Making Connections & Finding Solutions

By Jason Harper

University of Wyoming Trustees Education Initiative (TEI) has a long vision to continuously improve educator preparation, but also strives to connect resources and create solutions to solve immediate needs for the state’s educational system. Last spring teachers made a quick 180-degree turn as schools transitioned to online delivery to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

UW-E4 Director Curtis Biggs and TEI Managing Director Colby Gull pivoted TEI’s short-term focus to UW faculty and P-12 teachers in Wyoming to support them as they quickly adapted to teaching online. The two TEI masterminds orchestrated a multi-partner solution to connect expertise from across the state to meet the immediate needs of educators.

“TEI teamed up with College of Education faculty members, the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning (ECTL), the Wyoming Department of Education and our partner K-12 school districts to get this professional development (PD) to our state’s educators,” says Leslie Rush, UW College of Education interim dean and TEI executive director.

TEI worked with two UW College of Education faculty, Assistant Professional Lecturer Joseph Schroer and Assistant Professor Mia Kim Williams, both online teaching experts, to virtually present the K-12 Digital Teaching and Learning Workshop to teachers in Wyoming at no cost to participants or their districts. Teachers from all 48 school districts and other K-12 schools in Wyoming were invited to take part in the five-day intensive course that took place in August via videoconferencing and other technologies.

“The entire focus of TEI is to love, support and advance the work of education, both inside the college and across the state,” says Gull. “ECTL really laid a powerful foundation for the Digital Teaching and Learning Workshop and doctors Schroer and Williams built on that foundation to create an extremely timely and engaging learning opportunity.”

Williams and Schroer have worked to customize Digital Teaching and Learning, a course previously developed by the ECTL for college-level teaching, to apply to current best practices in K-12 education. The two faculty members demonstrated innovative technologies that assist and enhance online learning, and shared strategies to design online experiences that are rich and engaging for all students.

Participants worked to develop their online teaching presence and learned strategies to motivate students in the online environment. During the workshop, each educator worked to develop a lesson plan that is designed to be delivered online. Williams and Schroer assisted each participant in identifying and creating priority learning objectives; designing activities that effectively use media and other digital tools to support learning; and creating highquality assessments to measure student learning.

At the end of the workshop, participants were able to bring a complete lesson plan that has been designed to be taught online back to their home districts to implement and lead their own online teaching workshops with their colleagues.

The work of TEI and the College of Education in supporting educators does not end with the summer workshop. Ongoing PD courses to support K-12 online teaching are being built in preparation for rollout early in 2021. The continued PD will include online teaching pedagogy, assessment in online coursework, and digital teaching and learning tools.