Bringing to Life Our Mission and Vision: the Role of Professional Development in Instructional Technology

Abstract

Despite improved access to digital tools and increased demand to prepare students for the 21st-century workforce, K-12 educators still have difficulty balancing technology, pedagogy, and content in the classroom. In the rural school district of Pleasant County, there is variation in the utilization of instructional technology to engage students as content creators, collaborators, critical thinkers, and communicators. This problem was substantiated as evidenced by the study of the Effective Learning Observation Tool, which identified the domain of engaging, learning-centered instruction as an area of opportunity for the district, with the lowest score in digital learning (Cognia, 2023). In this study, our team utilized the seven effective elements of professional learning to design a learning cohort and implement student-centered coaching cycles to impact teachers’ knowledge, skills, beliefs, and self-efficacy (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). This study aims to examine how student-centered coaching cycles, in addition to learning workshops, impacted teachers’ knowledge as defined by TPACK, self-efficacy, and the utilization of instructional technology tools in the classroom. Using a mixed-methods design, data points were collected from a pre-post survey, classroom work plans, and run charts during each coaching cycle with five different teachers. Teachers who participated in the coaching cycles in addition to the learning cohort showed a statistically significant growth in the areas of technological knowledge (TK), technological content knowledge (TCK), and technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK), with greater growth across all domains of TPACK when compared with elementary eachers who did not participate in the cohort. Similarly, teachers participating in job-embedded coaching experienced greater gains in self-efficacy and instructional technology tool utilization as evidenced by larger effect sizes. These findings support the utilization of a student-centered coaching framework as a methodology for implementing job-embedded coaching for instructional technology. Additionally, this study provides evidence of effective, sustainable professional development practices to positively impact instructional technology usage in a rural district