Have our teachers grown professionally as of December? Are we truly "Building a Culture of Achievement"? Have I saturated them with so much professional development (PD) that the message has been lost? Have we built in enough time for professional discourse and reflection? As an Instructional Coach, I am constantly reflecting on these first months of school. We are approaching the end of another calendar year and I want to pause for a moment. In October of 2013, I used a very powerful school-wide reflection activity and I am thinking of using it again this year. It involved a strategy we have used multiple times during PD - Mind Mapping. (Mind Mapping is a multipurpose activity that incorporates writing, reflection, discourse, synthesis, and visual modeling techniques.)
Last year, our
Parson teachers had received bi-weekly professional development since
school started in August. That is a tremendous amount of bite-sized chunks and can be completely overwhelming! I decided to STOP professional development for a
couple weeks and allow time to process the information! It's not about me "covering"
information, it's about synthesizing into classroom practice and raising student achievement. I gave teachers one week to synthesize all of the training materials, book
study notes, e-mails, and the reality of classroom implementation. The teachers were given a poster board and asked to visually represent what "clicked"
during these weeks of PD. Each teacher would share a 3 minute presentation
for their peers during a morning PD. Initially the staff moaned and groaned about additional "work," but on presentation day the reflection process produced tears, shouts of joy, dropped jaws, thunderous applause, and deep questions!
Before
the presentations began, I reviewed our school-wide classroom priority - Accountable Talk. Discussions are
not meant to be a free-for-all! We need active listeners and articulate
speakers. I always want to model and use PD time to emphasize classroom strategies. Therefore, I established a discussion agreement and distributed
sentence frames on strips of paper. (The slips of paper were a new method of facilitating Accountable Talk.)
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| We
rotated the small Accountable Talk stem (slip of paper by Mr. Goddard's
arm) before the next teacher presented. The discussion was on topic and
everyone participated! (Again, this is a valuable mock practice of strategies that can be used to foster productive discourse in the classroom.) |
The teachers presented in a group of 4 teachers. (A reminder that groups of 4 are magic!) The teacher presenting spoke
for 3 minutes uninterrupted. (Yes, we set a timer so we would not loose
track of time.) The other 3 teachers actively listened and could not interrupt. At the end of
the 3 minutes, the listening teachers used the provided Accountable Talk
stems to give feedback or a question. The feedback round was timed for 1
minute. This sounds rigid, but exaggerated timing is a major reason discourse flops in the classroom.
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We repeated the cycle 3 more times to give all teachers a chance to share and receive immediate feedback.
Mrs.
Prosen, the principal, was holding back tears as she walked around the
tables. Listening to the level of conversation took her breath away.
She repeatedly praised the staff for the level of thought that went into
the Mind Maps! |
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| Some teachers created an elaborate production and shared unique personal reflections. |
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| First Grade Teacher... |
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| The Music Teacher... |
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| PreK Teacher... |
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| A Fifth Grade Teacher... |
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| The P.E. Teacher... |
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| A Third Grade Teacher... |
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| A First Grade Teacher... |
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| A Fifth Grade Teacher... |
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| A Kindergarten Teacher... |
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| A Second Grade Teacher... |
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| An Early Childhood Special Education Teacher... |
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| The Librarian... |
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| The Mind Maps were displayed in the lounge to continue the school-wide reflection and long-term review. |
So, this is where we were as of October 2013. The level of professional conversation and classroom implementation has absolutely increased. Our student achievement is steadily climbing. What can we say at the end 2014? Stay tuned...
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