Teacher support is just tweet away in R.I.

LAUNCHING PAD: Shawn Rubin, standing, director of technology integration at the Highlander Institute, helps teacher Dan Baldassi learn how to use iPads in class. / COURTESY DEVLOMEDIA
LAUNCHING PAD: Shawn Rubin, standing, director of technology integration at the Highlander Institute, helps teacher Dan Baldassi learn how to use iPads in class. / COURTESY DEVLOMEDIA

Many Rhode Island educators are embracing continuous changes in technology and trends in peer-to-peer training to enrich professional development.
“The whole climate of professional development has changed,” said Shawn Rubin, director of technology integration for Highlander Charter School in Providence. “One of the biggest changes is Twitter. It’s become a professional-development engine for teachers.”
Sunday nights at 8 p.m., educators from Rhode Island join the ongoing conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #edchatri.
The project was created by Don Miller, principal at Shea High School in Pawtucket and Alan Tenreiro, principal at Cumberland High School.
“Alan and I have known each other for five or six years and we both appreciate the value of technology and what it can offer us and our teachers,” said Miller, who began the conversation using #edchatri with Tenreiro last spring. They knew of the national “ed-chat” and decided starting one with a Rhode Island focus would be valuable.
They didn’t have to wait long to discover the worthiness of the project, said Miller.
“It’s amazing because it allows us to collaborate with educators throughout the state and all over the world from the comfort of our own home,” Miller said.
The negligible cost of this type of professional development is especially welcomed by administrators and teachers as one way to ease the continuing pressures of tight school budgets.
“It can be done for free. There’s no charge, no cost to participate,” Miller said. “It’s easily accessible. That’s the great thing about technology.”
More than 100 educators usually take part in the Sunday evening chats, Miller said. To give the project long-term value, he archives the Twitter conversations on the website www.edchatri.org/.
Topics archived on the Twitter chat include a longer school day and school year and the continuum of teaching and learning.
Participants include many Rhode Island educators, including a middle school principal in East Greenwich, the principal at Coventry High School, a reading specialist in Providence, a math teacher at Cranston East High School and an English professor at Rhode Island College.
R.I. Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Deborah Gist is no stranger to #edchatri. “The commissioner has participated from time to time in that online discussion group,” said state department of education spokesman Elliot Krieger.
The Twitter chat draws educators from around the country and the world. Those whose comments are archived online include an assistant school superintendent in Pennsylvania, an elementary school principal in North Carolina, an assistant principal in Virginia, a high school principal in Iowa and third-grade teacher in Venezuela.
Superintendent of Smithfield Public Schools Robert O’Brien finds the Sunday evening Twitter chat useful.
“It’s good because you see comments from teachers around the state. We’re sharing information. It’s all about collaboration,” he said.
That’s the key to the new stream in professional development, said O’Brien.
“The old model of professional development was, you went to a workshop, came back to the classroom and closed the door,” O’Brien said.
“Now we have professional-learning communities. We’ve been doing this for years,” said O’Brien, who is delighted at the results and continuing interest in a recent project.
“We offered iPads to the first 50 teachers who would give up a week in the summer to go to training,” O’Brien said. “At the end of the week, they had to have a project-based unit they were going to incorporate into their classroom in September.
One team in the iPad training was made up of a physical education teacher and an art teacher. They created a multimedia project with art, dance and a YouTube video.
The excitement among teachers and students over the projects has created continuing interest in the iPad training, O’Brien said.
“It’s been unbelievable. I had a lot more than 50 teachers who wanted to do it, but we didn’t have enough money for more iPads,” he said. “We didn’t pay them. They took it on as part of their professional responsibility. So I’m hoping to do it again next summer.”
The trend in teachers giving their time coincides with the increased responsibility they have for their own professional development.
“There is no state funding explicitly for professional development, but many of our initiatives do involve some form of professional development,” Krieger said. “For example, we might provide some funds to help with the turnaround of low-achieving schools, and some of those funds may be earmarked for professional development,” he said.
Funds from Race to the Top, a federal initiative to encourage states to create ambitious projects for education reform, have been used to train educators in Common Core Standards, which could be considered a form of professional development, Krieger said.
State requirements for teacher certification have been changing, with individual evaluation plans phased out during the past couple of years, Krieger said.
Professional-development oversight is the responsibility of each school district, he said.
Those evaluations are done by the school district, generally with the principal or evaluation teams, he said.
“The system used to be that teachers needed a certain number of hours at continuing education programs to get continuing education credits,” said Rubin.
Now, with the evaluation model, and the emphasis on the accountability of teachers in the classroom, teachers have unique ways to engage in professional development, said Rubin, who organized EdCamp Providence in November 2012, an “unconference” attended by about 120 educators.
“An unconference doesn’t have a set schedule like most traditional conferences,” said Dan Callahan, chairman of the board and a founder of EdCamp in 2010. “The schedule is put together by the participants on the morning of the event.”
An EdCamp “unconference” draws on the skills and experience of the participants. One person might lead a discussion on using Twitter in professional development, another might share good strategies for reading, he said.
Callahan is an instructional-technology specialist in Burlington, Mass., public schools, and a member of a teachers union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association. He was previously a special-education teacher in Philadelphia.
Callahan said teachers tend to have internal motivation and innovation has created a wave of enthusiasm.
“I’m doing it because I want to become a better teacher,” said Callahan. “Professional development has basically changed because a lot of us took our professional learning into our own hands.” •

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