Educator Leadership Opportunities

This particular group of LDLs will focus on the development of digital artifacts that can be shared with educators across the state in order to provide models that can be used in other contexts or that can inspire innovative approaches to designing for learning. Digital artifacts can include webinars, short videos, blog posts, case studies, or other artifacts suggested by the LDL that can support the growth and learning of educators. The LDL should plan to host a few online office hours to answer questions educators might have, and should be posting artifacts on a consistent schedule throughout the year.

This particular group of LDLs will focus on the development of Learning Labs, Dine and Design events, and Case Studies.

• Learning Labs will be a facilitated opportunity for other educators to visit the school of the LDL to see and experience models of leveraging technology for better student outcomes. They will also have the opportunity to talk with some of the educators at the school about how they designed those experiences, the challenges they encountered, how the adapted, things they would do differently, etc. The LDL should be able to facilitate a safe environment for educators to share their thinking and process behind learning design and for visiting educators to ask questions that will help move them closer to being able to design something similar on their own.
• Dine and Design events will follow the Learning Lab (literally on the same day). The LDL should facilitate some networking between educators who attended the Learning Lab over snacks. Visiting educators should leave not only seeing models from the school that served as the Learning Lab, but also hearing about ideas from educators from other schools. After the networking, the LDL should be able to lead visiting educators in a process of designing for learning. They should leave with something that they could try with their own students the next day (or shortly thereafter).
• Case Studies should highlight the school’s process of developing a culture around designing for learning with technology in a way that moves the students to better learning outcomes (especially the ones highlighted above). The case study can be written or filmed and should include artifacts from the process. Case Studies are more than just a story of what happened. They are used to spark conversation and learning so that key themes and trends emerge. They often have multiple points in which different decisions could have been made that would have resulted in different outcomes. In this way, readers have the opportunity to grapple with problems of practice and develop greater clarity around both the components of those problems as well as the strategies for successfully navigating them. Many LDLs would probably choose to write the Case Study, and then follow it up closer to the end of the year with a ‘this is what ultimately happened and here’s what we learned’ type of narrative.

This particular group of LDLs will focus on the development of a professional learning event in their region. The event should help educators design for learning with technology in order to gain better student learning outcomes (see notes above). There will be up to nine regional events in the fall, and up to nine regional events in the spring. Each regional event will have up to four LDLs to lead sessions and be resources for educators. These LDLs will represent a variety of roles (administrators, educators, librarians, technology integrators, etc.).

The overall format of the event should include the LDLs sharing models that can be transferred into the context of attending educators. A large portion of the event should also be left for educators to network with each other and to create something that they can take back to their classrooms and schools and use with their students (or staff) in the very near future.