Abstract: 

Revitalization of the Certificate in Learning and Assessment to Support Local Educators and Engage Community Partners 

Educators were forced into emergency remote teaching due to COVID-19. Educational grants through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund provided assistance. A regional university partnered with a local educational service center to use GEER funds to prioritize P-12 teacher professional development in online instruction. The partnership revamped a 12-credit hour four-course graduate certificate program in online learning and assessment, co-taught by university faculty and K-12 community partners, enrolling 58 local educators across 42 school districts in free graduate courses during the 2020-2021 academic year. With a 95% completion rate, this long-term professional development met educators’ needs, including how to simultaneously teach face-to-face and at-home students in changing school environments. This descriptive study gathered educator perceptions regarding how the courses impacted their ability to learn and use best practices in technology integration with their students, and support colleagues as they created district-specific professional development and developed into technology leaders. Based on the findings obtained, recommendations can be given to explicitly implement elements of distributed leadership into P-12 and postsecondary education and acquire new perspectives. Although teacher education programs and online instruction may generally be prone to emphasizing technological proficiency, cultivating leadership skills through the use of distributed approaches to leadership may be an important future direction for research and practice, or for responding to unexpected changes or crises. 

Biographies: 

Dr. Frazier is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at Indiana University East. Since earning her terminal degree, she has taught several courses including undergraduate and graduate courses in general, social studies, and reading methods, children’s literature, literacy in the content areas, and reading interventions. Her research interests include teacher perceptions of technology integration, professional development, coding within the context of literacy acquisition and computational thinking, and elementary literacy in the realm of schools and community. 

Dr. Tolbert is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Indiana University East, having served since 2015. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses covering special education methods, assessment, education in a social context, and the characteristics of specific learning disabilities. Notable service activities have included providing LGBTQ+ programs at IU East, serving as Treasurer of the Indiana chapter of the Learning Disabilities Association, and contributing to the Advanced Standards Workgroup of the Council for Exceptional Children. His prior research focused primarily on Spanish vocabulary acquisition strategies for students with specific learning disabilities and on examining the multicultural perspectives of pre-service teachers. More recent research projects have been directly related to COVID-19, including efforts to better understand educator burnout and to directly document the experiences of special education teachers in the context of the pandemic.