Empowered Leaders: Building Capacity at Samuel Gompers Middle School
by Rohya Prudhomme, Instructional Technology Facilitator at Samuel Gompers Middle School
The 2018-19 school year was a huge year for Gompers Middle School’s work with instructional technology. As a Practitioner 3.0 School, a recipient of the Verizon Innovative Learning Grant, and a School2Home/CETF partnership school there was great importance around ensuring that the entire school was prepared for a significant shift around instructional technology. As we end the school year, I am pleased to say that Gompers has truly risen to the occasion and established a model of excellence in supporting stakeholder growth around instructional technology.
One of the biggest factors in Gompers’ success with instructional technology has been through the work of the Innovative Design (ID) Team. At the beginning of the year, a small group of teachers volunteered to join the team that consisted of myself and the principal, Blanca Esquivel. These teachers, despite ranging in levels of technological expertise and comfort, dove right in and committed themselves to the work of helping to prepare the entire school for this momentous year.
As an ITF, it is incredibly important that the work we do around instructional technology be intentional and specific to the needs of the school, so as a starting point, the ID Team completed ISTE’s Lead & Transform Diagnostic Tool. This tool assessed the school’s alignment to the 14 Essential Conditions that ISTE defines as critical for effectively leveraging technology for learning. In reviewing the results, we decided to focus our work around the essential condition, Empowered Leaders. This Essential Condition calls for empowering stakeholders at all levels to be leaders in effecting change. Thus, we began by focusing on building capacity at the school site to ensure that all members of the school community felt that they had the knowledge and skills to be successful.
The first step towards building capacity was to strengthen the ID Team’s knowledge and conceptual understanding of instructional technology. Every other Wednesday, I would meet with the team after school. During these meetings we would review and discuss the ISTE Standards, Design Thinking, Digital Citizenship, Computer Science, and more. These learning sessions were crucial because they helped to ensure that the team had a solid foundation and understood that the focus of our work was not about the devices, but instead centered on leveraging technology for personalization and as a complement to strong instructional practices. Beyond the after school meetings, the team worked to implement their learning in their classrooms, planned professional development, and help to host school-wide events such as Digital Citizenship Week and the Hour of Code. As a result, by the end of the first semester it was clear that the team had ignited excitement around instructional technology for everyone at Gompers.
As the ITF for the school, I felt it was very important that we build on the excitement that the team had generated. Thus, for second semester, the ID Team worked to establish systems to help empower more stakeholders through ongoing professional development opportunities. We began to meet on a weekly basis, and we piloted an appointment system where teachers could request to meet with an ID Team member during their conference to receive personalized support. As a result, instead of only being able to reach out to the ITF for support as they had done during first semester, teachers and staff now had access to an entire team of support.This allowed the ID team to increase the number of teachers who could be supported, and it helped to establish relationships between unfamiliar staff members while fostering collaboration and a culture of sharing. The principal also supported the efforts of the team by focusing on increasing her own knowledge and working with me at least one hour a week in order to be a model for the students and staff. At Tuesday PD meetings and in her weekly bulletins, she would make a point to highlight what she had learned and how she was implementing it.
Now, the ID Team is leading professional development around instructional technology on their own, and from a group of mostly novice educators who had never done so before, that is an incredible accomplishment. After a recent Saturday Tech PD they held, the team shared with me how one of the teachers that they had been supporting this semester actually stepped up to help lead. When I heard this, I could not have been more proud because this was yet another example of how the team had truly helped to cultivate a community of empowered leaders.
