5.1 Needs Assessment
Candidates conduct needs assessments to determine school-wide, faculty, grade-level, and subject area strengths and weaknesses to inform the content and delivery of technology-based professional learning programs. (PSC 5.1/ISTE 4a)
ITEC 7460
Needs Assessment/Individual Teacher Technology Assessment
The Individual Teacher Needs Assessment was completed as a first step toward a semester-long coaching project in ITEC 7460. Even though this artifact was a result of a bigger assignment, it demonstrates this standard precisely. I performed a needs assessment for one of my colleagues in the English Department before I began a coaching effort with him for the semester. I surveyed his concerns, strengths, weaknesses, and needs about using technology in the classroom. My aim was to gather his thoughts about the technology available to him and look for ways to help him feel even more successful as a teacher using technology in his classroom. The Needs Assessment is a paper that investigates his current reality, his strengths, and then his frustrations with technology. In the needs assessment, I generalize his experience to the greater population of the English Department. Interviewing him was like a portal to other teachers’ experiences, too, and it really helped me to understand their frustrations with technology.
In his book Instructional Coaching (2007), Jim Knight asserts that teachers are “unanimously critical of one-shot programs that fail to address practical concerns” (p.2). I see this happening in our professional development sessions that are provided by the county which try to teach us how to use technology in our classrooms. The instruction is usually provided by a county technology leader who is knowledgeable about apps that can do cool things. However, teachers still resist innovation. I suspect Knight is also correct in saying that “poorly designed training can erode teachers willingness to embrace any new ideas” (p. 2). For my colleague, I conducted a needs assessment that aimed to honor his strengths while also find out what his actual needs were, his concerns, questions. In this way, I signaled that when I coached him, I would only be helping him to find solutions to problems he actually had. I discovered through this one scenario that teachers really appreciate being listened to first before being given training or coaching advice that has nothing to do with what they want. No wonder there is resistance to typical training: teachers feel like it’s a waste of their time. The needs assessment also revealed that my colleague had much more comfort with technology than I’d thought. The reason he didn’t use it had nothing to do with technology itself and everything to do with the way it’s distributed at our school.
The needs assessment helped me to adjust my perception of what needed to be coached. The colleague cited inaccessibility as a main reason for his not using technology more often in class. He reported that he could not get a Chromebook cart up the stairs of his trailer that’s ¼ mile from where we check them out. No wonder! It turns out that I could generalize his experience with accessibility to several other teachers who had refused to incorporate tech into their teaching. I now had a clue as to how to adjust the content and delivery of tech training that I did for the department. Now, I realized that accessibility, not willingness, was an obstacle for these teachers in trailers and in team-taught classes where they moved rooms constantly throughout the day. No one wants to push a 250-pound cart through the halls of a school with multiple levels and 3850 students and 250 staff and faculty.
At the beginning of my coursework in this degree, I had rated relationships and empathy as low on a scale of importance of working with other teachers. I felt it was necessary, but I ranked it well below traits like competence and content knowledge. One of the things the needs assessment taught me is that professional development often addresses needs that don’t need attention. In fact, empathy and relationships that seek understanding are the only way those needs become known. Therefore, they are crucial to the success of any initiative. Even more surprising is the way I discovered that actual needs like accessibility are being covered up by topics the administration thinks are important. That doesn’t feel right, and as a peer coach, it’s important to be on the side of my teacher peers. Largely, coaching is a persuasive exercise, and classically, knowledge of the audience is crucial for persuasion to take place.
Once I found the ways that my colleague wanted to use technology, I was able to recommend ways to access it in his trailer without undue stress on him. I was also able to adjust the content of my presentations to the department to address the teachers’ concerns about accessibility first. Once I did this, teachers reported a higher degree with the comfort with technology they used in their lessons. As for my colleague, we worked together a way to use technology to amplify a few of his lessons. He was observed when one of those lessons occurred, and he ended up getting a great score on his evaluation. It turns out that other teachers in our department have more readily received the training I’ve given on how to integrate technology into their plans since I’ve promoted their concerns as drivers of these improvements.
References
Knight, J. (2007). Instructional coaching: a partnership approach to improving instruction. Corwin Press: Thousand Oaks.
Needs Assessment/Individual Teacher Technology Assessment
The Individual Teacher Needs Assessment was completed as a first step toward a semester-long coaching project in ITEC 7460. Even though this artifact was a result of a bigger assignment, it demonstrates this standard precisely. I performed a needs assessment for one of my colleagues in the English Department before I began a coaching effort with him for the semester. I surveyed his concerns, strengths, weaknesses, and needs about using technology in the classroom. My aim was to gather his thoughts about the technology available to him and look for ways to help him feel even more successful as a teacher using technology in his classroom. The Needs Assessment is a paper that investigates his current reality, his strengths, and then his frustrations with technology. In the needs assessment, I generalize his experience to the greater population of the English Department. Interviewing him was like a portal to other teachers’ experiences, too, and it really helped me to understand their frustrations with technology.
In his book Instructional Coaching (2007), Jim Knight asserts that teachers are “unanimously critical of one-shot programs that fail to address practical concerns” (p.2). I see this happening in our professional development sessions that are provided by the county which try to teach us how to use technology in our classrooms. The instruction is usually provided by a county technology leader who is knowledgeable about apps that can do cool things. However, teachers still resist innovation. I suspect Knight is also correct in saying that “poorly designed training can erode teachers willingness to embrace any new ideas” (p. 2). For my colleague, I conducted a needs assessment that aimed to honor his strengths while also find out what his actual needs were, his concerns, questions. In this way, I signaled that when I coached him, I would only be helping him to find solutions to problems he actually had. I discovered through this one scenario that teachers really appreciate being listened to first before being given training or coaching advice that has nothing to do with what they want. No wonder there is resistance to typical training: teachers feel like it’s a waste of their time. The needs assessment also revealed that my colleague had much more comfort with technology than I’d thought. The reason he didn’t use it had nothing to do with technology itself and everything to do with the way it’s distributed at our school.
The needs assessment helped me to adjust my perception of what needed to be coached. The colleague cited inaccessibility as a main reason for his not using technology more often in class. He reported that he could not get a Chromebook cart up the stairs of his trailer that’s ¼ mile from where we check them out. No wonder! It turns out that I could generalize his experience with accessibility to several other teachers who had refused to incorporate tech into their teaching. I now had a clue as to how to adjust the content and delivery of tech training that I did for the department. Now, I realized that accessibility, not willingness, was an obstacle for these teachers in trailers and in team-taught classes where they moved rooms constantly throughout the day. No one wants to push a 250-pound cart through the halls of a school with multiple levels and 3850 students and 250 staff and faculty.
At the beginning of my coursework in this degree, I had rated relationships and empathy as low on a scale of importance of working with other teachers. I felt it was necessary, but I ranked it well below traits like competence and content knowledge. One of the things the needs assessment taught me is that professional development often addresses needs that don’t need attention. In fact, empathy and relationships that seek understanding are the only way those needs become known. Therefore, they are crucial to the success of any initiative. Even more surprising is the way I discovered that actual needs like accessibility are being covered up by topics the administration thinks are important. That doesn’t feel right, and as a peer coach, it’s important to be on the side of my teacher peers. Largely, coaching is a persuasive exercise, and classically, knowledge of the audience is crucial for persuasion to take place.
Once I found the ways that my colleague wanted to use technology, I was able to recommend ways to access it in his trailer without undue stress on him. I was also able to adjust the content of my presentations to the department to address the teachers’ concerns about accessibility first. Once I did this, teachers reported a higher degree with the comfort with technology they used in their lessons. As for my colleague, we worked together a way to use technology to amplify a few of his lessons. He was observed when one of those lessons occurred, and he ended up getting a great score on his evaluation. It turns out that other teachers in our department have more readily received the training I’ve given on how to integrate technology into their plans since I’ve promoted their concerns as drivers of these improvements.
References
Knight, J. (2007). Instructional coaching: a partnership approach to improving instruction. Corwin Press: Thousand Oaks.