I was talking with one of our veteran teachers this week… we were talking about our pre-school PD. I’m always a little nervous about how we plan for professional development at SLA. We have a veteran staff — the average SLA teacher has been at the school for nearly ten years at this point — and figuring out how to help masterful, veteran teachers keep getting better at their craft is tough. I want teachers to feel like we’re asking them to do work that matters when they come to staff meetings, and that we can get better and grow together as a staff.
In the conversation we talked about the humility necessary to keep working on our craft and how important it is to ground yourself, year over year, in the core tenets and pedagogy of the school. That’s not to say that we don’t incorporate new ideas, new learnings, new thoughts, but at our root, we recognize that iteration matters… we get better at the things we continuously work on.
So every year, we ground ourselves back into the SLA model of inquiry-driven, project-based teaching, taking apart what we do brick by brick for the purpose of getting better at it. We work to ask ourselves hard questions about how we plan, how we teach, so that we can get past surface-level understanding of the model into the places where it gets hard and into the places where we can learn. It’s exciting to watch folks who have been at SLA for ten, fifteen, nineteen years alongside teachers who have been with us for three or four years unpacking practice and sharing ideas across disciplines toward a common language and model of teaching.
And I think that iteration – the understanding that there is a theory of action and pedagogy that powers what we do – is a big reason why the average SLA educator has been at the school for almost ten years at this point. It’s a little bit wild to reflect on the idea that the average SLA educator has been at SLA for over half of the school’s existence. It’s given us the ability to get better together, and to, over time, build tools and systems and processes that (hopefully) make it easier for the next generation of educators to join us and teach and learn with us.
And because planning for iteration isn’t always easy, here’s the framework for that first workshop we did together this year. The planning was done as a collaboration between our AP, our Academic Standards Committee chair (teacher), and me. We write in shorthand a lot because of our shared language, so I’ve tried to add some more language for folks who may not know the SLA model. This was about an hour long conversation, and it framed the four days we had together before school started.
- Kick-off:
- Frame the necessity of going through this process – this work of building our practice around our inquiry-driven, project-based beliefs, and continuing to get better at them together. Why is it so important that we continue to grow together as a faculty? How do we talk honestly about the difference between when we are engaging in the deep work of the model vs. the surface-level work?
- Brainstorming:
- Begin with groups brainstorming an assigned core value (Inquiry, Research, Collaboration, Presentation, Reflection): What is it? Why does it matter? How is it seen in my classrooms? When have I experienced success with this value, and when have I struggled with it? What does it look like to do this core value well, and what does it look like to “phone it in?” (surface-level engagement)? Who else on staff you observed engage well with this core value?
- First write personal reflections in Padlet, and then discuss in your groups.
- Share out:
- for each value, have someone in the group summarize the conversation. During share out – open to the room at the end for others to share what they heard from the group.
- Deeper Reading – Give time for everyone to read the entire Padlet.
- Individual Reflection + Practice: reflect on best practices of core values shared out, and challenge yourself to implement one change/tweak to some aspect of one of your courses.
- To wit: How can I emphasize one of these practices within a particular value within my planning and practice?
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