Mod 3 ISTE, NBPTS, and WVPTS

Where do the ISTE, NBPTS, and WVPTS "speak" to or promote teacher leadership, particularly leadership for technology integration? Each of the National Board and West Virginia professional teaching standards are similar and provide expectations or standards in which every teacher should demonstrate regarding ; curriculum and planning, the learner, teaching, professional self-renewal, and professional responsibilities for school and community. Standard 4 in the WVPTS sets the standard for how teachers continue to improve their own knowledge, Professional Responsibilities for Self Renewal. Teachers improve themselves by collaborating and reflecting on what improvements they need to make to keep up with concerning changes in school, the major changes in schools today is in technology and teachers need continued improvements to keep ahead of their students. ISTE have specific standards for evaluating administrators and leaders to support and implement technology. ISTE.NETS.A – advancing digital age leadership have five areas in technology standards; 1)Visionary Leadership, 2) Digital Age Learning Culture, 3) Excellence in Professional Practice, 4) Systemic Improvement, and 5) Digital Citizenship. ISTE have numerous resources and training to help leaders in technology get the support, knowledge and skills they need to keep up with the digital age . These standards are to help promote policies that support excellence in teaching and leading. If you were designing a program or professional development intended to prepare teacher leaders to take advantage of these multiple pathways, what would it look like? What learning experiences would you include? A good deal of the professional development classes I have attended are all lecture type lessons, in which they introduce you to new discoveries via whiteboards and such, not much hands on activities. If I was to set up a professional development program I would want to set it up with a little more hands-on development and/or collaborative type of environment. There is too much individualized teaching, (teachers making their own lessons instead of working together to teach students), we need more collaboration among teachers in individual grades and between grades one higher and lower. Take the second grade teachers at our school, they each have separate planning periods which allows them little time to work together improving the education of the second graders as a whole. Not to mention the need to work with the teachers from other grades so learning can be built upon, first grade needs to work with second grade, second grade needs to work with third grade and so on. The old saying “It takes a village to raise a child” is true, and today our school is the main hall of the village. One teacher cannot expect to do well keeping to his/herself. All of those involved in the education of children need to work together, including teachers, administrators, parents and students. As of now teachers only get one half hour a day for planning, that is not nearly enough considering all the prep and planning that needs to be done on a daily basis. Teacher’s time is precious and needs to be well managed, therefore their professional development needs to be done on a daily basis. Teachers need at least on hour a day for professional development, half of this time should be spent in collaboration with administration or other teachers to improve teaching practices ( reviewing policies, procedures, content and/or methods for instruction) . The other half would be spent on classroom preparations and parental involvement (what individual students may need). Well trained and knowledgeable teachers make well trained and knowledgeable administrators, so we need to focus on recruiting, preparing, developing and rewarding effective collaborative teachers and leaders.