ISTE Standards Review

I had the privilege of hearing from Eric Sheninger today in my district. I was invited to attend with our district's leadership team. What a great experience to hear him in person sharing with OUR staff about OUR students and OUR needs. As he shared about professional development or even better, professional learning, I am trying to figure out my role as I sat amongst a room of district administrators from the building and central office levels. I turned to the ISTE Standards for Coaches and ISTE Standards for Teachers. When I compared the two and found that I did not necessarily agree with their direction. I found that both the Coach and Administrator Standards share most of their involvement specific to the area of Visionary Leadership and Digital Age Learning specific to modeling and facilitating Digital Citizenship. To my disappointment, the standards have the majority of the professional development falling on the coach's role but not the administrator.

This model would be counter productive for the direction we are taking things. It does not support our effort to have our administrators become more digital and leading from the front with respect to technology integration in our district and making a digital conversion in our district to help better prepare our students for the "real world". I am trying to keep in mind that the Standards are those from 2014 and are due for an update. I hope the update includes more ownership of professional development on the administrators since they are the ones who have the power to control the majority of our time and professional learning.

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