Info Update

• Dr. Z-Coe's Corner
• Spring Semester Update & Facilitator Quality Effort
• Summer & Fall 2005 Registration Dates
• Best Practices Challenge
• Bi-monthly Facilitator Discussion Topics
• Facilitator Leadership Board Activities
• New Book Club Discussion
• Chat with Participants

ABC's of Facilitation

• Facilitation Resource of the Month
• What's My Role?
• Dear Felicity,

Chatterbox

• Community Comments
• Monthly Online Chat
• Future Chats

Dr. Z-Coe's Corner

Dear FOR-PD Facilitator:

I hope that all is well with you. This semester is already slipping through our hands. Last semester we had the hurricanes and this semester the FCAT is upon us. Best wishes to our students, teachers, and schools with this year's FCAT assessment.

FOR-PD is going very strong this semester—we have over 2000 participants (!) for Spring 2005 and we continue to add district registrations. We have been receiving many calls and requests from participants who missed the Open Enrollment deadline. We expect that the summer will also be very busy for us. As you know, our secondary teachers are trying to complete the reading endorsement. Thank you for all you will be doing this semester to help your fellow-educators complete Competency 2 of the endorsement via FOR-PD. Thank you for all you will be doing to lead, encourage, and support the teachers in your sections.

We are continuing with our ongoing FOR-PD facilitator professional development efforts this semester. We hope that we are clearly communicating to you how much we value you and how much we intend on "investing" in your professional development. The FOR-PD facilitator is the #1 contributing factor to teachers' success in the course. We vow to do whatever we can to support you, help develop your facilitating skills, and help you grow professionally. We look forward to seeing as many of the Spring facilitators as possible at our 2/18/05 Facilitator meeting here at UCF!

This month, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about effective professional development. As we know, effective professional development incorporates principles of adult learning. Here are some key principles:

• Adult learners display readiness to learn when they have a perceived need and they require immediate application of new skills and knowledge.
• The teachers in your section will need to have immediate and specific feedback from you on their work and learning.
• Continue to encourage your "students" to connect new information with their prior knowledge and experiences. Continue to encourage them to apply what they are learning in their own classrooms. 
  
• Effective professional development is embedded in the reality of schools and teachers' work. It fosters critical reflection and meaningful collaboration.
• Keep the research and learning real—model to your "students" what the material means to you and create opportunities for them to ground the research into their practice and vice versa.
• Many teachers as a group haven't thought very much about their responsibility to improve not only their own practice, but to constantly work with their colleagues to improve the quality of teaching throughout the school.
• Create many opportunities for teachers in your course to work with colleagues and help them discover how what they are learning in the course can help change their reading instructional practices, their own professional growth and also students' reading development.
  
• Effective professional development is aligned with effective teaching and learning: Principles of effective teaching for students in classrooms should not differ for adults in general and teachers in particular.
• Good instruction is good instruction! Use effective instruction principles as you facilitate your "students'" learning in the FOR-PD course.
• Teach, don't just tell! Model, don't just "direct traffic!" You are a teacher and not just a manager of stuff! Our most successful facilitators demonstrate effective instruction principles and have high participation, learning, and course completion rates.
• Checklists, deadlines, and assignments are needed but not sufficient for teacher success in the course. What you do or not do will eventually affect your colleagues' success in the course.
  
• There must be sufficient time and resources for effective professional development to take hold.
• What we are doing with FOR-PD is about improvement of teachers' knowledge of SBRR and effective practice, and change. Teachers in your section are learning new ways of learning, working together, and tackling the complexities of reading and teaching. It takes a qualified facilitator, targeted time, focus, modeling, support, and resources.
• The teachers in your course are going to need time with you—they will look to you as their coach/mentor and they will get easily discouraged when you do not respond or give them direction. Direct them to resources, create opportunities for them to work collaboratively with others in the course, and help them manage the content and their time.

I hope that you consider these principles of effective professional development as you assist the state, your district, your colleagues, and FOR-PD with the reading endorsement. I wish you continued success. Thank you for all you do and please remember that you are not alone! We are here to support you and help you provide effective facilitation in any way possible. Please feel free to contact me in case you have any comments or questions at vzygouri@mail.ucf.edu or (407) 207-7296.

Regards,

Vicky Zygouris-Coe, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, FOR-PD
vzygouri@mail.ucf.edu

Spring Semester Update & Facilitator Quality Effort

Over 2000 students! That is right—over 2000 students are enrolled in FOR-PD courses this semester with about 1000 from open enrollment and 1000 from district sections. As mentioned in the Dr. Z-Coe's Corner, we anticipate opening more district sections throughout the semester, so the sky is the limit with our final spring numbers! It is a very exciting time for FOR-PD, and challenging. While the additional students are wonderful and we thrive on having more people to work with, this also means we need to step up our quality assurance efforts. I am calling on the facilitators to do just this! We need you to work extra smartly (notice I did not say harder) in order to ensure your students are satisfied with their course experience. Here are a few tips to help you work smarter, not harder:

• Are students keeping up? If you notice someone lagging behind by a week or two, contact them right away! They could be stuck with some aspect of the technology or an issue with the content. Let's find out their issue and pull them back in!
  
• Are you communicating with the students in the discussion area by probing their thoughts and challenging their ideas? Research has shown that facilitators are THE key to participant success. They need to know you are there helping and watching and participating right along with them.
  
• Are you grading on a weekly basis? Students need to know how they are doing. Posting grades is the way for you to give them this data. Are you sending them private emails, explaining their grades? Of course you do not need to do this for everyone—just people who score below the required 80%. If you choose to send out an email to everyone, that is wonderful and I will encourage that practice! Believe it or not, keeping up with the grading actually will help cut down the hours spent on the course. Facilitators across the state have talked to me about best practices with regards to grading and all agree that if you keep up with it, it is MUCH LESS effort in the end!

If we all make that extra effort to help the students, I am confident we will see positive results. These results will manifest in completion rates and more importantly, in student learning!

Summer & Fall 2005 Registration Dates

Summer is just around the corner and fall is not far behind! As we know, many districts are planning their summer training schedules. We have prepared our registration periods for summer and fall for your planning purposes.

SUMMER

FALL

Best Practices Challenge

We recently came up with a wonderful list of best facilitation practices in our Bi-monthly For Facilitators Only Discussion board. I know there are more best practice ideas out there so I encourage you to go to the For Facilitator Only board and post your best practice in the bi-monthly discussion topic. While we have posted another topic for the rest of this month, I want to encourage each of you to continue to post what you have found to be a best practice in your facilitation.

One example of a best practice posted by Hope Shirey (and others) is to send out weekly email updates.

I send out a time line for my students so they know what is expected and the response is good. Each week I sentan update via the mailboard as to what lesson we are doing and tips to keep up or sometimes an application of one of the strategies in the lesson. The participants like this ...

- Hope Shirey

Thanks for the idea, Hope! There are SO many more. Check out the best practices area for a summarized document. I look forward to adding to this document, so keep the ideas flowing!

In light of our new list, the Best Practice 2005 Challenge is here! I want each of you to look at this list and adopt 1 idea that you are not currently using in your course and try it out. Keep a record of how it works—did you enjoy doing it? Did your students seem to benefit from the idea? We want to hear from you! We will talk about how it goes in the For Facilitator Only discussion area. So get ready to take this challenge and try something new in your facilitation! We will talk about our results in the next few months.

Bi-Monthly Facilitator Discussion Topics

The latest discussion topics:

The topic for Feb. 15 - Feb. 27 is about teamwork. The open enrollment and district sections do run a bit differently in that some districts can have face-to-face meetings, while most open enrollment sections do not have that luxury as participants are from all over a region or many different schools. Nevertheless, we do have one thing in common—we all are facilitating other teachers in their pursuit to learn more about reading instruction. We, as facilitators, are a team. What constitutes a good team? There are many examples from sports teams to movie production teams to office and school work teams. Let's take what we know about teams and apply it to ourselves. How can we function as a better team? What are some things that we, as facilitators, can do to employ team principles so we do not feel like a lone island? Let's generate some ideas on teams in the Feb. 15 - 27 discussion time. Depending on how this discussion goes, we may extend it.

The topic for Feb. 28 - Mar. 13 is ideas for dealing with students who are lagging behind, but give you the impression they want to finish the course. What are some ways you can handle this situation? What have you done in the past? This should be a really good topic to generate some discussion because I know many of you have faced this situation. Please share your experiences with others as we have several facilitators who have never facilitated before and they could benefit from your wisdom! This topic will begin on Feb. 28 - look in the For Facilitator Only Discussion area for the new topic. As noted above, if the teamwork discussion is generating a great deal of interest, we will postpone this discussion to a later date.

We also welcome your ideas for new bi-monthly topics! Have something you are particularly interested in? Is there something you recently learned at a conference that you feel will generate discussion from other facilitators? Feel free to share your topic ideas with us—just email forpdfac@mail.ucf.edu. We look forward to seeing you online!

Facilitator Leadership Board Activities

The Facilitator Leadership Board continues to be active. They are currently in the process of working their own classes (and other commitments), much like the rest of you! We have started our book review discussion and are discussing chapters each week. We will use our summaries to lead the book discussion with the entire group, starting on Feb. 18. Look for more details in the FOR-PD Book Discussion news story below.

New Book Club Discussion

Reading and reading professional development for teachers is a major focus in education today. The focus of FOR-PD is to provide Florida teachers with a professional development course that focuses on research-based qualities of effective reading instruction. The course was designed to help teachers improve reading instruction for students in grades K-12.

As facilitators, we must be knowledgeable not only about reading, but also about characteristics of adult learners and technology. It is our job to provide a meaningful online professional development experience. While participant professional development is extremely important to our FOR-PD office staff, our facilitator professional development is just as important, if not more!

Join us as we explore a model of professional development specifically for those who teach literacy to teachers. Systems for Change in Literacy Education by Carol Lyons and Gay Su Pinnell will be our featured professional development resource for the spring semester. There will be a special discussion area in the For Facilitator Only Discussion Board related to this book. For each chapter, the Facilitator Leadership Board will provide a synopsis and thought-provoking questions related to the job of a FOR-PD facilitator.

The book is organized around four sections:

• Developing Teachers' Conceptual Knowledge and Skills
• Implementing High-Quality Professional Development
• Enabling Professional Development through Coaching
• Supporting Lasting Change

Section 1 establishes the foundation of the book. The section opens with a discussion on adult learning and literacy and explores the components that ensure a sound, pedagogical framework built on constructivist principles. Information regarding factors associated with developing a community of learners in a collaborative environment, the reading-writing process, and key points about teaching literacy are also discussed.

Section 2 outlines specifics to assist in organizing and implementing a literacy professional development program, including classroom innovations and teaching techniques.

Section 3 focuses on coaching, detailing strategies and techniques to maximize the coaching experience for both staff developers and teachers. This section includes discussions designed to augment skills such as analysis of instructional effectiveness, assessment of literacy teaching, coaching to improve pedagogical style, and reflection of organizational structures and classroom practices.

Section 4 discusses issues and situations relevant to professional development. Chapters within this section detail methods to assist in teachers' continued learning and research, strategies for overcoming barriers to effective professional development, program design for both classroom and school levels, and the contribution staff developers make to augment teacher education and school effectiveness.

Below is a schedule of when each pair of chapters will be discussed in the For Facilitator Only Discussion Board. Don't worry if you don't have the book—members of our Facilitator Leadership Board will post summaries of the main points of each pair of chapters every week. You can read the summaries and contribute based on what you read as well as your experiences. We look forward to discussing literacy professional development with you!

Facilitator Discussion Schedule

Chats with Participants

As many of you know, we recently held a technology chat for participants. I know some facilitators were concerned about offering chats as they were worried participants may not attend. Well, we had a record number of participants in our chats! On Wednesday evening (Feb. 2), we had 78 people in the chat! Anyone who has participated in a chat understands that 78 people is a tremendous amount. I am very proud of the facilitators who attended as they adhered to the chat protocol throughout the evening. Our modeling helped many participants. Still, many others did not know or understand the protocol and that made our chat a bit difficult to follow for newcomers. We have instituted some chat changes to help avoid situations like this in the future and I would like to take this opportunity to share these with you now.

The chat protocol will be incorporated into our Lesson 1 content. That way, all participants are exposed to the protocol before entering a chat. In the chat notification box (the pop-up that appears in WebCT when users log on) will also contain the chat protocol as another means to get participants to read it prior to coming to the chat. For our larger chats, open to participants and facilitators, we will offer more chats and offer them by regions. This will help control the number of people involved in a chat during one evening. We also encourage all facilitators to post the chat protocol in their courses at the beginning of the semester. Make it a discussion topic in the faculty lounge. Everything we can do (either as FOR-PD staff or facilitators) to help participants learn chat protocol will help ensure our chats are as productive as possible.

We are very excited about the interest in the chats and look forward to several more interesting chats with you and participants in the future. Remember, if you have a topic of interest, do not hesitate to communicate with our office.

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Facilitation Resource of the Month

This month's facilitation resource expands on the notion of adult learning. Malcolm S. Knowles was a very influential figure in the adult education field and he defined the term 'andragogy'—referring to the specific characteristics of adult learners. The following about Malcolm Knowles is taken from the Encyclopedia of Online Education (2002).

Malcolm Shepherd Knowles (1913 - 1997) was a, perhaps 'the', central figure in US adult education in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s he was the Executive Director of the Adult Education Association of the United States of America. He wrote the first major accounts of informal adult education and the history of adult education in the United States. Furthermore, Malcolm Knowles' attempts to develop a distinctive conceptual basis for adult education and learning via the notion of andragogy became very widely discussed and used.

Our reference this month Staff Development, Adult Characteristics, comes from "Plan instruction for adults, Module N-4," The National Center for Research in Vocational Education. (1987) Ohio State University, Columbus, OH (contributing authors include Joe Cave, Cheryl LaMaster and Sharon White). This site contains a table comparing characteristics of child learners with adults.

Let's look at this table and think about the typical FOR-PD participant. What do these characteristics mean in terms of how we should approach facilitation? Take one or two points and talk about how you have seen the characteristic(s) impact participants in your class. I'm sure many of you have stories related to the adult characteristic regarding time. What about the characteristic regarding negative past experiences impacting adult learning expectations? What about the adult need for immediate applicability of learning? These are all areas that affect our participants. Let's discuss this a bit further on the For Facilitator Only discussion board under the topic FFF* Discussions. See the thread "Adult Learning Characteristics."

Reference:

Smith, M. K. (2002) 'Malcolm Knowles, informal adult education, self-direction and andragogy', the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/et-knowl.htm. Last updated: January 30, 2005

What's My Role?

Spring classes are well underway and there are district sections just beginning! I encourage all of you to check out previous versions of the FFF to read about your role at the various stages of a course. This month's role will focus on courses that started in January and are in their 3rd week or so. Just as in the first opening weeks, you are still to be a source of support for your participants. The encourager, the teacher, the discussion participant, the grader, the listener. These are all important roles and remain so for the next few weeks.

Your role now needs to focus on keeping participants motivated. How can you do that?

• Continue to reply to their postings in the discussion area. They need to see you are being an active participant in addition to a regular grader, etc.
• Contact anyone in your course who is not caught up. You may want to consider using their outside contact information (either email or phone). Remember that you received this information in your facilitator welcome email. If you need another copy of that email, let us know at forpdfac@mail.ucf.edu. Contact our office if you are having trouble reaching anyone.
• Use the Faculty Lounge area of the course to post some comic relief from the course! Post a success story about FOR-PD to help keep folks motivated. Feel free to use any of our quotes from the community quote section of the newsletter. Showing your participants the value of the course for them is an excellent way to help keep everyone motivated.
• Most importantly - stay involved! Participants model what they see. If you start to slack, your participants will follow suit!

Do not hesitate to call me to chat about your course. If you are having any specific problems or just want a friendly ear to listen to what troubles you, give me a call (407-207-7295).

Dear Felicity,

Dear Felicity,
I have some participants who are dropping out of the course. What do they need to do?

- Drop Student Central

One of my participants, an assistant principal, was
really excited about some changes she made in meetings
with teachers to discuss student interventions.  She
"combined" the teacher's reading interventions with some
of her own that she learned through taking FOR-PD.  She
responded,  "It was exciting to see the teachers go
right back to their classrooms and begin using some of
the ideas.  One teacher called me 'wonderful.' That was
a great feeling and due only to some new knowledge."

Just what FOR-PD is all about--growing professionally!!!
 :)

-- Barbara Poole

This is another quote similar to the one in last month's FFF. I want everyone to see the impact we have on teachers—you can and DO really change how people interact with their students! Sometimes it is an indirect impact, as above. You just never know how you will affect one person in your course. This is a good reminder to us all that what we do is of great value. Thank you FOR-PD facilitators and keep up the good work!

I had a student email me to let me know how well
organized this course was and how much she got from it.
She compared us to other on-line courses and gives
FOR-PD 5 stars out of 5!

-- Janis Ellen Jackson

Now some of you may think we posted this one for you all to read just as a means of self-praise. Well, everyone needs a bit of that now and then, don't you think? Actually, all kidding aside, this quote illustrates an important point about our course—and one that you can bring out to help ease participants' fears during the first few weeks. Our course is organized in a manner to facilitate learning. We have the same "look and feel" for each lesson. Once they are familiar with the course content layout, that will never change. The assignments are always located at the end of the content. The literacy log is always located on the first page of content. We have created visual cues (read this, do this, etc.) to help participants know exactly what do to with the content they see in the course, and this is used in a consistent manner throughout the course. Thanks for helping us share this piece of information with this great quote, Janis!

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Do you have comments about the course? Have you received any comments from participants? We always look for feedback so send it our way. Email forpdfac@mail.ucf.edu with your stories!