PD:
- organic (edcamp)
- rigorous reading
- action research / Cycles of Inquiry (individual, PLC, school, district)
- collaborative curriculum writing
New Teachers:
- How PLCs work and the rationale behind them
- Lessons from Japan - pg 49
- Collaboration and join planning
- "They have in-depth grade-level and subject-level meetings, discuss student and curriculum issues with other teachers, individually and collaboratively prepare lessons for the following day, and make calls to teachers... (in the same room)...communal space for teachers allows them to work collaboratively."
- beginning teachers: 1-6 years
Parent MOOC - district levvel
"What will it take to change?" - pg 8
- Teacher may need as many as 50 hours of practice before mastering a new teaching strategy.
- Teachers' initial exposure to a concept should not be passive.
- Teachers much receive support during implementation - when teachers are coached through the awkward phase of implementation, 95% can transfer the skill.
- Modeling is highly effective
"Numbers of Note"
- 45% of students in US teacher prep programs regularly look for podcasts and online videos to help them prepare for teaching - pg 9
Pause classroom? Wouldn't that be a wonderful feature to have in a classroom where everything is going wrong? ~ lisa Diker and colleagues, pg 54
"Planning Professional Leanring" by Thomas Guskey
- Finis Origine Pedet - The End depends upon the Beginning
- Education does not have a "history of steady improvement build on a continually expanding knowledge base...this lack of strong evidence stems from a general absence of purpose... the research community has failed to offer useful guidelines for "best practices" that would help improve the quality and effectiveness of professional learning activities ... education has lacked purpose, cohesiveness, and direction.
- Activity Trap - this happens when we are lacking a clear notion of the purpose of those activities. Why are we doing this? What do we hope to accomplish?
- Evaluating PD:
- what are participants reactions to the activity?
- what new learning (knowledge and skills) occurred?
- what organizational support and change is needed? occurred?
- how did participants use the new knowledge and/or skills?
- what were the student learning outcomes?
- Planning PD:
- student learning outcomes (considered through multiple sources of evidence)
- new practices to be implemented
- How do we know these particular practices and policies will produce the results we hope to achieve?
- How good or reliable is that evidence?
- Was it gathered in contexts similar to ours?
- Is this the kind of evidence we consider more important?
- Instead of Research says..., ask what research?
- is it refereed - meaning that experts in the field have reviewed the articles and judged them as sufficiently rigorous to yield trustworthy results.
- needed organizational support (change)
- time, funding, instructional materials, necessary technology
- Feedback - regular, specific, and based on measures of student learning
- L@SW, observations
- desired educator knowledge and skills
- What? and Why?
- To do this, what must teachers know how to do? (break it down)
- optimal Professional learning activities
"What you learning...when you see yourself teach" by Jim Knight
- "our biggest finding? Video cameras, when used in a manner that respects the professionalism of teachers, can have a positive effect on teaching and learning....
- Why Video:
- Most conversations include a certain level of Conflict: because the teacher is remembering what she thinks happened from her perspective, and I'm remembering what I think happened from my perspective, and there can be a disconnect between those two remembrances.
- Video provides a more professionally rich conversation
- Video creates a clear picture of reality and goal
- "the difference between our reality and our goal creates a tension that we can only resolve by either achieving the goal or giving up. A compelling goal makes us discontented with our reality; it pulls us forward to a better version of ourselves.
- Video for
- evaluation
- coaching
- team work
- coach themselves
- teaching is such an all-encompassing intellectual task that it's hard to step back and reflect on exactly what's happening in a given moment.
- We are prone to get used to what we see everyday - habituation. over time, our understanding of our class can become less accurate.
- Prone to seek out data that supports our preconceived understandings of reality - confirmation bias
- We really don'at know what it looks like when we teach unless we use video.
- safe
- participation is a choide? when you insist they resist (Timothy Gallwey)
- focus on intrinsic motivation
- establish boundaries
- walk thte talk (video tape yourself)
- go slow to go fast
- Video tape all teachers - random - use this as the basis for their AoF.
- Ted Talk: www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_teachers_need_real_feedback.html
"Rethinking Classroom Observation" Emily Dolci Grimm, Trent Kaufaman, and Dave Doty
- Problems with traditional PD:
- Teachers have little say in what they learn
- Transferring learning from training to the classroom is difficult.
- There are few opportunities to practice and refine strategies
- New approach:
- Teachers engage peers in gathering and analyzing classroom data - data that speak to the unique context of their own classrooms.
- place the observed teachers as learners and primary learner in the observation process.
- identify the focus of the observation
- Develop a question that reflects an area of focus - can't be answered without gathering classroom data
- connect instruction to learning
- all collect classroom data related to the focus
- Scripting
- counting
- Tracking - illustrates patterns,
- Ex: eye contact, SLANT, questions, students talking
- Observation Skills:
- ID focus question
- All data addresses the question
- Protocol: Use protocols; teams that do, find them essential
- Focus meeting
- Lead teachers provides logistical information
- clarifying questions
- Lead teachers provides context for the lesson and shares the focus question
- Clarifying questions
- Lead teacher assigns observation methods to observers
- Clarifying questions
- Debrief Meeting:
- Observers discuss the teaching and learning they observed
- What did you see and hear?
- staying descriptive challenges the land of nice; stay in this space longer than you think necessary to avoid going directly to conclusions; be exact
- What do you conclude from this? wonder about?
- Observed teacher speaks about how the data from the observation relates to the focus question
- How do the data answer my focus question?
- How have the data informed other areas of my instruction? how?
- Observers and observed discuss next steps
- Observed: How will the data collected today inform my instruction?
- Observers: What have I learned that I can apply to my own instruction?
- must be: ongoing, collective, job-embedded, results-oriented, PLCs are how we work everywhere...as above so below
- Use to "peek" inside each other's classroom, "do the work" together and identify skills and strategies, and explore areas of focus (collective and individual)
- Learning map and rubric for common formative assessment: www.d125.org/learningmaps
- Stevenson site visits - www.d125.org/about/site_visits_for_ educators.aspx
- PLCs present 2x a year: January and end of the year.
- How the PLC implemented a process to improeve student achievement or school culture
- Provide evidence that the process had a positive effect
- Use TECHNOLOGY
- create personal learning networks that share, reflect on, and imporve instructional practice
- teachers can see how colleagues use different strategies, techniques, and materials to teach the same content.
- Examples:
- The Center for Teaching quality: http://teachingquality.org
- Mastery Connect (www.masteryconnect.com) - assessments
- The College board's AP Virtual Community - https://apcommunity.collegeboard.org)
- The Teaching Channel (www.teachingchannel.org)
- TeachLivE - simulation here
"Edcamp Teachers Take Back Professional Development" by Kristen Swanson
- If we want classrooms where we are teaching students to be collaborative and more proactive in their learning, don't we have to set up a culture where we trust teachers to do the same? AND We have to trust that teachers are professionals who use their classrooms as innovative laboratories and who are motivated to engage in authentic learning.
- Unconferences
- blank slate
- build the schedule together - mingle and chat over ideas and post potential discussion topics, GO....
"When Change Has Legs" by David Perkins and James Reese
- Leg #1: Frameworks
- Examples: Project Zero, Teaching for Understanding, Understanding by design, Making Thinking Visible, Making Learning Whole, Visible Thinking, Cultures of Thinking, Artful Thinking, Responsive Classroom, Expeditionary Learning, 6+1 Traits
- Challenge existing practices and create discomfort
- Can work with multiple frameworks as long as they aren't contradictory
- What conversations are necessary?
- Leg #2: Leaders
- leaders inspire and guide initiatives
- political visionary
- practical visionary
- Leg #3: Community - collegial culture
- teachers meeting regularly in small groups to discuss experiences as they try out the target framework
- Keep PD/culture transparent: activities evolve and members eventually assume facilitative roles in new groups
- Keep all faculty broadly aware of progress - fairs, sharing, reporting, posting student work
- Where is there room for differing levels of buy in? all-in, half-in, toe-in-the-water, bystander-for-now... "legitimate peripheral participation"
- Leg #4: Institutionalization
- Systematic efforts to stabilize a successful innovation for the long term
- The innovation gets written into the DNA of the school - mission statement, communications, formal docs, teaching and learning commitments, hiring practices, etc .
- change should occur thoughtfully, not because of haphazard events.
- Conversations to have:
- Conversations about frameworks
- Conversations about leadership - manage up
- Conversations about Community - norms -
- Conversations about institutionalization -
"The Crossroads Model" by John Settlage and Adam Johnston
- Crossroads evokes a place where a person faces a dilemma and nees to choose from among multiple paths....they anticipate moving forward ont heir own rather than joining forces
- Crossroads puts the "confer" back into conference - gathering dedicated ind
- the ideas that high-quality conversations often take place outside the meeting rooms - at crossroads
- goals: seek wisdom from others about what considerations they should address before proceeding
- Protocol:
- Vexations and Ventures:
- Arrive with persistent challenge (Vexation) and proposed solution (Venture) and discussion-starter questions
- How are you envisioning that you are approaching a crossroads where a decision must be made about an appropriate venture.
- Read the challenge and solution and offer feedback and suggest edits designed to make the documents as clear and thought provoking as possible. Goal: Vexation is genuine and significant; Venture is not obvious or easy solution - it must raise questions that promote a sense of responsibility among participants
- Resubmit Vexation and Venture paper a few weeks later
- Structured Conversations (forum for hearing others and being heard):
- Incubators: 75 min and 12 participants (Like consultancy Protocol)
- Statement phase (10 min) - make problem accessible and intriguing to the rest of the group
- Clarify State (5 min)
- Incubate phase (15 min) - presenter sits and listens as the audience members toss ideas back and forth, building on one another and sometimes offering contrary notions
- benefits of listening with attention and respect
- helps others let down their guard and listen to new ideas and perspectives
- Rejoin Phase (5 min) - presenter has 5 minutes to comment, express gratitude, ask questions
- Facilitators: monitor time and make sure the discussion is focused
"Flipping the Flip" by Patricia Geoffre Scott
- Quality teaching must be centered on learning.
- Flipping increases quality time for learning
- Flipping allows all teachers to acquire the pre-req knowledge base to participate in a professional conversation...
- Flipping PD:
- Accountability: responses
"The Trouble with Top-Down" by Rebecca Van Tassell
- GOAL: create prompts for each of the aspects of Danielson's framework.
- Cycle:
- COI
- Ground it in the Framework
- Create prompts from the framework - look fors in classroom observation
- Walk-throughs
- Learning
- Link teaching to learning
"Problem Solving in 7 Steps:
- Determine whether you have a problem and whether it's worth solving
- Affirm positive beliefs regarding your ability to solve the problem
- Clarify the obstacle and identify possible solutions
- Determine each solution's likelihood of success and consider the resources required
- Try out the solution that has the greatest chance of success
- If your solution doesn't work, try another one
- If you can't find a solution, identify an alternative goal.
- Make it explicit.
Thoughts to consider:
- RtI: Are we supplying RtI services for all classrooms? "A school's willingness to provide students with extra time and support...was just as likely to assist a student in AP Calc as in Algebra 1." - pg 33
- Create a 10th period 2/week to provide intervention and enrichment for ALL students.
******
Thrive by Meeno Rami (5 ways to re-invigorate your teaching):
- Turn to mentors - create and maintain meaningful relationships with other professionals you can learn from.
- Join and Build Networks - use personal, school, local, national, and web-based networks including Twitter to connect to other professionals.
- Keep Your Work Intellectually Challenging - Find the time to read print and online resources to keep your passion for teaching alive.
- Listen to Yourself - Manage your fears, align your teaching with your values, and learn hot to address external resistance.
- Empower your Students - Share responsibility and decision making with students, and help them connect their learning to the outside world.
Want to see teaching in action? Check out this site: the School Wide Network. There are lots of videos of teachers...teaching!
Developing/Planning PD:
- Determine student needs
- How does this fit into a context - what makes us realize this is a need? narrate/frame
- What are instructional/leadership needs? Be specific and descriptive
- What are the outcomes/Ideal? - LT/SC
- Expectations of implementations - what will change in practice?
- What is the support plan? How will all, some, few be supported?
- NOW: plan the structure, mode, and resources (who, what, where, why)
- Create agenda (questions, protocols - so it's a tool)
- Determine role in the PD
- Monitor implementation: TFBWT, Coaching Cycles, PLCs, etc.
JHMS PD Plan (DRAFT) 2012-13:
We are working on the development of a cohesive Professional Development Plan for JHMS for 4th quarter and next year. This plan will revolve around the Instructional Core, allotting time for instruction, curriculum, and student engagement - with teachers being the students! This means we have three components to the plan:
- Instruction - We will continue to focus our studio (both in-house and CEL supported) and coaching cycles on instruction.
- Curriculum and content - We will begin using grade level and content PLC meetings to collaborate around content and curriculum. This "deep collaboration" is needed to develop our knowledge and skills around curriculum in a way that will stretch us as professionals and expand what our students are able to do at all levels.
StudentTeacher Engagement - in this context, that means YOUR engagement about your professional development and learning. This will be done through independent reflection; sharing with your PLCs about your Cycles of Inquiry regarding your Area of Focus; conferences with admin (possibly including Instructional Coach); and coaching cycles. We are in the process of further defining what it means to coach and to be coached.- How can I help her understand how to help herself?
- Problem ----- Inquiry (what is the problem and what is the actual inquiry about it?)
- We have to become critical of our own work and what's in front of us.
- Question until hit, "I don't know." Then that is an Area of Focus.
- Content / Curriculum
- Provides: What we teach and When/where it lands in the year
- PD Necessary: Collaboration with grade level/vertical teams, Study (books, research, and CCSS)
- What is the continuum of skills that include inference, drawing conclusions and generalize? How do you differentiate those skills? Is it necessary for student to know the difference? As teachers, how does knowing the difference help you to listen and see more? (The better we listen and see, the more we are able to push kids and the more likely our instruction will not stagnate.) How do we infer while we read? How do we construct sentences that cause our readers to infer? (Connect reading and writing!) Assessment questions: what would it sound/look like IF students were .....?
- How does this skill/concept look across texts and genres? RIGOR comes form moving across genres. This creates transferability.
- Differentiate between a unit based on text and a unit based on skill/concept. Why? When? Also, consider NOT WHOLE TEXT - sections or short texts (microfiction).
- Guiding Questions:
- Learning is the inquiry stance - how do we get students to take that stance? What essential questions would frame the work as inquiry to motivate students?
- Why do I teach this? Really, why? Why do we study ____? How would we help students to figure that out?
- Why do readers need this?
- What is the point?
- What does this skill/strategy do for readers?
- Is this a skill? strategy? or graphic organizer? (We need to get to skills/strategies.)
- If we want to understand ____(character)? What would we need to do/know to do that (learning outcomes)? What questions do we need to engage them in (answers = summative/formative assessment)?
- What does it mean to be a reader? writer? mathematician? DO THE reading/writing/math.
- How do we stay at the concept/skill level and NOT the story level. This allows for transfer, incremental practice, modeling, gradual release, and formative assessment.
- Instruction/Implementation
- Provides: How to teach
- PD Necessary: Studio, coaching, peer observation
- Guiding Questions:
- What do I do to do this well?
- How do I do this well? How else could I do it?
- How do I teach so students internalize this skill/strategy?
- Did they understand? How do I know? (formative assessment)
- Continuous Improvement/ Individual Professional Development
- Provides: Why for the what, how, when/where
- PD Necessary: Stance of a researcher, CoI on AoF (Area of Focus)
- Guiding Questions:
- How am I experimenting? researching?
- Where is my edge?
- What do I wonder about?
- What was hard for them? Where are they not proficient? why?
- What does it really mean to be a reader? writer? mathematician? How am I pushing/creating my own experiences that help me to better understand the teaching and learning?
- Collaboration - PLC work
- Book/Research study
- Studio
- Coaching
- Action Research stance for Cycles of Inquiry
In reading, we do not master anything. We master skills at the level of text we are working with.
Resources:
Book on designing staff development.
Protocols!
Professional Development Tools - for meetings
Goal for PD Structure:
Experiential Text (do the reading?)
Reflection
Professional Reading (Why actively read?)
Reflection
Try on
Professional Development Standards website with the standards and rationale for PD and professional readings.
Quotes from
The Power of Protocols: An Educator's Guide to Better Practice by Joseph McDonald, Nancy Mohr, Alan Dichter, and Elizabeth McDonald
- "Abbreviated Protocols" - a summary of the book.
Why use protocols?
"There is nothing stronger than protocol when it comes to undergirding human interactions, but the strength is in the service of expression and discovery (ix)."
"(Protocols) constrain participation in order to heighten it (ix)." Goal: "variety-increasing organizational forms (x)."
"What if lots of people were as skillful in facilitating genuine conversation as so many now are at avoiding it, suppressing it, or smothering it with self-centered talk (x)?"
"We think that product worth producing begins with toughtful process (x)."
"There is no way to solve a complex problem without listening to the perspectives on the problem of all those immersed in it. There is no way to gain the full value of outside expertise without subjecting it to dialogical encounters with internal expertise. And there is no way to find the creative solutions to the many educational problems at hand without cultivating and protecting diversity of viewpoints (x)."
"....and they not only require - or we would say foster - a substantial degree of democratization...one the prizes diversity, universal participation, and wide cultivation of what we call facilitative leadership (xi)."
"Whenever talk has important consequences, we deserve a chance to think through what we want tos ay, and an environment where what we choose to say can be heard and respected...(what becomes possible) a new kind of educational setting - not cellular but collaborative, not isolated but networked, not opaque but transparent and accountable (xiii)."
"In some educational organizations, protocols may at first seem foolish, their artifice an unwarranted interference in ordinary business. The more dysfunctional this business, the stronger the negative reaction may be. For example, schools or colleges mired in norms of private practice, and used to ignoring the actual impact of the practice on students' learning, may not take easily to learning with protocols. Encouraged to try them anyway, however, and pressed to see them all the way through, even reluctant participants may find something refreshing about protocols. Then, urged to reflect on the nature of this refreshment, the participants may find that the protocols help them imagine alternatives to ordinary habits of working together, learning, and leading (1)."
Ways to learn together:
- Exploring Student Work ("...one good way for us to educate ourselves is to pause periodically in our practice to become deliberate students of our students (3).")
- "...we must on a regular basis suspend flow, capture images of the work interrupted, study the images calmly and deliberately, and explore together what they may mean (4)."
- We learn more about students' learning ...and
- "We read students' work closely as a text that captures the efficacy of our own work. This text is where our moves as educators and their impact on students are most traceable (4)."
- Create a PLC
- "Protocols force transparency by segmenting elements of a conversation whose boundaries otherwise blur: talking and listening, describing and judging, proposing and giving feedback.... protocols again teach us habits that we wish we already had: to take the time to listen and notice, to take the time to think about what we want to say, to work without rushing, to speak less (or speak up more) (7)."
- "(Protocols) can also disturb privacy and certainty by interrupting the ordinary flow of conversations. Some of them force the raising of questions, the suspension of judgement, and the withholding of response - all of these useful to learning at certain times (7)."
- "Foster democracy...to appreciate the value of diverse ideas and deliberative communities (8)."
- "(Protocols) constrain behavior in order to enhance experience....(they) help educators and students to exercise their descriptive powers, intensify their listening, enhance their qualities of judgement, and facilitate their communication with one another (8)."
- Create Different Work Place
- Focus on student learning
- De-privatization of practice
- Collaboration
- Shared norms and values
- Reflective dialogue
- How do we do this?
- Gather colleagues together with a purpose
- Establish effective ground rules for gatherings
- Enforce the ground rules by identifying behaviors consistent and inconsistent with them
- Enable the colleagues to share information freely with one another
- help them attend fully to one another's perspectives
- help them make a collective commitment to the choices the group may make.
- Facilitation
- Goals:
- promote participation - learning is social, we learn through and with others
- No hogs and No logs to "hear all voices"
- ensure equity - "what is a point of view we have not heard?"
- acknowledge the value of difference in the group's learning and helps the group strive to understand the contribution it may make
- make room for dissidence, and may even stretch colleagues' capacity for learning from it
- build trust - not necessarily trust each other, rather trust the collective situation
- Use: protocols for opening and closing and for each conversation AND to intervene when necessary.
- Three important questions (PTT, TT, Group):
- What? What have I learned about the topic that brought this group together?
- So What? What difference does it seem to make - for example, to my teaching or my team's planning?
- Now What? What steps can I take to make the most of what I have learned?
University of Pittsburgh - resources and PD related to school reform and improvement of student achievement.
The Jigsaw Classroom...everything jigsaw!
Looking at Student Work website.
"Looking Collaboratively at Student Work: An Essential Toolkit," by Kathleen Cushman, Horace 13 - several strategies for examining student work.
The New Teacher Center at Univ of CA, Santa Crus - resources for new teachers.
"Standards in Practice" by Education Trust - includes PD resources for understanding and implementing a protocol for examining classroom assignments and student work.
Center for Learning - Winehart (History guy) and Marzano.
Schools Moving Up - site for work toward educational reform. How do school neutralize the effects in students lives that get in the way of learning... Used belief statements for IF/Admin meetings.
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