Building Better Teachers: A Vision for Professional Learning From Day One

Erin Stanley:

Didn’t receive. So let’s start with introducing our guest, Danette Ballard. Would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do at Mobile County?

Dynette Ballard:

Sure. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today, and thank you for having me. I am from Mobile County Public Schools. I am the coordinator of professional learning and assessment for the district. We are a rather large district with about 53,000 students. We have over 3,900 certified employees and 90 schools including three specialized treatment center. So we’re a large district and supporting teachers is quite an undertaking with that many to support.

Erin Stanley:

Yes. And tell us about your role.

Dynette Ballard:

So I am responsible for professional development, both for teachers and school and district leaders. And so I coordinate our professional development. We have a huge event at the beginning of every school year where we do professional development for all teachers and leaders altogether. And so I’m able to plan that. And then I’m also responsible for our new teacher academy to support new teachers, new to the teaching profession, both alternative certified and traditional certified teachers.

Erin Stanley:

Thank you. Dr. Katina Walton, tell us a little bit about what you do at the district and your background.

Dr. Katina Walton:

I’m an instructional specialist. I work with Ms. Ballard in Mobile County. Right now I am at Scarborough Model Middle School, and I support teachers throughout the year with instructional based practicing co-teaching planning goals, being sure that they make their professional level of PD or if they have something that they want and just good old fashioned support and mentoring. This is my first year back in Mobile County, but when I was in Mobile County, I had a great mentor and that’s what I remember. Mobile County is great with putting teachers with mentors that pour into their teachers that pour into the school, and it’s an honor to be back and be a part of that.

Erin Stanley:

This district is really enormous, isn’t it? And so I bet the kinds of challenges you both see are varied. What are some of the most common challenges you’re seeing Danette with new teachers?

Dynette Ballard:

Well, the new teachers coming in, historically, the bulk of our new teachers have been traditional certified in education. They’ve gone through a student teaching experience and they have knowledge of establishing rules and procedures, behavior management organization, some of those kinds of things. They’ve actually seen that in practice throughout their education degree process. But now we’re seeing a greater number of alternative certified or emergency certified teachers. And so they have no student teaching experience, and so they’re coming in getting this alternative certification to start teaching, but not having any background knowledge to apply to their own classroom context. And so that has been a big challenge for us. Also, with those alternative certified teachers, we have seen a lot of them. The Praxis is one of our state requirements for teacher certification. You have to pass the Praxis in your subject area. And we had a large number of those teachers who were not able to pass the Praxis partially because they were over involved with students and planning and lesson planning and doing all these things.

So they weren’t taking the time to prepare in that aspect, but also they just needed some support. And so we realized that in some ways the support for both groups of teachers looked the same, but in a lot of ways it looks different. And so we had to come together with a group of leaders at the district and just come up with a way to support all of them and make sure that they were successful because our retention rate for teachers was not where we wanted it to be. We had a high turnover, a lot of teachers leaving within the first three years, and a lot of them cited it was because they didn’t feel supported. And I will say that after digging in and talking to people at the school level, they were receiving support, but a lot of them, it wasn’t the kind of support that they felt they needed. And so we really had to bring our heads together and come up with a plan that would serve all of them and support them in an effort to retain them because we know that teachers and teacher quality is the single most influential factor in student achievement. And so this is really important to us and it is still a work in progress. It’s not perfected, but we are well on our way and making good progress.

Erin Stanley:

Gosh, that’s such an important distinction that you’re offering support, but maybe it’s not the support they need. I definitely want to get more into that. But first I want to hear from Katina, you’re working with teachers that have had some experience, correct? They’ve had a couple years under their belt typically. So what kind of challenges are you seeing there?

Dr. Katina Walton:

I’m working with both, but working with teachers who have experience under their belt, one challenge is I think all of us never really like what we sound or look like when being recorded. Just a little hesitation. It’s hard to think of somebody’s going to record me teaching or somebody’s going to come in and record their self teaching with me, and who’s going to see it and what is this going to be used for? So it’s great to be sure that you go in, you do personal observations first before ever bringing the camera. You go in with what’s being done. Well, I love the way you are doing student-centered teaching and do so being sure that they understand that you are there to observe and to help not the gotcha girl. And then to kind of offer them chocolate or whatever they need, diet Coke, Coke to allow you to come in and record or to team teach.

I think when they understand that you are definitely there for them as a helping tool for them and not something that’s there to watch them or against them, they open up. And with older teachers, I don’t like the word older seasoned teachers, they’re not hesitant, but it’s uncomfortable. The unknown is uncomfortable. And this may be new to our seasoned teachers, whereas our new teachers who are going through the new teacher and they’ve been in the universities and they have university supervisors, they’re accustomed to being recorded. And so they’re like, oh, yeah, I did that during student teaching. No problem. And I was like, oh, so I don’t have to give you chocolate or coke. And you’re like, no, no, no, come on, come. And I was like, yeah. So that’s just the challenge in my humble opinion, the unknown, what is this for? Why are we doing this? What will this data prove? What will we use this data for? And just easing their misconception of what the recording is for and being sure that they understand that we are a team trying to improve instructional practice throughout the district. It’s become a little easier.

Erin Stanley:

Well, and underlying all of that, you kind of touched on this idea that they need to understand that you’re there to help them. This is not adversarial. We’re not saying we’re going to catch you doing something wrong, which just points to a whole culture that has been established in the district that I’m so impressed by because I know that takes a lot of work and a lot of purposeful, intentional work on the part of everyone involved there, which I think in talking to Danette really starts with the new teacher academy because that’s the viewpoint you go into that with. So can you tell us about the new teacher academy, how it came about, how it’s evolved, and what you guys do there?

Dynette Ballard:

Sure. So I took on the role of professional development about three years ago, and one of the things that I was tasked with was providing professional development for new teachers, and that was all I got. I didn’t get any backstory, any additional information, just, Hey, you need to help these new teachers. And so the first year we just did new teacher professional development. It wasn’t a full academy. I met with them every other month and we did a full day of learning on a variety of topics. At the end of that first year, I realized that we needed to make it more serious and we needed them to be more committed, that it wasn’t just a, oh, yeah, there’s room in my schedule, I’ll come that day. But it was a, I’m carving out time in my schedule for that because it’s that important. And so that’s where we developed last year, the new teacher academy.

And so we really worked with our principals to get them on board to say, Hey, I know substitute shortage is a real thing. I know that sometimes there are things going on in your building, but I’m giving you these dates in July for the whole year. And so you have the schedule, so I’m asking you to protect this time. So we meet monthly for a full day, and the professional development is the framework is laid out for the year, but they do a survey at the end of each session and one of the survey questions is, what do you need to learn more about? What is your most pressing need? And so I look at that survey data and I look at what I have scheduled for the next month, and I figure out how to incorporate the two. And so I make sure that yes, I’m teaching them what I know as a district leader they need, but I’m also meeting their needs.

And sometimes it’s one big overlying theme like classroom management, but other times it’s elementary teachers need help with our new reading curriculum and secondary teachers need help with something totally different. And so in those instances, I’ve been able to do a breakout session type thing where I offer four or five things and let them choose which one for the afternoon session that they want to attend. And so that makes it feel, they feel important because I’m listening and I hear them. And it also makes them feel like when they’re doing these surveys that they’re not wasting their time because I refer back to those surveys all the time and say, in last month’s survey you said dah, dah, and I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is how you access that piece of information, or this is how you do this, or Our afternoon breakout sessions are going to address these topics.

And so they know that I’m looking, I’m really pouring through that survey data to make sure that what we’re doing is working. And that’s a challenge in itself. Last year or well, this current year, we have supported 334 individuals through New Teacher Academy. Now, not all 334 have attended every single month. Some of them were hired in November, some were hired in January, and we just let them pick up whatever month they’re hired, the next month they attend. And so it’s been an ongoing process. We average about 200 teachers a month. And so when you think about professional learning and activities that are meaningful in a group that size, it’s really hard. But we try to break them into groups as much as possible so they can get some individualized support. Also, one of the things that I’ve done that they have indicated has been really helpful for them.

Any of the professional learning that we do, I use strategies for engagement for discussions for anything in the classroom that they can go back, take back to their school and use. And so I get them up and moving and we do all this, all kinds of crazy stuff, but a lot of them have cited, Hey, I’m going to do that in my classroom this week. I’m going to apply that. And so after we do it, I always explain to them, this is what this would look like in your classroom or this might be how you could use it. So there’s a lot of modeling that happens through those professional development sessions. Also, our topics are aligned to our Alabama core teaching standards, and that just kind of keeps us focused and it makes sure that they’re being held to this set of standards and those are the things that they’re supposed to be doing.

But I have teachers who have been teaching 20 years who don’t even know what the Alabama core teaching standards are because nobody’s ever referenced them. And so that was important to me because this is the set of standards that you’re being held to, and I want to make sure and understand that everything we’re doing is aligned to that set of standards. And so that’s been really helpful too in keeping me focused as well, because in planning this, you just think, oh, well, all new teachers need to know this and this and this, and you just kind of are all over the place. But we have one to two standards per month that we focus on. And some of them are classroom management, behavior strategies, instructional strategies. We do a lot with collaboration and even leadership. Our last session of the year was about leadership and about them setting goals and accomplishing those goals.

But one of the things that I think was the most powerful and survey data said the same thing. And this is one of our growing pains, and I’m just going to be transparent. In the October session we did the survey and I had multiple teachers in all kinds of ways basically say everybody keeps talking about providing good quality instruction and I don’t really know what that looks like. And so in thinking and reflecting on that, I thought the only way for them to know what it looks like is to get in and observe a teacher. And so I schedule, I scratched my plan for November and our November new teacher academy session, I had 270 new teachers paired with a master teacher throughout the district, and they went in and did classroom observations. I gave them a Google form for some observation notes, and I had specific things that they were looking for, and they were tied to the things that we had learned about in previous months of new teacher academy.

And so they were looking to see evidence of those things and they stated that that was super helpful. And so that’s something that we’ll continue. Now, it was quite an undertaking to find because we paired them with somebody in their subject, their specific grade level, their content area. I do have fine arts teachers, band teachers like yourself. We had band directors observing other band directors, but we have career tech folks. We have obviously all the elementary grades, all the secondary areas, subject areas, but then we have health teachers, we have driver’s ed teachers, just all these different configurations, but we were able to pair them with somebody if not exactly what they teach very, very close. And so they felt like that was a valuable learning experience. And so the takeaway from that, what we’re going to do this year is make that happen in September.

So right off the bat going in, they’re going to get to observe a teacher before they get too far into it and realize, I don’t have procedures for collecting papers or collecting homework or I don’t have procedures for handing out math manipulatives or I don’t have my things organized. I don’t get my lesson plans written and include enough activities because I finish everything and the kids have 30 minutes and their behavior is off the chart. So they’ll get to see that in September. And so in September they are going to observe a teacher, but in January, a team from their school, and this is news to Dr. Walton, she doesn’t know this yet, a team from their school including an administrator, an instructional coach, maybe a partner teacher or somebody on their grade level, A team is going to observe that new teacher and have a feedback conversation with them.

And I think that will help as well, because one of the things that came out at the end of the year was I have people in and out of my classroom, sometimes coaches, sometimes administrators, but they leave before I get a chance to ask them how I did or how it went, what I need to change. And she said, sometimes I get feedback in an email or through a Google form or our state observation tool report. They get feedback that way, but they really want to sit down and have those conversations and have somebody tell them what they need to grow. And so that’s kind of one of the changes. That’s why I say this is ever evolving. We are making great progress, but we still have some work to do. So our May session, we spent the first half of the day looking back and reflecting, and then we spent the second half of the day looking ahead and goal setting.

We talked a lot about smart goals and about how you can’t say, I want to increase reading achievement. You have to say specifically what you’re going to do to increase that achievement and make sure that it’s measurable, and they all cited that as being super helpful. One of the other things we did in that session, our professional learning plans are created at the beginning of the year. Each teacher goes in our state platform and creates their plan, and then at the end of the year, they submit evidence. And so we had a lot of conversation about when you get ready to submit that evidence, if you attended a workshop, a workshop certificate says you attended the workshop, but it doesn’t say you became a better teacher because of it. And so what kind of evidence can you prove if at all possible, use data to show that you went to this reading professional development and as a result and as you implemented it, you saw your formative assessment scores continue to increase in that specific area.

And so we had conversation about that as well. We talked a lot about video observation, video analysis about how valuable it is to record your self-teaching and make sure that you are analyzing it, but you’re also getting some feedback. That’s where we have, I may be jumping ahead, but that’s where we got GoReact, and that was what we wanted to do with GoReact with our instructional coaches, was to allow them to coach some teachers using GoReact and provide some feedback. So we’re trying to ease these new teachers into that so that once they finish with me and new teacher Academy, then when they get to the instructional coaches like Dr. Walton asking them to video themselves so they can provide feedback, they know and understand that it’s not evaluative, it’s supportive, and that’s really important to us,

Erin Stanley:

This balance that you’ve been able to strike between having a foundation of standards that don’t change these Alabama standards, but then responding and being really flexible to their needs in the classroom, in their real daily lives in the classroom is pretty incredible. And I think a tribute to why it’s been so successful that you can be super responsive, but you’re not just doing anything they want. You still have this foundation of teaching standards. That’s really powerful.

Dynette Ballard:

Thank you.

Erin Stanley:

So Katina, let’s move over to you and especially talk about your process as an instructional coach because you do use video and then you do have those conversations, correct? Tell me more about that.

Dr. Katina Walton:

Correct. So we do use video. We will drop a little robot as the teacher calls it in the classroom. They wear a mic and a tracker, and so I can leave the room and they record their self while they’re teaching the lesson. As I said, the teachers from New Teacher Academy, they’re like, no big deal. I’m used to this. Okay, okay, okay. For the more seasoned teachers, it’s a little bit new, but they do feel better. I don’t know what it is about us as educators. When somebody’s sitting in the room watching us teach, we’re like, but if we’re in our world ourself, we’re a little bit more comfortable. And that’s what I noticed from my seasoned teachers. Once I exit the room and I’m sure that everybody’s being tracked and everything’s going on, they do an outstanding job. From my side as an instructional coach, as Ms. Ballard said, it’s very important that we do a beginning of the year survey for teachers.

In that beginning of the year survey, we use a form and we ask, what are their needs? What are some things that you feel you do well? What are some things that you feel you need some improvement on? So in using that data for me as an instructional coach as well as working with the principal, we kind of have a feel of what the entire population of teachers may feel like they need a little help on. And so the teachers who actually requested help in the teacher survey, those are definitely my first go-tos, but my new teacher academy teachers are always the ones that I know, this is where I’m going, this is where I’m going, this is where I’m going. As a new teacher, you always want to feel like you are supported, that you have someone there that can answer questions about this Alabama standard and how we unpack those standards and what we do if a child is not on grade level, how do we catch them up?

And all of those questions come up as Ms. Ballard said, what does good instruction look like? And so we use a cycle of instruction here. Everything is done from the framework. When you walk into a classroom, no matter whether it’s a sixth grade classroom or an eighth grade classroom, we have a cycle of instruction. So the administrators and myself or any coaches that walk into the room, we know what a teacher’s doing when they’re doing it, look at the lesson plan, they’re following the cycle of instruction, and we can walk around and monitor myself. The principals, there are two assistant principal and a principal here. We do observations. Those observations are done frequently enough to where teachers don’t hop up as soon as someone comes in the room. As educators, we’re learners, we’re lifelong learners. So we try to create an environment where teachers know that this is a lifelong learning environment, even down to a data literate environment.

We model for them how we use data to help our teachers improve or master something that they didn’t. The same way we expect them to use data to assess and find the gaps in our students’ learning in order to help them. So we’re actually mirroring that data literacy from the district to the instructional specialists to the principals, to the teachers, to the students, even down to parent surveys. So we use the data to guide us in helping our teachers in what they need. For example, classroom management is an ever going thing, and classroom management. When I came up in, I’m not going to say what year, but it was either you had it or you didn’t. But there are strategies. There are strategies that we teach our teachers for classroom management. There are verbal warnings, there are different things that we go down the checklist and when it’s done, it’s done.

We used to say, you can’t sell wolf tickets or call wolf if they get in trouble. You have to follow through that way. You set the standard that this is a learning environment, we’re here to learn. We have one hour for this class and I have to get a, B, C in. And so using that data and showing students that we use that data and showing teachers that we use that data to fill in any gaps is great. The recording, I love it. I may jump ahead, but in GoReact, what I love about it is everything is transcribed. I can go to the first five minutes and I can follow that cycle of instruction. I can tell you if that teacher is doing that bell ringer, which is your open, your pull ’em in, get their attention type thing, even down to the transitions in the classroom, the praises that the teacher gives.

So GoReact as this great recording of transcribing everything from what the teacher says to the pauses to filler words. And being from the south, we use a lot of filler words. For example, for me, I’ll keep myself in this. I use the word that a lot when I was completing my dissertation, and I didn’t really understand that. So of course, Grammarly, the first beginning of ai, it would highlight that and it taught me you’re using that word too much. I would just take them out. So let’s go to GoReact. We’ll talk about one of our new teacher who is actually in our new teacher academy. She’s the sweetest little person. She’s an ELA teacher, and in the filler word, it recorded her saying, y’all about 80 times, and she’s like, Dr. Walton. I said, don’t feel bad. I did the same thing with the word that.

So we talk about teachers allowing wait time for our students to think about their answer. We talk about think, pair, share, where they discuss with their classmates. For example, we all have two different types of points of views from anything that we read. If I’m sharing with a partner and we can discuss our comprehension, I may see something that my elbow partner didn’t see. We discuss it and then we share out. So it works very well with that. It even shows AK shows the pauses, if it was a meaningful pause, it shows the fill of words, the hedging words. So when I was using the analytics and I opened it, being a first time user myself, I was like, wow, look at this. Look at this, look at this. So in there it records the minute. If there’s a point where I want to tell the teacher, good job on praising that student Go, react has a little bubble, it’s already there.

I can type in my feedback, but the cool part, I can go in and record feedback. So it’s like they’re watching their self-teaching and they’re watching my feedback. So that was the great thing about it, and it was a way for to stand honest for teachers. I’m not just asking you to do it. I’m also willing to do it as well. When they see that you are willing to do the same thing that you ask them to do, they’re more open. It becomes more of a learning experience than, oh my goodness, I have to do this because they see me mirroring exactly the same thing that they are doing. So I go back and do the feedback in the comments by typing or recording myself, giving them feedback on what I notice, like for example, the praising, if it’s higher order thinking questions, the pauses that they allow the students to think if they are doing student centered learning, if they’re doing small group instruction, all of that can be identified and it can be used in that PLP that Ms. Ballard talked about, which is your professional learning plan, you have evidence that you have improved in student-centered learning evidence that you have improved in small group instruction.

So that is another way why GoReact is a phenomenal tool in helping new teachers as well as seasoned teachers, because you have that documented proof that I have done this, it has improved my students by this percent, as I said in my smart goal, and I’ve been observed for this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times, and here’s proof. So in that way, GoReact has been a very valuable tool in working with new teachers from new teachers academy and seasoned teachers as well as coaches because if we’re willing to be recorded as well, everything is transparent for everybody.

Erin Stanley:

And I love that data piece. I mean, can you imagine having to collect that on your own? I have talked to instructional coaches who will make tick marks every time they hear a hedging word or a filler word, and that is just exhausting. Then you can’t concentrate on anything else, but to have the surveys that you’re doing, then coupled with all the analytics right there at your fingertips with Gore, react makes it so you can have data-driven conversations and make goals based on that data. I think that’s brilliant. Brilliant. So I just want to clarify a little bit about this process. So you observe the teacher and then watch it and GoReact, and you can kind of watch it any time, which is nice. And then when you have a conversation with them about that, you also record that conversation. Is that correct?

Dr. Katina Walton:

Correct, yes. Okay. Correct, correct. And I did it because this was new to me and I was like, why not use this tool? I’m new to the coaching at this point in my career, so I would want to watch myself to see what was my facial expression? Did I give them the deer headlights look when something was said, possibly improper or correct, or was I praising them for what they did? Well, did I start that conversation off with a positive? So there are certain things as a coach that we have as a checklist to be sure that we are coaching, but also being positive at being a mentor, and they are receptive to what we are saying. If it is something that, Hey, have you ever thought about or Hey, can I come in your classroom and we team teach this, they’re more susceptible to it.

So the survey kind gives us an overview of what the teacher may want to improve. We go in and do the paper and pencil or the form, our observation. Then from the survey and the observation that myself or the principals have done, we then go into the video recording. I know what they want me to look for. I know what I consider to be looking for. I know what the principal wants me to look for. And so it’s much more powerful by the time we do the video and we do the GoReact and the analytics, and we’re looking at it and we’re looking at the improvement or looking for the improvement or looking for ways to tweak a lesson. So it’s very, very powerful in that way

Erin Stanley:

And coming in with that attitude as an instructional coach that I’m learning, I’m looking to be better. I’m not here just saying I’m the expert. Do everything I say to do really speaks again back to that collaborative learning culture that we talked about at the beginning. That’s really great. I want to ask about the support. Go back to that question at the beginning about teachers really needed support and you were offering a lot of support, but then you found there was this disconnect about what they felt like was support. Can you give us some examples or talk more about that kind of idea?

Dynette Ballard:

Sure. So one of the things, and I’ll just use this as an example. At the beginning of the year in one of their first surveys, they said that they needed support with classroom management. And so this is my 26th year in education, so I’ve been around a long time. And so one of the things that I know is that you need to be organized and you need to have processes and procedures for everything you do in your classroom, and you also need to plan engaging lessons, and those things will help minimize behaviors in the classroom, disruptive students, that kind of thing. If you don’t give them all this free time to move about. And so I thought that’s perfect. That’s exactly what we need to plan. So we did all of those things and then the teachers were like, no, I need classroom management. I need, so they didn’t make the connection between all of these things that they’re teaching me how to do are directly related to classroom management.

They wanted to know when a kid has an outburst or when they tell me exactly what to do, but the extra layer of that is tell me what to do in my fourth grade, ELA classroom. And so for a secondary teacher using an example of a different content area or using a different grade level, they weren’t making those connections. And so we’ve had to be really diligent about making sure that we specifically state what I’m doing right now feeds directly into what you’ve asked for. And we have brought in consultants to do some of the work with ’em. I do a lot of the presenting myself, our curriculum folks do a good bit of it when we do specifically the breakout sessions by grade and content area. And so we’ve all had to make sure that we’re intentional about specifying this is why we’re doing this and this is what this is.

The other thing that we noticed was that they were getting a lot of support in the schools. The administrator would stop by and check on them, just How’s it going? How can I help you? Instructional coaches were helping them plan. They were going in and out of their classrooms doing different things, but for a lot of them, especially the alternative certified folks certified, they wanted somebody to say, you need to write your lesson plan and you need to include this and this. They really want somebody to hold their hand and they want somebody to reassure them that what they’re doing is okay, that I’ve written this lesson plan, I need you to check it before I do it, which we all know how cumbersome that can be. You are providing support in the best way that you can as a principal, but you can’t sit down and lesson plan every week with every new teacher in your building.

I mean that, and even as an instructional coach, most of our buildings only have one or maybe two instructional coaches. Our elementary have a literacy and a numeracy coach based on state legislative acts that that’s a requirement. But in our secondary schools, most of them have one instructional coach and two of our secondary, our high schools have over a hundred teachers in the building, and there’s one coach to a hundred teachers. So with large numbers of new teachers, that makes it a little difficult. But we’ve tried to, again, listen to them and hear what they’re saying and make sure that they know and understand the intentionality behind what we’re doing.

Erin Stanley:

I love that. Well, in our last few minutes, I want to get to a couple of questions that have come through in the chat. Tara says, I’m an education facilitator that coordinates filled experience for our teacher prep program, interested in how faculty instructors use this as part of their observation tools.

Dynette Ballard:

Is that at the college level? Is that

Erin Stanley:

It sounds like, yeah, she’s at the teacher prep program. Yeah. Tara, do you want to expound on that a little bit? So

Dynette Ballard:

I’ll say this, the way that I found out about GoReact is from one of our academic supervisors who also teaches at the college level, and he was using GoReact with his student teachers that he was supervising. And so they were videoing lessons and uploading them, and then he was providing feedback to them in that way. I’m not sure if that answers your question or not, but I’ll say a little bit about this as well. When we, as the district purchased to GoReact, we didn’t just purchase an unlimited number of licenses because we know and understand in order to provide quality feedback, you have to have time to do that. You have to have time to sit and to watch the videos and to really think about what the best next steps are for that teacher and how you’re going to advise them to move forward.

And so for our instructional coaches, they’re in the classroom doing co-teaching, teaching, those kinds of things. And so they’re doing all these face-to-face coaching cycles with teachers. We gave each one of them two licenses to use in the fall and then two in the spring for teachers who did not require a large amount of support, they just needed a little help to move forward. And so our idea behind it was, while you’re doing all of these face-to-face coaching cycles with these other teachers, you can help two teachers by watching just a couple of videos and providing some feedback for that. So we didn’t give them licenses for their whole faculty because again, you can’t watch 25 videos for different teachers over and over again and remember what each teacher’s supposed to be working on. So we tried to focus it on just two to three teachers at a time. So I am not sure if that answers the question or not.

Erin Stanley:

And Tara, just to give you a little more context into programs that I’ve talked to, some will just use it for one observation, and that’s part of their edTPA. They use that as evidence. But I talked to a university actually in England just last week, who does I believe four or five observations every month. And a lot of those are not going to their instructors or their faculty. They’re watching them and self-reflecting on what they could do better. So it kind of depends on the program, but there’s a large variety of how it’s being used there. Terry asks if you guys are using AI in training and supporting new teachers at all.

Dynette Ballard:

That has been an ongoing conversation. And in my May session of New Teacher Academy, we had a little bit of discussion and we’ll make sure that we include this for next year. Some of our new teachers were talking about how great GoReact is. It can just, I’m sorry, not GoReact AI because it can just write your lesson plans for you and all you have to do is print ’em out. And I kind of cringed a little bit and tried to explain to them that AI is wonderful. It generates some great ideas, but AI doesn’t know your students like you do. And so you have to make sure that these lesson plans that it is producing are meaningful and relevant to your students and meet them where they are. And so we are starting that. I cannot tell you that we have figured all that out.

Dr. Katina Walton:

If I can add to that, it’s like Ms. Ballard said, AI is a wonderful tool, and that’s the biggest thing. You have to know your population. You have to build relationships with your students and know what their needs are. AI is just like a prompt for you to get started. It’s wonderful. It is wonderful, but it is just a prompt because what if you have a student who is maybe two grade levels below? And so AI can’t tell you exactly what to do to get that student from two grade levels below to one or a two grade level. So it is like a great tool, but just like textbooks or online websites, all of these things are tools that we use to reach the whole child or the whole student, depending on if it’s secondary. It’s wonderful, but it’s a starting point.

Dynette Ballard:

And I will say with the AI markers in GoReact, we have used those. We paid for that feature and have given access to the coaches to do that, but we have encouraged them to also provide their own feedback on those videos. So the AI markers will pop up and it will analyze the video and it gives really great feedback. But again, the coach knows what they’re looking for out of that specific teacher, and so their feedback is also valuable.

Erin Stanley:

Yeah, that’s such a great use of it. Bill, do you have questions for this group?

Bill Mauer:

Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on what Danette said when we concluded the AI markers. It wasn’t meant to replace the coaches, but it’s meant to provide an additional layer and really a conversation starter into, Hey, what did AI think? So we definitely want the coaches to provide the prime levels of feedback inside the platform. I do have a question about peer observations. Danette, you talked about that at the beginning and how you do that across the district. Have you used GoReact for that process?

Dynette Ballard:

We have not, but I would like to. My idea, we have a slow start with GoReact, like Dr. Walton talked about, people not comfortable with videoing themselves. What my long-term goal is is for the videos that are placed in GoReact to become a library of, these are videos on how to teach this specific topic or this content at this grade level. And to be able to show in some cases, to show this is where this teacher started out and this is where they finished. Show little segments of the video to show growth as a result of the video analysis, but also just to be able to show for those new teachers saying, I don’t really know what good instruction looks like. If they had access to some of those videos and could watch a lesson for their subject and content area before they start teaching and lesson planning, then I think that would be beneficial to them to be able to see it in action. And so that’s our long-term goal with GoReact is that library of videos tagged with specific subjects and content areas, grade levels, all those kinds of things, and maybe even down to specific standards in some cases.

Bill Mauer:

I love, love, love hearing that because I think that’s the most powerful piece of GoReact is that library where you can create your own content, have a library of exemplars, and use it for multiple instances for professional development, from peer observation to, Hey, let’s watch this exemplar video and do a peer collaboration of, Hey, what did we see? There’s so many different uses of GoReact that a lot of people are still just scratching the surface, but that library component, you already have great teaching happening in your district. To be able to capture that in video and then store new library for later use, I think is the biggest piece of the platform.

Dr. Katina Walton:

I think that’s awesome because we all know everybody goes to YouTube for everything, but to have it personalized for your state, for your standards, for your grade level, and to have example of great lessons or not so great lessons that eventually turned into master lessons, it shows that you can grow. So I think that’s the part of GoReact. To have it personalized for your particular district or state is a powerful thing because we can look up New York and whatever, but we know that the demographics are totally different. So I think I second that emotion. I think that’s great.

Erin Stanley:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much to our presenters today. This was an amazing conversation and they have both very generously offered to share their contact info, so we’ll send that out when we send out the recording. And feel free to pick their brains about the amazing things they’re doing in Mogul County. Really great things are happening there, and your teachers are lucky to have the culture of support and continuous learning that you have established.

Dynette Ballard:

Thank you.