Year Summary 2000
July 18, 2000

The purpose of this memo is three-fold: to summarize what we’ve achieved in our first year of operations, to re-state the objectives we’ve agreed upon for year two and to raise some new issues that we should consider over the next several months.

COATT Year One: What We’ve Accomplished

We set an ambitious goal for ourselves for the first year of operations as a Consortium that we failed to meet. We had hoped to see a significant number of pre-service teachers earn COATT recognition. Instead, only a small handful of students earned the M-COATT. This result has led us to some serious re-thinking of what sort of incentives are needed to drive this process and will lead to some changes in our second year of operation which are described in the section below. While falling short of that goal, there are a number of significant things we did accomplish in year one:

1. We created a process for reviewing and evaluating digital portfolios for the purposes of granting the M-COATT, although the scale of the evaluation process has still not given us as much experience as we’d like to have.
2. We developed an approach for an in-service component of COATT for implementation in the 2000-2001 academic year.
3. We have created an on-going dialogue between the key institutions and organizations in the K-12 and higher ed communities about the role that standards can play in improving the use of technology in our schools.

This last accomplishment may be our most significant in that I get the impression that the kind of dialogue we have at our monthly COATT meetings is not being replicated regularly in the state.

COATT in Year Two

The list of tasks we’ve given ourselves for year two indicate we haven’t lost any ambition.

1. We’ve suggested that each member institution to develop an undergraduate and/or graduate level course that students can take to prepare their digital portfolios.
2. We’ve decided to create a COATT job placement network that will link M-COATT recipients with school districts and school administrators with an interest in hiring teachers with strong technology integration skills.
3. We intend to use the insight we’ve gained from year one to do a better job of promoting COATT on each member campus.
4. We have asked our member academic institutions and K-12 organizations to recruit practicing educators to participate in our in-service pilot in the coming school year.
5. We’ve committed ourselves to a series of portfolio review sessions, at least one each in the fall and winter terms for the in-service pilot and two and perhaps three for the pre-service component.

Some New Questions for COATT

There are several new issues I hope we can take up in the months ahead. One is a structural issues that I’d like to see addressed over the next three months, the others are important but not quite as time sensitive.

Many people have offered leadership to COATT over the last year (and during our gestation period as well) although we have no formal leadership structure. I think we would benefit in the year ahead by having elected leaders with particular areas of responsibility. I’m proposing that we create a five person leadership group composed of:

• Two co-chairs, one for pre-service, one for in-service;
• Two-vice chairs who would serve as chairs in the following year;
• A treasurer (a sure sign that we think there should be a bank account in COATT’s future.)

I’m not wedded to this particular leadership structure, but I throw it out for discussion purposes in hopes we will develop a proposal on this issue at our July meeting. That proposal, in turn, could be discussed and decided at our August meeting. Our September meeting could be used to elect whatever group of officers we decide to create.

The election of officers is an important step toward making COATT a viable organization. Another is to develop a fundraising strategy that can make the organization self-sufficient. In order to accomplish that goal, I think we need to give clear definition to what has become our de facto mission, i.e. COATT is an organization that articulates and promotes high standards for the use of technology to enhance student learning in order to raise the level of teacher preparation and professional development in Michigan. Our discussion of the in-service pilot of the last year helped us see that COATT’s greatest impact might be in giving definition to the diverse professional development efforts underway in the state by providing clear goals their participants can attain. As we gain more experience with the in-service pilot this year, I hope we will examine the question of developing a second certificate for practicing educators that might be based on the Seventh Standard or some analogous standard that defines significant achievement in mastering the skills relevant to teaching with technology. The thousands of teachers who are trying to improve their skills, but who are not yet at the COATT level, need clear goals and deserve recognition for attaining them. While this task is a step beyond the original mission we took on in COATT, I think the development and promotion of a standard that speaks to the needs of this greater number of educators would be a logical and important contribution for us to make.

I hope we can use our July meeting to begin the discussion of some of the ideas mentioned above and to make sure we are making progress on the strategies we’ve already agreed upon to move COATT forward in year two.