Adam McMickell, Director of Student Achievement in Ogden School District, drops by UEN Homeroom to talk about personalized learning in Ogden. In this episode we discuss what professional development should look like, how does badging and certifications play a role in professional learning, and how Ogden is trying to meet this needs of their teachers by giving them a personalized approach to learning.
Adam McMickell, Director of Student Achievement in Ogden School District, drops by UEN Homeroom to talk about personalized learning in Ogden. In this episode we discuss what professional development should look like, how does badging and certifications play a role in professional learning, and how Ogden is trying to meet the needs of their teachers by giving them a personalized approach to learning.
Welcome to UEN's "Homeroom." This is our chance to tell your stories and talk about issues impacting Utah's amazing educators.
In the "Homeroom," we plan to feature teachers and leaders from across the state of Utah, and this is going to be a fun, informative bimonthly podcast.
And this week will be no exception.
Welcome to the "Homeroom"
Let's kick it off.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So today, Dani, we're going to be talking about personalized professional development. What do you think of when you think of personalized PD?
Well, the first thing I think of when I think of personalized PD is the opposite of personalized PD. I think of faculty meetings, where there isn't any choice or voice.
You don't feel like those are personalized?
No.
I get to choose where I sit.
[LAUGHS]
Sometimes, I actually heard in one of my classes last week that there were assigned seats at a faculty meeting.
OK, that is depression personified.
Isn't that amazing? So it's out there. It happens. So we know that personalized PD is not always the way it happens for our teachers. So when we are talking about personalized PD, what does that look like?
You know, I'm excited to talk about it today, because I know, for myself, I like to learn in certain ways, and there are certain tools I like to use. So I'm really excited to see how other people are trying to do the same thing.
I completely agree with you. I also like to sometimes be stretched outside of my comfort zone. I will whine about doing an activity and then really love the activity as well.
Yeah, I think sometimes we just need to get out of our comfort zone a little bit, right?
Absolutely, I think that can be part of personalized PD is knowing just how far to take it.
Yeah, well, today, our guest is going to be Adam McMickell. Adam McMickell is the director of student achievement for Ogden School District, and he supervises the district's assessment, curriculum, digital learning, library media, and dual language immersion programs. Previously, Adam served Ogden's learning community as a district instructional technology specialist, a school instructional coach, and an elementary school teacher.
He started his educational career in South Korea, where he taught K-12 English as a second language for three years Adam earned his master's degree, his administrative supervisory endorsement, and English as a Second Language endorsement from Utah State University. Go Aggies.
He's a Google-certified educator, trainer, and innovator, completing that in the Mountain View cohort in 2014. He is also a certified Microsoft educator. Adam has presented at several state and national conferences and is currently enrolled in the ESD certified educator program. We are happy to welcome Adam to our podcast.
Hi, Jared.
So one of the first parts about being here is that you have to take some questions from our live studio audience members. Now these are real Utah students, and they have some questions for you.
Did we get any from Ogden School District?
Oh, they could be.
Yeah, we don't know.
Could be. Random sampling, huh?
Yes, indeed. So are you ready for this challenge?
I'm not sure I'm ready, but here we go.
OK, question one.
What's your favorite movie?
Oh, challenging, non-academic question right upfront. I wasn't prepared for that one. You asked if I was ready. I was not ready for that.
You're like, Pythagorean Theorem. I am ready to go.
I am ready.
You never know what a kid's going to ask you.
Well, you know what? We have been fully immersed in all of the Harry Potter movies lately. So it's hard for me to say a favorite movie outside of that realm. I have a 7-year-old, and she's fully committed to Harry Potter. So within the series, hmm, maybe, I don't know. Order of the Phoenix, I would say, right now has been my favorite.
That was the one where they have the Tri-Wizard Tournament?
No, that's Goblet of Fire. Nice. You were testing me there, right? Yeah.
I'm exposing myself as--
I don't know, but as the host, maybe you asked that question intentionally. I knew the answer.
I can tell you right now, there was not that much intentionality.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, have you watched all the Harry Potter movies, Dani?
I haven't. I haven't even read all the books.
Oh, my god.
Stop judging me, you guys.
No, I won't.
I feel the judgment.
Yeah, I'm not going to pretend. This conversation is now just between me and Adam.
All right, so I can leave now.
OK, so Harry Potter and the-- which one was it?
Order of the Phoenix.
Order of the Phoenix, OK.
Our second question.
Where do you like to go on vacation?
That's a great question. It all depends. So we're looking forward to a great vacation this winter break. My wife is from the Cape Town area, and so where do I like to go? I like to go see my in-laws, and a lot of people won't say that. But we like to go to South Africa and spend time there with our family.
South Africa is an amazing place to go.
It is an amazing place, yes.
I have to go to Utah County to visit my in-laws.
More locally, I think, any of the national parks are great with us-- Yellowstone, Yosemite.
Our last question.
What is your favorite snack?
Anything crunchy, salty to get me through the day. Typically, pretzels are on hand. I find that it helps alleviate some stress as well as tasting delicious, so pretzels.
Dani, are you a salty snacker?
Yes, salty only. No sweets.
I can't say I'd go that far.
Adam, we're glad to have you with us today. And as we talked about it in our intro, today, we're talking about how you and your district are personalizing professional development. So maybe you can share with us just a little bit about your ideas concerning personalized professional development. What does that mean to you?
I think when we think about personalized professional development, a lot of it has to do with reflection from my own experiences. And when I came into the district, I came in through an ARL track. I didn't give my original degree in education. So I think back to those meaningful experiences that I had to go through, and fortunately, I had people surrounding me who gave me some ideas to personalize my own learning, because I certainly didn't have the same needs as those who had come out of preparatory programs.
And a lot of it was a combination of those embedded experiences, and we're fortunate enough in our district to have instructional coaches in every building who look for opportunities with observation and targeted PD to provide the in-the-moment needs for our teachers but also to couple that with opportunities blended online and really giving teachers direction where they can explore and connect with people who maybe meet a specialized need that they have and they recognize through the process.
And that's what I certainly needed as a young teacher coming in. We had great professional development on house that the objectives were set for us. But as I went back into the classroom, I recognized that outside of what my peers needed, there were certain aspects of classroom management, lesson planning that were important to me. And I knew that they had much more experience, and I certainly could talk to them. But I got some direction how to connect online with certain programs and kind of self-regulate my own learning.
That's awesome. Thank you for sharing where your vision came from as a professional learner. Because I think it's really important that a lot of times we think about the experiences that we have as learners, but then there's the disconnect between what we actually do. That's all fine and good, and then we deliver a PD that has just kind of been set from 50 years ago. So how did you make the jump from what you knew you wanted as personalized professional development to actually putting it in practice?
Continuing to put it into practice. It was a challenge, and fortunately, I've got a good team to work through those challenges. So what we did is, not unfortunately, we put together some high-quality professional development first, and I think that was important for us to get right.
So we could go in. We had a lot of face to face. Either we were going to buildings or we were hosting professional development at the district, but to be fair for our team, it wasn't personalized upfront. And I think that was a kind of a check on ourselves. Could we design quality adult learning experiences before we kind of investigated our system as a whole to determine how we could personalize it a little more?
After it was our first year as a team, and after we were reflecting, we acknowledged, one, we were doing a good job in those face-to-face moments. And as their supervisor, a specialist, I could safely say anytime I wanted to observe them, they were providing a high-quality experience for our teachers.
However, I think what it came down to, making that leap, that was about us owning our actual objectives, our vision for professional learning. Were we certain that, one, we are providing a proper entry point for all of our teachers? Did we recognize their needs? Was that actually translating into action in the classroom and fundamentally altering student achievement in our classroom? And we couldn't come back with a good response to that.
So in one sense, we were being effective, but really, our core values and our beliefs and the principles which we are trying to abide, we weren't meeting those. So it was a lot of work. It was a lot of coordination, conversations with district leadership, even at the superintendency level, talking about kind of our vision for where we wanted to go forward, making sure I anchored that to what we believed needed to happen with professional development.
And we started making some of those fundamental shifts, where we started looking at hybrid options, initially, not going on board. Like, this could be a completely online program, where they can select their own place and time and pace which they wanted to complete the professional development. But we started having those conversations about where were some quick wins we could make and provide multiple options, multiple entry points for our teachers? So that's kind of how it got started, and it certainly evolved from there.
Yeah, we've definitely seen a lot of evolution in what your team is doing over the last couple of years, and it's really incredible. So there is a lot of different ways that teachers can choose professional development in Ogden. Do you want to tell us just briefly kind of what that looks like?
We can-- I'll do my best here. So within digital teaching and learning, focus in that area, that's where some of my supervisory capacity started. So we've had several years working on personalized professional learning there. So I think that would be the best example.
We recognized we were doing trainings around Google. We're a Google for Education district. So we had all these discrete trainings. We weren't doing a great job connecting those trainings. Teachers who certainly participated were getting a lot out of them, but were they connecting the pieces to improve practices in the classroom? We weren't sure.
So one, we wanted to unify all those elements and provide that clear pathway. That's where we started. And so that led us down to what we now know as our Certified Educator Pathways Program.
Second thing we wanted to do there, and this is we wanted to make sure at the end of it, they had that opportunity to take that certification exam and have that piece, where they could badge out and be proud of the work they've done, and that carries meaning and weight.
So teachers can obviously enter into that pathways program. We clearly structured, using what Google offers as well and then embedded it within our context to make sure that we have artifacts of learning along the way that come directly from our teachers' classrooms. So that's part of our program.
And then, again, to meet our teachers needs, we did a lot of empathy mapping. We had a lot of assumptions that were floating around, and we tried to tackle all of them based on stakeholder input. We connected with our admins and our teachers to say what are your actual needs, and what are your actual wants and desires when you enter PD?
And we found that it was varied, as you could imagine, but some teachers did it because they do it. They are passionate about that continuous improvement and learning, and so we recognize that group. And that's a pretty easy group to cater to. You just have to make greater opportunities available, and they're on board.
We had others who were looking for certification. They were really interested in that badge at the end of it. So we wanted to make sure that whatever we were doing, both it was high quality in the moment, it contributed to improvements in the classroom, but at the end, we could also-- we aim, like teachers do, we wanted a certain percentage of students who were passing that certification exam at the end. So we took a lot of work there to make sure that for that group of teachers, they could expect to have that at the end of the program.
And then also, we had a lot of teachers who were interested in re-licensure. They were looking for advancement and maybe a lane change, a step in their pay scale. So for those teachers, we recognized it wasn't enough to personalize within just the Google-certified educators pathway that we wanted to do it in such a way where we could put in the assurances to USBE to get a USBE credit along the way.
Because again, our discrete trainings, they were maybe an hour. You could get re-licensure credit for that. But if we really align them in a single pathway, we could say if they participate fully, they provide evidences of learning along the way, and we evaluate that, provide feedback. USBE, do you think that warrants a credit, right? It certainly is 15 to 18 hours of work, clearly.
And so they said yes, and so we were able to offer all of those kind of opportunities for our teachers within that one pathway. It's personalized in the fact that we require them to come in for orientation after they apply to the program, but after that, they can engage with the content fully in an online space through the Google Classroom.
They can also participate in some face-to-face opportunities, so for those learners who are like, I'm OK in this online space, but I want to make sure I touch base once in a while, come and engage with our specialist and deepen their learning, they can do that. If there are other learners who feel like they need to have the majority of their learning take place face to face, we have scheduled those opportunities too. So they kind of navigate throughout that coursework and experience it how they want to experience it.
We have set aside kind of recommendations based on what Google would expect within their online platform how much time you should typically spend to really tackle those assignments. But part of that personalization was this is a voluntary participation. We are committed to making sure if you participate, it's going to positively impact your classroom, but it's up to you how long it's going to take.
You kind of enroll in a cohort. We typically have that for a semester, if you just kind of went at it at a traditional pace. But certainly, we've had teachers who have taken the whole year, and that's fine. We want to meet their needs and make sure that they're having a positive engagement with the resources. So that's one of the programs, and it's highly personalized in both how they experience the content, the timing, the pace, on and offline experiences, and then it meets a variety of needs as to why they want to engage in the PD.
We also offer the ed tech endorsement program. There's a little more structure there, especially with the core courses, right? I mean, we have a partner in Southern Utah University, and they have requirements. The state has requirements that we have to meet, and we respect that. It's a different type of learning experience for our learners.
However, what I like about it is, outside of those core courses, a lot of it is working with our teachers who enroll and showing them opportunities and options. One, they can go to USET and they can get a USB credit, which could be applied. That's a great opportunity for them.
And so I feel it's highly personalized in that way, because a lot of those, either we're inviting you in, specialist up to the district, or they can engage with the UEN courses and you wonderful people online. And so all of those experiences combined, there's a certain degree of personalization there. It's not like the educators pathway, but it's not intended to be, and we don't market it as such.
They understand it. Masters level kind of requirements, especially within those core courses. Much more rigorous demand, but at the same time, the expectations-- we try to hold to those expectations. If you're willing to commit to this type of program, this is what we are willing to make sure that you get back as a guarantee. So right now, I mean, those are kind of two of our bigger programs that we're offering.
Yeah, I liked when you were talking about how you were designing this course and the things that you were thinking about as you were mapping them out. And when you had a couple of your trainers were teaching a bunch of district leaders about the options available for PD in Ogden, you had a Google for Educators trainer there, who was absolutely blown away by what Ogden School District was doing.
She was sitting there, and just, her mind was blown by the stuff you were doing with Google for Educator resources, and then how you've personalized it for teachers. So it just kind of connected some dots for me, in that this is how we want classrooms to be, and you guys are doing a really great job modeling it for teachers in the professional development, which is sometimes where we have that gap, you know?
We know this is how we should be teaching, and we know this how we want our teachers to teach. But you guys are doing a great job actually modeling that for educators.
I can say the work, especially behind the Certified Educator Pathway program that we put together, really was a contributing factor to our recent designation as a reference district for Google. And we're very proud of that work, but more proud, not just to have the badge, which is on the website, and it's important to a lot of people, right? [LAUGHS]
Again, we recognize that as a desire for the teachers, but at the same time, a lot of our district leaders were like, we would like that badge because of what it represents for us, though deeper level. What does it represent? Well, it represents we're doing right by our teachers, and if we're doing right by our teachers with their professional learning programs, we're doing right by our students, and we're doing right by our community. And that's what it means to us.
It required a lot of time, in which my specialist and myself, we had to be really vulnerable. It's a vulnerable space. We challenged ourselves. Because like I said, going all the way back to our first year as a team, which was only a few years ago, we recognized we were doing well in those discrete professional development opportunities, but that was not what our teachers needed.
And so to have that conversation and then to go through-- we went through a design thinking process, which forces you to challenge assumptions, which forces you to get out and talk to stakeholders, which forces you to be empathetic to your learners, that's a really vulnerable space for us, because we weren't sure we had the answers.
And we were happy when we recognized we didn't have all the answers, but guess what? That's the beauty of what we're trying to promote. We reached out. We already had-- I had established through connections with Google, I'd gone through the Innovator Academy to become a certified innovator, a lot of connections through PLNs. And we tapped into that. We tapped into our own expertise.
And then we are able then, as part of our programs, to speak to that. Because we want to model that for our teachers. You're not going to have the answers, but guess what? These are ways in which you can reach out into the communities that exist, tap into expertise, connect, and collaborate, and then you can make substantial change within your classroom, like we have done for you through our professional learning programs.
You know, one of the key terms you've said a couple different times that you don't often hear when you're talking about professional development is "empathy," you know? Like you mentioned, your team knew you were doing something well, but you asked yourselves is this something that meets the needs of the people that we're trying to serve?
And that's not often something that we hear that explicitly in training. Sometimes we cater to what our skill sets are or what we're good at, and you've gone beyond that, which I think is a really valuable skill. And when we talk about personalizing professional development, you're thinking about the person, which I think, sometimes, we think about the program, right?
I agree. We took the time to get out there. I mean, if anyone's looking to revamp their program or even refine it, you don't need to completely overhaul it, make sure you get out and you talk to your learners and our adults.
And we took a lot of interviews, and then we brought them back and created some empathy maps and profiles of the learner. What is important to this learner? How were they experiencing us? Just like we would want to do with your students. I mean, there's planning. There's enacting, and you want some tight alignment there.
But then also, often forgotten in the classroom, is how is that experienced by the student? Because that's certainly different. I could go in and see a teacher, and they could enact. They could bring about a beautiful lesson. But if I lose sight of how it's being experienced by our variety of learners, then I'm missing a key element in the improvement process, and the same thing with our adult learners.
And what we found was you can make a statement like we're doing it well. Well, that's relative to your criteria and then your objectives as well, right? So what we found was there was a slight disconnect. Yes, they recognized you are a good facilitator, but as a system, as a program, you're not really meeting our needs, right?
I'm coming. I may learn a discrete skill or we have some general concept, but I don't feel, personally as your learner, I wasn't feeling how to make those connections that would be meaningful to me that would help me go back to the classroom and translate that into improved action. That wasn't there.
And that was hard to hear, but at the same time, it was what we needed to hear, and we were willing to hear it. And I want to compliment my team, because when I challenged them, I wasn't sure how they were going to respond. Because it's simultaneously recognizing that they were amazing on their evaluations, highly effective, but pushing them beyond that. Say, listen, you are highly effective. We can do better.
And that was hard, but at the same time, they owned it. They're like, yeah, we can. We can, because what we're trying to do is influence classroom instruction, and that's where we didn't have the answers, right? We couldn't make that clear connection between us being highly effective in this space and that's actually improving student achievement over there.
You know, one thing that I was thinking about that all educators kind of run into sometimes is the desire to roll out your greatest hits. You know, just to oh, this lesson always plays really well. I'm going to stick with this. And if this one works, I'll do this again in the next unit, and I'll just kind of stick with that format.
When you're talking about rolling out a professional development plan for your district, I'm thinking about teachers, as they see this, how does it challenge them to do something similar in their classrooms, where they think about the things that they do really well, but how can they go to that next level to reach the needs of the students, to reach their learning styles? How can they take these things that they're seeing in their own professional learning and translate that into student learning?
And we're doing better at that.
Because that's hard to--
It's hard.
I mean, just because you've experienced as a teacher doesn't mean you can necessarily immediately translate that into-- I shouldn't say as the teacher-- as the learner in a professional learning situation to now changing your practice.
Absolutely. I feel like we've been able to develop a lot of kind of models and examples within digital teaching and learning. And I don't know if it's because that's the space in which I came up to the district and I feel more comfortable. I'm not sure. We could reflect on that a little more.
But within that, I feel like there was a natural space for us to be more transparent. So yes, we had core objectives for our professional learning, but within that, kind of lift off the hood and say, we're employing these strategies. And these are the decisions we've made leading into that, which you could then take back to your classroom as well.
So we try to err on the side of transparency, not just with the objectives in the moment in those experiences but also to the kind of the undergirds of the entire program and the decisions that have gone into that. And it's felt pretty natural in the digital teaching and learning space, but I'm not sure we're doing that great a job with that particular aspect of our curriculum training yet. We're certainly trying to refine and revamp just our general instructional professional learning opportunities and curriculum professional learning opportunities. But certainly within these programs, with our Google programs, our educational technology endorsement program, we're acknowledging those moments.
And you're modeling that.
Yeah, we're attempting to, yes.
It takes time, but that's a great model for them to see.
So you've been talking about your pathway to the Google certification program as well as your ed tech endorsement program. How important are the certifications to the professional learning in your district? The getting those badges or getting the ed tech endorsement, what part do you think that plays?
It depends on the learner. Generally speaking, though, they're very important for both the learner and the program and the district. So at the high level, the district in Ogden, over the years, we have gone through a lot of school turnaround. We're a heavily impacted district, and we have gone to great lengths with partners with the University of Virginia and others to do a lot of significant work.
Part of being who we are, we feel like we're constantly battling perceptions that aren't rooted in reality. You know, when we hear voices talking about things that may or may not be happening in Ogden, that's not what I was experiencing as a classroom teacher, as an instructional coach, as a district specialist, and now as a director. I knew we were having exceptional things happening in our district. I knew we had innovative teachers, highly dedicated, worked as hard as anyone in this state, but perceptions existed.
So at the district level, what do those badges mean? It's a nice promotion piece, right? It's kind of a tangible piece that we certainly can talk about that, to be fair, the media is interested in. They will run articles on how you've got x number of Google-certified trainers. I'm not sure they really know what that means. That's our job to make sure it carries value.
It's like a high school diploma. We never have wanted to inflate numbers. You want to make sure a student, if they earn a high school diploma, it carries that value that they're prepared for the next level and the same thing with our certification program. The thing we've liked is kind of the demands that Google places for those certifications. We felt like that was a nice fit. It actually improved practices, we feel like as a marketing piece.
And it helps us internally perpetuate and gain momentum within our program. So we promote it, and people start putting their badges in their signature lines. And then their peers start seeing those badges emerge, and maybe they just-- it starts off with a question like, what does that mean?
And those who tend to participate in this program are really passionate and excited. And so when they speak about those elements, again, it just generates that natural momentum, and we start seeing that spike out.
And next thing you know, you're a reference district, and you have Google coming. And again, that was a nice piece that our professional relations office can, you know, hey, did you know Google just visited because of the work we're doing? And then maybe the media is a little more interested in looking at the programs we're offering. And maybe then they're more interested in talking about, hey, tell us what's happening in your schools.
And that's where I want to get the focus, because it's not about the badge. It's about what's happening to change things in the classroom. And if it takes me promoting the badge to have that conversation to get there, that's fine. So that's at the district level.
There's just a pride of when we think about the learners at the teacher level. There is a pride in being able to display that badge. There's a pride from our administrators, as they walk in our hall in our Professional Development Center. We now have a map up on one of our bulletin boards, and it shows all of our schools in Ogden mapped out, and next to it, is the number of certifications they have within that building.
And so then there's that kind of natural competitiveness. We try to keep it healthy, but always bringing it back to the conversation. So we know, as a good example, Ogden High, they have done some extraordinary things in digital teaching and learning over the last several years, as you would expect. That's reflected in the total number of certifications they have in their building. I think they're tied for the most in our district.
Bringing it back to what's happening, we have clear examples, an exceptional one is in our science department there. What they're doing with portfolio work with Google Sites, how they're engaging their students in online spaces, how they're blending their instruction is second to none.
You know, did they need a badge to do that? No. Did they learn a lot throughout the process leading up to that badge? Did we fulfill their needs as learners through all that work we did in the testing assumptions and designing a program? We believe so. They have a lot of endorsements. They have a lot of certifications, and that is clearly translating into improved action.
So that's why it's important to me. It's not the badge itself. It's what the badge represents. For a lot of people, it's pride. For us, it means good work is happening, and we're making positive change in our classrooms.
Absolutely, and even if it's a silly reason that gets a teacher involved, like, oh, I want that badge too. Because I have to say, your trainers took me through a small exercise, and I don't even have the badge yet, but I got a little check mark. And just getting the check mark before the person sitting next to me, that was some healthy competition that got me going, instead of just sitting in the meeting, twiddling my thumbs. So I think if it is something silly that gets people engaged or gets the media interested in what it is that Ogden District or any district is doing great with kids, that's great. Bring it on.
Yeah, and it I'm always looking for an opportunity. I find that the badging and the certifications provide this. Let's talk about what's happening in our schools. I mean, that, to me, is a direct-- that's what I want to get done to, right? And then that helps us make connections to how can you help us improve what's happening in our schools too? And we want to have that conversation.
Also, it's amazing how much it means to teachers to earn that. And we're looking forward to the badging opportunities that are starting to happen at the state level as they look at through our professional learning through Midas and to be able to have micro credentialing.
We had kind of been exploring that, especially through the Pathways program. We want to do that locally. We were going to call it Professional Learning Pathways, kind of modeled after our Certified Educator Pathways, where we were going to bring together series of trainings to make sure we had those clear connections for our teachers and ultimately, be able to say, if you completed x number of trainings within this pathway, we can kind of guarantee you would be a much better teacher for it.
And we were trying to negotiate with HR. We're, like, what would that mean? Could they get a stipend? Could they get a-- if they have certain number of credits along the way. But now that USBE and through the support of Davis, we're tackling badging. We're excited at that opportunity and what that's going to present, I believe, when they launch it live in January. So we're certainly going to try to take advantage of that in all areas.
You know, I think it's an interesting conversation, because when we first start talking about somebody sees on an email signature a badge or something like that. And they say in the past, it was really hard for us to quantify, like what is a good teacher? What are some of the steps they take?
And yes, there's all kinds of the art of teaching steps that they take. But there's also that science of teaching, which says if you go through certain programs, the end result will be that you'll learn some skills and some techniques that will improve your teaching. And you're helping to really articulate that in your own district to say, hey, we can't promise that everything's going to go great, but we know that if you go through these certain steps, you'll be better tomorrow than you were today.
Absolutely, and it can't hurt them to broaden their repertoire of skills and knowledge that they can bring to the classroom. Knowing that, too, especially within the ed tech endorsement program but also within the Certified Educator Pathway program, we embed leadership training. Because we know, with our district size, and I can't speak for all districts, we have a very small team.
And I know even though I have these high-quality specialists, we can't effectively get to every site often enough to say we are the only support you need, right? We need leaders. Whether they choose to take a step up to be an instructional coach or be a principal and administrator, regardless of that, recognize themselves as leaders as classroom teachers. Take the learning they've had back to their buildings, make better decisions, better founded decisions, be able to pull in a broader set of skills that they can apply given the situation and then share that with and among their teams. So we try to embed that too, knowing that our limited capacity, the size of our team to reach all that scale.
That's so smart.
Well, Adam that's all the time we have for today's episode. We really appreciate you coming in with us today.
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.
I know we could go on for probably another two or three hours.
Yeah, I have so many more questions, but maybe another episode.
That's right, we'll personalize this and maybe have another episode some day.
Nice.
Well, we appreciate Adam McMickell for joining us in UEN "Homeroom" today.
Thank you.
So Dani, do you want to give our audience a tech tip today.
I mean, do we have to?
Well, I mean, this is a podcast kind of about technology.
I'm tired. Do you have a tech tip for today?
I mean, I guess if I have to, I can come up with one.
I mean--
So we've invited Adam in for a little bit of overtime today, and he's going to share with us our Lazy Teacher Tech Tip.
Lazy teachers don't have time to waste, I suppose.
They're busy.
They are busy.
And they're kind of lazy.
So within the Google world, one thing to note, previously, before they made an update, you would update something in Google Slides and Sheets and Docs. And then maybe if you had a data piece out of Sheets, you would copy and paste it over. And then you would have to worry about, well, if I updated in my original sheet, maybe I'd have to go update it in all those other spaces where I've copied and pasted.
That's not the case anymore. So if you haven't seen it, if you create a table in Sheets and you copy your data over and you paste it into Docs or Slides, it gives you the option to link it and connect it to the Sheet. Which means, as a lazy teacher, I can focus all my attention on updating that one sheet, and it will automatically update all of those other spaces where I've copied that data.
I didn't know that that's what that meant. So when it says, "do you want to link this?" You say, yes.
Say yes.
And then it updates it for you.
Yes. So yeah, in most cases, always say Yes.
So as a person that was so lazy, I didn't even click Yes, I was actually causing myself way more work.
Way more work.
I don't know what this means, so I'm going to say No.
Always say yes.
Always say yes.
There's our tech tip for the day. Always say yes. [LAUGHS]
Thank you, Adam.
You're welcome.
All right, so that was awesome chatting with Adam. I think that there are a lot of school districts who probably are right where Adam's district were. That they're doing really great trainings, but they want to take it to the next level, but they don't necessarily know what that looks like or where to go.
I'm just thinking even for myself, right? Like what am I just being kind of complacent in and saying this is good enough? Where can I take the things that I'm doing and try and look a little deeper at what my students need and how can I provide that for them?
Absolutely. I think this was a really cool in-depth look of what it is Ogden School District is doing and how they got there.
I don't know that I've ever said this before, but I want to live in Ogden.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, I might move.
Let's do it.
Just so that I can be part of the Ogden City School District.
Let's go.
OK, well, it sounds like we're going to go pack up our cars and head out.
Yeah, we're busy. So it sounds like I hear the bell ringing, so we've go to go guys.
Thanks for joining us in the "Homeroom." See you next time.
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