computational thinking into a single applicable statement: “Students break problems into component parts, extract key information, and develop descriptive models to understand complex systems or facilitate problem-solving,” ISTE Indicators of Computational Thinking. Essentially, computational thinking is a process for quantifying, breaking down, and solving problems into small solvable pieces. Problem solving can be done in any content area. By looking more closely at the ISTE Computational Thinking standard, we can get an idea for how computational thinking might be applied more generically across content areas as a way to approach problem solving in different subjects.”

Explanation: Computational thinking is so relevant to supporting ISTE standards that not only is there a student ISTE standard dedicated to this area but there is an entire category of ISTE computational thinking standards. Supporting educators in computational thinking therefore supports educators, leaders, and instructional teams in their capacity to put ISTE standards into practice.

Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

5a Working with adults

5b Facilitating active learning

5c Evaluate the impact of professional learning

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