Meeting my Professional Learning Needs through Community

Learning Communities

      Learning Communities help me stay sharp as a coach by connecting with fellow educators, exploring new tech, and diving into the latest teaching methods. It is so important as a new coach to be supported by other coaches, and I love it when I can support others as well. 

       In Prince William County, our coaching community is vibrant, caring, and active. I am continuously grateful for my relationships with other coaches both within and outside of the county that have been so important to my own development as a coach and my ability to meet the needs of my teachers. Our regular training sessions and meetings are incredibly useful, both in the presented content and the time we spend together problem solving and game planning. I remember going to one of our Apple Learning sessions early and spending the first 15-20 minutes with the other ITCs trading helpful tidbits. I was having some issues with Book Creator. I knew it had the capability to have many participants working together in one book, but when I tried this with some of my staff members it flopped! The other ITCs helped walk me through how to set it up correctly for this interactive feature. I was then able to share this activity with my staff members! At the same meeting, I was able to show them how I had set up my flagging and categorizing system in my email to keep track of tasks as they came in. This helped them to manage their workflow to better serve their educators! 

     Leveraging learning communities, I guide and develop personal goals with teachers, ensuring alignment with the school and district focus. Through this process, I connect strategies and tools to specific challenges facing my educators. When needed I assist teachers with technology tools for implementing these strategies, while also offering support as they experiment and adapt their instruction. It can be hard for us to get out of our comfort zone, so I try to ensure that my teachers feel like they have a safe space to take risks! 

     I was working with one of my colleagues to incorporate more blended learning into her language arts stations. I knew there were some excellent tools for what she wanted to do that I was personally less familiar with. I reached out to my mentor, who met with me on Teams to go over the strengths and weaknesses of each tool I was looking into, as well as suggesting a tool I hadn’t thought of. My mentor helped me determine which tools would be used best for which types of activities. I was then able to return to the educator with several options for strategies and tools that made her classroom more engaging, interactive, and differentiated. As a coach, I am engaged in learning communities, aligning personal goals of teachers with our school and district focuses, and connecting the strategies and tools needed to address specific challenges faced by educators.