ISTE Standards: Learner Standard

The ISTE Standards for Educators are essential for helping students become empowered learners.  It has been deemed that these standards help educators to deepen their practice, promote collaboration with peers, and challenge educators to rethink traditional approaches and prepare students to drive their own learning.  Schools and districts should aim to adopt these standards as they reflect a vision and commitment to improving learning and the student experience by effectively leveraging technology.  Using these standards in teacher preparation across curriculum can help improve classroom technology implementation and allow for growing successful educators.  

The ISTE Standards for Educators are as follows:

1. Learner
2. Leader
3. Citizen
4.  Collaborator
5.  Designer
6. Facilitator
7. Analyst

Each of these standards provide valuable indicators for educators; however, I am going to discuss the Learner Standard, as I feel that we never stop learning; even as educators, we are always learning from our peers, students, and everyone around us, at all times.

Foremost, The Learner Standard states that “Educators continually improve their practice by learning from and with others and exploring proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning.” Moreover, this standard indicates that educators:

*Set professional learning goals to explore and apply pedagogical approaches made possible by technology and reflect on their effectiveness.

When educators explore, and apply, then they can learn about, test, and add into regular practice a variety of proven, promising and emerging learning strategies with technology.  At the Drew TEACH Digital Literacies Conference, Renee Hobbs gave a piece of valuable advice, “Tinker. Fail. Explore. Repeat. This is how we learn to use digital tools.” This statement will empower teachers to want to further explore technology knowing that the only way we will learn is if we try and fail a few times before we succeed.

Moreover, the ISTE Standard indicates that these pedagogical approaches are shifts in teaching and learning afforded by digital tools and resources.  For example, increased personalization and differentiation; virtual collaboration, either in real time or asynchronously; project-based learning; STEAM; authentic projects with expert or real world data; providing immediate feedback using digital tools; competency-based assessments and new digital analysis tools.

*Pursue professional interests by creating and actively participating in local and global learning networks.

Educators need to create as well as actively participate in all sorts of networks where they have access to recourses and communication with fellow educators.  This is how they will learn several strategies.  For example, starting social media chats or groups, blogs that encourage discussion; virtual webinars; meet-ups; edcamps or unconferences; collaborative asynchronous writing or working teams.

As a preservice teacher, I already connected with several educators through the Drew TEACH conference whom I now follow on Twitter.  I have several notes on suggestions made at the Tech Talk, which already gives me a whole list of tools to use in my classroom.  I feel that this is a proactive step to becoming an extremely successful educator.

*Stay current with research that supports improved student learning outcomes, including findings from the learning sciences.

Furthermore, educators must stay current through practices like setting search engine email alerts for specific topics, following thought leaders or key organizations on social media or RSS feeds, attending presentations or webinars and subscribing to edtech research journals or other media sources.

As all educators are aware, lesson plans revolve around student learning outcomes, which is the knowledge, skills and dispositions a learner should have at the end of an assignment or learning unit.  Therefore, we must stay current on any research that supports these, including findings from learning sciences (Interdisciplinary field bringing together findings – from research into cognitive, social and cultural psychology; neuroscience and learning environments, among others – with the goal of implementing learning innovations and improving instructional practice.)

Check it Out! - Teaching with the ISTE Standards