Building and Supporting a Diverse Technology Team - S2E12

In our previous episode, we discussed the changes taking place within school districts in response to, and also to embrace, trends regarding remote and hybrid work environments. Today, we’re continuing to speak about the ways in which technology departments are evolving their goals, aligning staffing objectives to those overall goals, and developing new approaches to build modern teams. Specifically, we’re discussing the process of building and supporting diverse technology teams.

Our expert guests give their perspectives on the ways in which districts benefit from diverse technology teams, some of the recruitment blind spots they’ve uncovered and addressed, how competition from other industries has influenced and improved hiring and retention efforts, how they’ve evolved the way candidates’ experience is evaluated, and more.

Today’s guests are technology leaders from large school districts around the country: Kara Thorstenson, Director of Libraries and Instructional Technology for Chicago Public Schools; Lori Jones, Assistant Superintendent for Technology Services in the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas; and Lisa Spencer, Director of Instructional Technology & Support for Prince George's County Public Schools in Maryland. They chat about the elements of building and supporting a diverse technology team – the why and the how.

This is the second of three episodes aligned to CoSN’s Large District Great Minds Series, in which leaders from large school districts across the country are engaging in meaningful peer conversations, and working alongside CoSN to incubate and drive innovative practices designed to solve districts’ unique challenges as we move into the new era of hybrid learning.

The Large Districts Great Minds Series is sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Classlink, Clever, ContentKeeper Technologies, ENA and CatchOn, FileWave, and Google.

Engage further in the discussion on Twitter. Follow: @MsTLHLMC @NISDLori @laspaseo @CoSN @EdCircuit

The CoSN Podcast is produced in partnership with EdCircuit. To learn more about CoSN, visit www.cosn.org.