professional development

Iteration

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?

How To Plan Better Professional Development

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So… after yesterday’s post, several folks asked me to talk about how to make PD better.

There are as many ways to make professional development better as there are ways to make our teaching better… what follows are just a few. The overarching thing to remember is this – we have to be one school. The same set of values that we look for in our classrooms should be what we value in our professional development. With that:

Root professional development in the work teachers do. Asking teachers to do exercises that are not based in the work of the day is inauthentic. For example, if your school wants to do a deep dive into reading across the curriculum, ask teachers to bring their current unit plans and work together to ensure that all readings that students are assigned have reading comprehension activities attached to them. Have teachers work together to study a text like Subjects Matter and apply lessons learned, and then come back together for reflection after the work has been implemented.
Don’t come in with answers – come in with questions. Inquiry-based professional development, where teachers are working to collaborative to solve challenges the school faces is incredibly powerful. We’ve looked at issues of culture, of student performance, of cultural competence as a faculty, where we asked ourselves hard questions and then looked to solve them. You don’t solve hard questions in a single meeting, of course, but a committee of teachers can come up with a powerful lens or frame on a problem, ask challenging questions, and then take the outcomes of the conversation back into committee to then craft next steps. When real problems are taken up by the whole faculty, solutions can come from unexpected places, and often the wisdom of the room will end up solving the problem in ways that a single voice ever could have.
Don’t plan professional development yourself. We have a committee structure at SLA that is fully teacher-led. Committee chairs come together to set broad professional development agendas for the semester, and then the different committees plan professional development in consultation with administration. Everyone has a stake in planning useful PD, because we all sit through each other’s sessions. When we all feel responsible for each other’s learning, people spend the time to make it meaningful.
Prioritize – I’ve seen too many schools and districts that treat every single PD session as an opportunity to present a new idea, as if one two-hour PD session is ever enough to fully learn an educational idea enough to then be amazing at it in the classroom. School faculty should figure out what are the primary goals of the school that year, and then seek to weave those goals through all professional development for the year (or two.) When everything is a priority, nothing is, but when we set a few big goals and then ensure that the overwhelming majority of the professional learning is in service of those goals, amazing things can happen.
Follow-up. If PD happens in a meeting, and then the work isn’t prioritized by administration, it’s a waste of time. If we want teachers to believe in collaborative professional development, then time must be set-aside for implementation and reflection. Otherwise, we’ve created yet another “one-off” professional development session that is easily ignored by those who choose to, and worse, disempowering to those who actually want to see the topic / idea implemented powerfully.

These are a few ideas and values to get you started — there are many more that I encourage people to share in the comments. Simply, in all we do, be thoughtful, collaborative, and empowering when structuring professional learning. When we do that, we can create those values in every classroom – for every student – in our schools.

Professional Development and Collective Wisdom

An old story… a young teacher comes to his first staff meeting where he sees an veteran teacher already sitting down. He sits down next to an older teacher who says to him, “You know… when I die… I hope it’s in a faculty meeting.”

The young teacher says, “Why?”

To which the older teacher replies, “So when I cross over, I won’t know the difference.”

Most educators have been through some terrible staff meetings and professional development sessions where people took turns reading to them, talking at them and maybe giving people the odd moment or two to discuss with the person next to them. And most of the time, educators are forced to sit through meetings and professional development that, pedagogically, would get them written up if they taught that way in their classes.

That’s got to stop.

There’s a simple question we should ask when we bring teachers together:

“Does the structure of this meeting / PD / whatever leverage the collective wisdom of the room?”

And if it doesn’t, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions:

Do we need to be together for this or could this information be disseminated in other ways?
Are we missing the chance for people to learn together and solve the problems as a community?
Who does this meeting really serve?
What are the meta-lessons that the participants are learning about what teaching methods are valued by this meeting?

If we want active classrooms, we have to have active PD.

If we want teachers to create collaborative classrooms, we have to create a collaborative culture in our adult learning and problem solving.

If we want teachers to value the ideas and experiences of our students, then we must value the ideas and experiences of our teachers when they come together to learn.

And if we want our schools to find innovative, powerful solutions to the problems we face, we must all learn to seek out the collective wisdom of the room.

Practical Theory

professional development

Iteration

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How To Plan Better Professional Development

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Professional Development and Collective Wisdom

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Practical Theory

professional development

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