P21+Professional+Develop+Award

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills honored Wisconsin’s Peer Coaching Professional Development Program with the P21 Best Practice Award at the recent P21 annual summit in Stowe, VT. Julie Walker, executive director of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and P21 Chair along with Lillian Kellogg, vice president of Education Networks of America presented 21st Century Best Practice awards to 10 state professional development programs: Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. []
 * P21 Professional Develop Award**

Our WI Peer Coaching Collaborative assists teacher leaders to develop the coaching communication and collaboration skills essential to help their colleagues learn the necessary technology skills and instructional strategies needed to integrate technology into active, engaging learning activities that promote P21 learning outcomes. Coaches help colleagues in their schools by providing timely training or resources, co-planning learning activities, modeling effective teaching, observing colleagues, and reflecting on what they observed. Coaches encourage ongoing educator collaboration focused on improving student learning and help schools to develop the capacity to meet their professional learning needs.

The Peer Coaching model used by the WI Peer Coaching Collaborative is based on effective research components. It is a framework that builds internal capacity for schools to create systemic capacity to provide professional development by promoting the participation of school administrators as well as coaches and teachers. Peer Coaching provides effective, affordable teacher professional development.

Our WI Peer Coaching model is built around research supported factors for improving teaching and focuses on improving student achievement by improving three areas of teaching and learning: 1) improving lesson design by incorporating engaging strategies focused on Common Core Standards performances, 2) integrating digital classroom tools and resources to enhance learning, and, 3) developing collaboration/communication skills around reflection and analysis of the lesson improvement process.

Trained coaches collaborate with peers in protocol based discussions. These protocols are designed to give teachers optimal feedback without teachers feeling the need to justify or explain their reasons for current work and student work samples. They assist the collaborating teacher in analyzing and improving lessons from their own classrooms with their own students toward the goal of improving achievement through the use of 21st century digital classroom tools, balanced assessment practices and ongoing reflection.

Many Wisconsin districts participated in peer coaching as the core professional development for their FY2010-11 Enhancing Education through Technology competitive grant projects. Mary Lou Ley, Director WI Peer Coaching Collaborative and a WI P21 PD Affiliate, led each train-the-trainer professional development program. Educators engaged in both face-to-face and online training. This training was offered for optional graduate credit. To learn more visit their wiki space at http://wipeercoaching.wikispaces.com.