Arkansas Teacher Corps was awarded the annual Outstanding Team Award for 2021 by the University of Arkansas Staff Senate. This honor celebrates ATC’s successful transition to a new virtual coaching platform in response to the COVID-19 pandemic while increasing the amount of feedback per fellow and fellows’ overall satisfaction with coaching.
The Outstanding Team Award recognizes outstanding staff members who work together as a team on the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville campus. The award serves to applaud new or innovative staff accomplishments that have a positive impact on the U of A or the larger community, as well to encourage and promote excellence in the workplace.
In naming ATC as the 2021 Outstanding Team, the Staff Senate highlighted ATC’s use of the new coaching platform:
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced K-12 schools to move instruction online, the Arkansas Teacher Corps was confronted with the challenge of supporting about 50 teaching fellows in the pivot to a virtual environment. It was essential for ATC to quickly find and implement an online alternative to in-person coaching to maintain their standards of excellence. The team was able to secure a grant from the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, which initiated a pilot run of a virtual coaching platform with Edthena in spring of 2021. ATC fully implemented Edthena for Fall 2021, resulting in a 650% average increase in feedback per fellow. Also, since the team’s transition to Edthena, fellows report 100% satisfaction with the quality and frequency of the coaching they receive.
In a previous blog post, the ATC team shared that “by creating a comprehensive system for virtual coaching in 2021, our team has increased the overall participation of teachers in the coaching process and increased teacher satisfaction with coaching specifically. This has also led to decreased teacher burnout, increased teacher retention, and increased teacher growth compared to the year before.”
The Edthena Success Team has also taken notice of the dramatically higher participation rates and have been actively recognizing the team’s work.