Victor Boulanger

Since the adoption of a one-to-one environment in 2012, large investments were made into developing state of the art technology at Kaohsiung American School. These culminated in a complete integration of technology into the new campus inaugurated in May of 2015. The missing component was an equally strong system to enable our community to thrive by using this environment and infrastructure to redefine the professional development experience at KAS. Thus the first Learning Technology Coach position was created at our school in August of 2015. Lead, Collaborate, Share An in-depth discussion with Diana Beabout during her fortuitous visit at KAS in September allowed us to become conscious of the leadership potential in our existing Tech Ambassadors program . Innovators and early adopters establish the momentum that will effect transformation ( What Are Innovators Like? Everett M. Rogers 1962 p.55). Tech Ambassadors are KAS lighthouses whose leadership skills need to be recognized a

For this part of the course, Tom and I initiated a thorough review of the main axis of our  strategy to support and empower the learning leaders at Kaohsiung American School: the existing KAS Tech Ambassadors program. The resulting analysis spans over 6 pages which we agreed would not be suitably reproduced in this forum. You can click on the following link to review the full content of KAS Tech Ambassadors . As for the content of this forum post, I will share an excerpt of my personal reflection: Diana Beabout’s words during her visit at Kaohsiung American School still echo loudly in my office: “The Tech Ambassadors are lighthouses, beacons for other teachers. (from  What Are Innovators Like? Everett M. Rogers 1962 p.55). It is clear that their lights shine, reflect, and inspire others. Following the success of a session held by the Tech Ambassadors, one of our ELL teachers hosted an Authors’ Tea this week. In a meticulously time-controlled environment, ELL students shared t

I organized my post-observation meeting around a short list of open-ended questions taken from the Cognitive Coaching method (I found the first couple of questions in the Coaching Initiative Packet shared by the Minnesota Low Incidence Projects) which I supplemented with long-range questions stemming from this forum: What were some of the things that you felt went well? What did you find most difficult about teaching this lesson? What are some skills you would like reinforce in your students? What is next for you? What would you like to try? These allowed me to establish a progression similar to the GROW model which Jocelyn described. We were able to start our meeting by recognizing Lulu’s strengths before looking at improvements to be made and future initiatives to be taken. Sharing Lulu felt that the sharing portion of the sandboxing activity went very well. Except for a couple of students, they all learned from each other and demonstrated helpfulness and respect which ar

I will be perfectly honest: my time in Lulu’s classroom was not a victory lap by any means. It was not a complete checkmate either. They were some failures in a sense that I have recently begun to love: First Attempt In Learning. They were also some victories. I consider this first attempt a great learning success . I co-taught a lesson with Lulu to kick start her students presentation on Cultural Fridays. Lulu’s outcomes for this project are to raise her students awareness of other cultures in a fun, entertaining way, and to use technology to help each group work collaboratively. Lesson Planning When we prepared this lesson, Lulu wanted me to start by showing the students how to change their school issued password. She mentioned they had unsuccessfully tried before and this is where I made my first and largest mistake: I was so eager to get to the good stuff, the presentation, that I said yes without asking any question. We set aside 10 min. for this (5 min. to talk about creatin

The first goal I have is to understand what makes a good coach. This may come as an all-too-obvious goal for anyone taking this course, especially considering the wealth of excellent advice already provided in this course to make us better coaches, but I am very keen on connecting this knowledge to my personal experiences of some of the best coaches I have met. In fact, the best teachers I know relate to their students in a way I can only describe as personal coaches . This is particularly visible with middle school teachers. They follow students’ individual actions, distillate meaning from these actions and explore the achievements attained or improvements required by the student. The wisdom they are able to impart by asking simple questions leading to  deep soul-searching answers within a short conversation is never lost on the students who are almost always grateful and eager to return to them and share more. Guidance from a Coach When Jim Knight asks “ how did you figure thi

On September 1st, Tom Hammerlund and I are starting the course "Coaching: From Theory to Practice" taught by Kim Cofino via Eduro Learning . Eduro Learning: Empower, Leverage, Build, Learn We are both very excited about this course for two main reasons: Kim was my wife's instructor when she took her  COETAIL class. We have grown to know and respect Kim as an amazing educator and leader in her field via her initiatives with COETAIL at Yokohama International School , and now at NIST in Bangkok and of course Eduro. Tom and I both work at Kaohsiung American School  where Tom started on August 1st, 2015 as our first Learning Technology Coach, a momentous position which I have patiently waited for ever since I joined KAS as the Director of Learning Technology back in August 2012. You can follow my writings for this course on this website.