Digital fluency for young learners, coached at district scale.
When COVID moved Houston ISD’s K-3 classes online, engage2learn coached the district’s Teacher Development Specialists to turn a new literacy curriculum into virtual learning, and measured the work in its coaching platform.
I know e2L commands the virtual space. I have seen your work there, and we need that expertise to reach the goals we have for our coaches, our teachers, and our learners.
A new curriculum, built for classrooms students could not attend
In the summer of 2020, Houston ISD’s Teacher Development Specialists, the district’s resident literacy experts, wrote a full year of differentiated English Language Arts and Reading curriculum for grades K-3.
Then Houston became a COVID hotspot, and it was clear that most of the 2020-21 school year would be remote. Chief Academic Officer Yolanda Rodriguez saw that a curriculum written for in-person learning would not meet the needs of virtual students, and K-3 teachers had not yet widely used the district’s learning management system, itsLearning.
Chapter 02 · What we did
Work with the coaches, support the teachers, measure it all
Through its Coaches Academy, engage2learn coached a cohort of Teacher Development Specialists through 2020-21 on turning the district’s curriculum into engaging virtual learning. The teams first spent several months building custom coaching resources aligned to the district’s evaluation system, the literacy curriculum, itsLearning and digital tools for young learners.
Each specialist was coached on two standards, the engage2learn coach standards and Best Practices for Virtual Learning, and then coached and supported K-3 teachers in turn.
In a district of more than 200,000 students, the work had to be measured. engage2learn built a virtual classroom visit form with virtual-learning look-fors and a custom Professional Growth Rubric, aligned to the district’s teacher evaluation, into its coaching platform, eSuite, now GroweLab.
Chapter 03 · What changed
Coaching that is the work, not extra work
Because every coaching conversation, by engage2learn or by the district’s own specialists, was aligned to the teacher evaluation system, coaching became essential work for Houston ISD rather than extra work.
The data from those conversations gave the district a way to connect teaching methods, learning tasks, assessments and coaching to student outcomes, and to plan each school’s strategy around the best practices, digital fluency among them, that raise student achievement.
Chapter 04 · In their words
In their words.
“I know e2L commands the virtual space. I have seen your work there, and we need that expertise to reach the goals we have for our coaches, our teachers, and our learners.”
