Preschool Teachers Learning Together Remotely: Lessons from a Hawaiian School System
Blog Post
Screen shot of a Kamehameha Schools online course for preschool teachers, based on https://slidesgo.com/theme/biology-lesson
Sept. 1, 2020
This guest post by Wendy Oliver, a senior technology integration specialist at Kamehameha Schools, provides a window onto a new type of professional learning that unfolded this summer: teachers gathering online and using remote digital tools to learn how to teach their students with digital tools and in remote settings. In this case, the teachers also had the added challenge of teaching very young children: Kamehameha Schools includes 29 preschools that support early learners ages three to five years old, with sites located throughout the state of Hawaii. There are a total of 85 classrooms and each preschool classroom has one lead teacher and two teaching assistants. In total, the system features approximately 255 lead teachers and teaching assistants. Here is Oliver’s story about how she and colleagues handled this challenge.
When the pandemic forced our school system to close its doors last spring, our preschool teachers were forced to teach in a paradigm that was unfamiliar to many: distance learning. This approach caused anxiety amongst many teachers, especially those who used limited technology and were forced to immediately learn various web tools to begin remote teaching with their students, who were no more than 4 or 5 years old.
When summer came upon us, there was a need and desire to provide professional development that would empower preschool teachers with the skills, knowledge and strategies to teach remotely—and do so in ways that were appropriate for such young children. While there was a plethora of K-12 professional development offerings, few, if any, were focused on preschool. Many teachers and other professionals in early childhood education know that content developed for K-12 is designed for older children and focused on particular sets of academic skills, so our hope for a summer course was to share all of the aspects of developmentally appropriate technology integration for early learners.
To benefit our early learning teachers, we wanted a format that was teacher-centric focused, flexible and offered meaningful choices on relevant topics through the following modalities:
- Reading
- Listening
- Watching
- Participating (asynchronously and synchronously).
Thus, we adopted a format developed by Torrey Trust of University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s school of education. Trust and colleagues had created a choice board for “Preparing for Remote and Online Teaching,” which we discovered at the ISTE Connect website, a community for members of the International Society for Technology in Education. The choice board was openly licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license, which enabled us to use and customize it for our school system (see screen shot below) as long as credit was given to its origins. Our virtual professional learning program was five weeks long, and choice boards were revealed to educators one week at a time, in order to scaffold learning and accommodate a reasonable learning pace.
In thinking of summer professional learning opportunities, we wanted to create a positive learning experience that was self-paced and asynchronous (complemented by weekly synchronous group sessions), and one that enabled teachers to choose and explore various levels of technology integration and topics based on their current knowledge and experiences.
The seven topics we felt were important to cover for this course were
- Pedagogy & Distance Learning
- Hawaiian Culture Based Education
- Family Engagement: Becoming Media Mentors
- Digital Citizenship
- Appropriate Media Use for Early Learning
- Education Technology Integration Models & Standards
- Webtools
The thought was that if we could give teachers a little taste of each of these topics over a five week period, it would provide them a solid foundation of understanding to begin intentionally using technology at the start of the school year in August, whether the learning happens face to face or remotely.
The final requirement for the course was a teacher created project that would accomplish two goals:
1) it should incorporate anything they learned over the five weeks;
2) it can be used with the students or families when school begins in August.
Seventy-four teachers participated in the sessions, and we received positive feedback throughout the course. Teachers shared how much they appreciated the different learning modalities as well as the freedom to choose various topics they wanted to learn more about. Teachers also commented how meaningful it was for them to have the opportunity to meet synchronously every week to learn from presenters and to connect and share with teachers from around the state. We began to notice a transformation during Week 4 of the course. Teachers were using new technology-related vocabulary in their discussions and comments, and their final projects exemplified learning and understanding.
The teachers shared their projects to a Padlet, which will be used as a resource repository that our preschool teachers can use in their classrooms immediately. It is exciting and gratifying to see the teachers begin their school year with the confidence in knowing how to appropriately and effectively integrate developmentally-appropriate technology with young children and their families after taking this summer course.
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