Blogs We are living in a world of unknown and the ever-evolving landscape has been challenging for all educators, to say the least. While much attention has been on the detrimental impact COVID-19 school closures are having and will continue to have on student learning, few are discussing the negative effects these closures will have on teacher growth.
The Insight ADVANCE team recognizes that teachers were not trained for what they are currently facing–and it’s our job to help them get the professional learning they need, especially during this trying time. We are doing our best to prevent educators from getting lost in the chaos by making their transition to remote instruction and virtual coaching easier by continuing to update our products like, ADVANCEfeedback. We are doing so by building new features, facilitating trainings on our platform, and supporting educators when they come to us with questions. When we build technology we believe you can’t separate purpose from functionality–they go hand in hand to create a meaningful experience. How do we approach supporting educator growth when building out our product roadmap?
A holistic approach: the ADVANCE Suite integrates multiple complementary tools.
We know that sometimes more than one tool is needed to get the job done, so you can use one or more of these three tools to coach, share, train and assess the educators in your organization. Use the features that suit your needs, and if you need guidance, our implementation team will help you develop an approach that suits your educational focus.
Our new dashboard provides notifications and status for ADVANCEfeedback, ADVANCEcalibrate and ADVANCElive and is a place to see up-to-date information for each tool with highlighted action steps. Ease of use is a key ingredient in making the process simple to understand focusing on what needs to be done next.
ADVANCEfeedback supports video-based observations recorded in the classroom or during a virtual online session. Use our mobile app or record an in-classroom or virtual lesson on your phone or computer and upload it into ADVANCEfeedback. The process of self-reflection, adding goals, notes, lesson plans and then sharing it with a team or submitting it to an individual coach provides opportunities for timely support as well as meaningful discussions and collaboration.
When combined with ADVANCElive scheduling and conducting live coaching sessions with individuals or a group is a powerful way to provide a holistic coaching experience. Live sessions can be recorded and are available to invitees for all meetings and trainings. ADVANCElive can be used for trainings as well as meetings without leaving the platform.
ADVANCEcalibrate is an online training, practice and credentialing system that ensures inter-rater reliability and provides validity and consistency of feedback for coaches and evaluators. It is important to view online training, practice, and credentialing as “professional development” opportunities rather than compliance-driven “mandates.” By doing so, we create learning opportunities for evaluators to further deepen their understanding of necessary rubrics/instruments for the most effective way to provide coaching feedback.
The integrated Resource Library which can be accessed by everyone provides an organized repository for videos, tutorials, support documents and other artifacts. Curated materials can be uploaded by the district team, the ADVANCE team or individual contributors who have upload permissions. All resources can be viewed and/or downloaded by the assigned end user. All materials can be filtered and sorted in order to quickly find what is needed.
Flexibility to fit the need:
We know that in current times educators may be faced with a number of teaching modes; in the classroom, and remote learning synchronously or asynchronously. An educator will most likely use more than one of these approaches and need coaching for all three. Video-based observation for classroom teaching has been the focus when using ADVANCEfeedback and is easily adapted to support coaching for remote teaching and the need to use multiple methods to deliver education.
The importance of helping educators determine an approach for delivering remote synchronous (live or in real time) learning and what learning can be supported asynchronously (recorded or self-paced) will be an essential part of the coaching process. The ADVANCEfeedback workflow provides the flexibility to add probing questions, framework/rubrics and uploading all types of support materials which are appropriate for coaching all types of teaching experiences. In ADVANCEfeedback coaches can provide qualitative and quantitative feedback, leave comments, resources, and performance ratings and then conduct post-observation coaching sessions and one-on-one instructional coaching sessions using ADVANCElive.
Personalized Implementation and Support:
Finally, we believe that we are all in this together and although we make the tools as easy to use as possible our implementation team works hard to make sure that your organization is supported every step of the way. We know that a successful set-up, user training, and ongoing usage monitoring will create a better experience. Understanding the needs of your organization is important to us in order to help guide you in the best ways to use ADVANCE Suite to meet them.
Interested to learn more on how you can best support your educators
with our ADVANCE Suite?
