Trying on a New Hat & My Blog is 1!

Happy Blog-day!  With Enthusiasm is 1!

Baking is one of my favorite hobbies and I never need a reason to make cupcakes, and I certainly couldn't let the first anniversary of With Enthusiasm pass by without a sweet treat!  THANK YOU to all who have read, commented, and supported me this first year as a blogger!  I reread my first post today and was inspired with how far I have come on this journey, and look forward to the new adventures as a new year of blogging begins.

Putting on My "Coach" Hat 
Knowing I would be my new role as a STEM teacher and coach as I headed to ISTE was helpful.  I was able to focus my experience to learn more about the roles of technology coaches and instructional technology specialists.  I attended the "Standards for Us! The New NETS*C for Technology coaches.  This session unpacked this new NETS*C in a very succinct way, focusing on the elements for the standards:

Visionary Leadership
Teaching, Learning, & Assessments
Digital Age Learning Environments
Professional Development & Program Evaluation
Digital Citizenship
Content Knowledge and Professional Growth.  

This session put my new coaching role into perspective as the NETS*C are no small feat of accomplishment, however, it was also eye-opening as to the depth and breadth of coaching we could provide teachers.  Rubrics for the NETS*C will also be available soon, and there was discussion about the inclusion of language regarding coaches building positive relationships with teachers.  I see the rubrics as a valuable tool in my practice as my school corporation adopts a new teacher evaluation system this fall.

Thanks to a tweet by Sandy Rollefstad (who I met at the SocialEdCon after party as she was just beginning her Twitter account), I made it just in time to "Peer Coaching Panel: Meeting Teacher and Student Needs", presented by Matt Huston, Mary Lou Ley, and Tracy Watanabe.  This was probably my favorite session from my ISTE experience because of the panel's use of video in their presentation.  It was a brilliant choice to contrast interviews from Year 1 and Year 2 collaborative coaches.  I was able to hear the change from a teacher-focused classroom to a student-focused classroom as the interviews were played.  The changes that the presenters observed are that Year 2 Coaches are:

- Focusing more in learning outcomes
- Finding technology to align with learning
- Coach using more protocol and structured procedures
- Don't focus on one tool, focus on lesson improvement then evaluate if there are tools to integrate to improve the lesson
- Have a measurable way to collect data about lesson improvement

Final words of wisdom included that while some coaching conversations may feel contrived, it's important to work through it and stay focused on the work and student learning.

With my "coach" hat on, I returned home from ISTE and found myself sharing this post about Flipped Faculty Meetings by Steven W. Anderson with administrators in my school corporation.  Which led to participation in #flippedclass chat and great discussions with Kristin Daniels about Flipped Professional Development as a model for coaching, which is also aligned to the NETS*C.  More tweets and emails began to fly and now we are all abuzz with enthusiasm for what #flippedpd could look like in our elementary schools and faculty meetings.

As my new STEM meets this week to create our vision, plan, share and learn from one another, I am eager to be part of the collaborative process of developing our coaching model to support student centered learning experiences.