Digital Leadership Week 4

     One thing that I think is important to keep in mind when talking about professional development for technology in my school district is our location. Teaching in Columbus City Schools means that we are located in the same city as McGraw Hill headquarters. McGraw Hill does about 3 full days of training on their softwares per school year. This is a very specific and organized structure that CCS is currently doing. I think they do a great job with teaching math teachers how to integrate their software into the "I do". Science and Social Studies are more geared towards the "You do". While ELA training seems to be best used as more of a we do. With that being said, it is often falling on the deaf ears of teachers without student technology available to them. At the heart of these trainings, they feel like a curriculum push that just so happens is using technology as its medium.

    When looking through a few of the available readings, two seemed to be more helpful than others when planning how to incorporate PD into my plan. The first is Tan et al's (2025) paper on artificial intelligence. A lot of teachers, especially young teachers, have figured out how to use AI to make their job easier. One thing I would like to do with vision is to lean into training teachers into how use it to make them actually better at their profession. Tan et al's (2025) thoughts on how to use AI to do things like track and read analytics to increase teacher data literacy to make more informed instructional decisions. The other one I enjoyed was Shi et al's (2025) paper about how we can use technology as a means of inclusion. I enjoyed the emphasis of intentionality here and believe that would fit in well with my goals. Shi et al (2025) do a good job at emphasizing that use of assistive technology has a lot to do with teacher bandwidth and skills to implement.

    I believe both of these align extremely well with my goals and vision statement. One important part of my vision statement was leaning into strengths and growing areas of weakness. The only was to be able to do that is to first identify them. Using AI to analyze student data is a great way to be able to do this. As an intervention specialist, naturally two of my three goals had to do with differentiation. Even simply doing trainings on the importance of screen readers for class reading will wildly increase participation in a school that is over 1/3 on an IEP. This increase in teacher learning has a direct path to increasing student learning through additional supports and more zeroed in instruction.

    I think the words that would describe the changes from my TIP would be equitability, thoroughness, and inclusivity. With that being said, I am not sure if really shifts the scales in terms of PISA scores. I co-teach algebra 2 and when I looked over the math section of PISA, I didn't have a lot of confidence. Less than 10% of students in our school passed their math OST last year(Niche, 2024). However, I think data like this is what makes it that much more important to implement something like a TIP. The words I used to describe this TIP are the way crawl out of this hole whether pertaining to technology or any other systems we have.

References:

Niche. (2024). South High School. https://www.niche.com/k12/south-high-school-columbus-oh/

Shi, Y. R., Sin, K. F. K., & Wang, Y. Q. (2025). Teacher professional development of digital pedagogy for inclusive education in post-pandemic era: Effects on teacher competence, self-efficacy, and work well-beingLinks to an external site.. Teaching and Teacher Education, 168, 105230.

Tan, X., Cheng, G., & Ling, M. H. (2025). Artificial intelligence in teaching and teacher professional development: A systematic reviewLinks to an external site.. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 8, 100355.