A recent article in EdWeek highlighted the frustration that many educators feel in professional learning. The article outlined some of the major issues:

“Professional development doesn’t actually treat them like professionals. Mandatory seminars often have no relevance to their particular subject area or cover skills that they mastered years ago. Facilitators from outside groups introduce new instructional practices and don’t inquire about, or even acknowledge, teachers’ current strategies. “That feels like a slap in the face,” said Brittany Franckowiak, a biology teacher at Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Md.”

As we get ready to discuss Part 3: Share Your Learning in Learner-Centered Innovation for the Book Study this week I am thinking a lot about the importance of validating and elevating the great work that happens in our classrooms every day as a first step to growing and improving across all our classrooms.  If we want to shift practices in classrooms we must create a culture that empowers teachers, values their opinions and recognizes their professional learning preferences and needs.

Here are 3 practices that you can build into any professional development day or meeting to honor the expertise of educators and help them actually learn and improve.

1. Provide Time and Resources for Teachers Solve the Problems They are Facing in their Classrooms

When learners are empowered to work through issues that matter to them rather than just going through the motions, the time and energy spent isn’t a chore; it’s productive because it improves both job performance and satisfaction.An inquiry-based approach to learning and improvement, commonly known as improvement science, aims to engage learners in rapid cycles of Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) to learn fast through action, fail fast, and improve quickly. This approach acknowledges that failure is part of the process and that failure itself is not the problem; failing to learn from the process is where we can go wrong. Amy Var, a middle-school teacher, engaged in an improvement science project to figure out how to enhance her peer-editing process by teaching students to give more thoughtful feedback. As Amy learned to use new tools and saw it working with her students, she let go of the control of editing and became more willing to allow her students to lead. The evidence she collected included student work, student feedback, and her own observations. She embraced the role of the learner and shared her thoughts on her blog on the process:

More than anything, I’m looking forward to our next steps. I feel like I started by dipping my toe into the pool, and now I’m ready to dive headfirst into the waters of change and see where the tides continue to take me. It’s such a good feeling, after eighteen years of teaching, to be this excited again!”

I want to underscore her reflection. With so much focus on how to motivate and incentivize learners, Amy’s personal learning experience illustrates that when what we are learning is directly tied to our own goals and is meaningful in our daily work, learning can be its own reward and can push us to want to know more.

2. Create Critical Friends Groups to Look at Student Work and Determine Next Steps

Presenting challenges, providing feedback, and creating actionable next steps are all valuable exercises that help improve learning experiences. Teachers can benefit from presenting a lesson idea or project on which they are just beginning to hear feedback. Midway through a project, you can seek feedback to help improve and determine next steps. In my experience, one of the best ways to understand and provide feedback to improve teaching and learning is to look at student work samples from your own projects. When educators look collectively at student work to determine strengths and implications for designing learning experiences, we can learn a great deal about our impact on desired learning outcomes, validate our own practice, and discover ways to improve with our colleagues. Using protocols to structure conversations and provide meaningful feedback can elevate the discussion and push us to provide critical feedback in a way that is specific, kind, and helpful. To achieve our goals, our English department had to shift our meeting structures from what we wanted and what we were teaching to looking at student work to find out what they were learning. We learned about new strategies, came together after school to engage in collaborative conversation that allowed teachers to experience the new strategies in their own reading and learning and then plan for how to support students in their diverse classes. The team made the commitment to try out the new strategies, they picked a time for me (as the literacy coach) to come to observe and discuss what we were learning and we all shared what was working and challenges each week. We shifted our conversations from what content and page number we were teaching that week to what we were learning and how we could impact student outcomes. The biggest shift was when we committed to bring evidence of student work connected to our desired outcomes and move beyond the spreadsheets of numbers to actually understand what was happening in our classrooms, dig deep into our problems of practice, engage in dilemma protocols. We began to interrogate our own practices to ensure we were truly meeting the needs of the learners. Innovation is not about creating something new, but doing something that leads to better outcomes because of what we have created. We asked questions like, How do we know that our idea is working? What is the impact on desired student outcomes? Does your team know what it is that you hope to accomplish? When we focus our efforts on what we want to accomplish, not simply the metrics or data from an isolated test or standards, but the type of student that we want to create, we might find that our meetings become more meaningful and impactful. Test scores might be easy to track, measure and rank (teachers and students) but it’s important to understand the extent to which they serve your purpose.  I’m not saying they don’t have a place but they aren’t the only goal that we should be focusing on.

3. Design Structures to Open Classroom Doors and Observe Each Other

Knowing how critical it is to see others teach and reflect on the implications for our own practice, I have continued to embed these opportunities in professional learning as I work with administrators and teachers. As far as professional development goes, despite popular belief, it is an inexpensive way in terms of both time and money and the impact on teachers is powerful. Once the teachers get the opportunity to see their peers teaching they often share the following key insights:

• Observations help ground the conversation about teaching and learning and allow for a much richer dialogue
• Observations prompt reflection about their own practice -both validating what they do and stretching their thinking
• Teachers want to their peers to experience the process- if you think about it, this shows a level of comfort with the process that they trust others to observe them knowing it will be about improving practice not judging them.
• In this new era of teaching and learning, especially with technology, teachers must see their colleagues teach to understand the possibilities in their own classroom.

Teachers have been far too isolated and the teaching profession is plagued by a culture of closed doors.  When given the opportunity (and sometimes a gentle nudge), teachers appreciate observing peers and reflecting on their own practice and almost always want to do it more. There is value in observing peers to develop a shared understanding of what learning and teaching looks like in your own context and to determine next steps. In addition, visiting and connecting with other schools is extremely important.  When teachers have access to other teachers in different contexts, they see new approaches and possibilities that exist beyond their own classroom and school.

Onward

These three practices often validate many things that teachers are doing, help them see new strategies and practices and can inspire new and better ideas. Remember that empowered teachers empower their students. Creating diverse opportunities for professional learning is more important than ever as many schools strive to move away from standardization to more personalized environments for all learners.  Ensuring that teachers have opportunities to develop a shared vision, engage as learners, have access to resources and materials, get to observe models of the desired teaching and learning and collaborate with peers in more authentic and personal ways are critical to shifting to more authentic, learner-centered classrooms. In the end, though, I hope you don’t just take my word for it.  I keep asking teachers what they need to meet the needs of the learners in their classroom and I hope you will too.