Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
-
Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Learning with Blogs and Wikis on 2009-10-04
-
The few moments that we can steal for professional development are usually spent
in sessions with experts pitching the latest silver bullet
-
School leaders are beginning to believe in the human capacity of their faculties
-
-
What's more, the readers of my own blog challenge my thinking in provocative
comments day after day. Mike, a reader from Texas, jumps in on conversations
regarding teacher empowerment. K. Borden, a parent from the school district in
which I work, pushes my thinking about holding schools accountable for
improvement.
-
Tell others how much you enjoy having your thinking stretched by the blogs you
read. Use your enthusiasm to generate buzz about the potential for making
professional learning organic, easy, and fun.
-
Instead of simply chatting about your weekend, you'll find yourself debating the
merits of the new practices that you've stumbled across online.
-
In today's digital age, free digital tools like blogs and wikis ensure that your
voice can be heard without cost. All you need are a few good ideas, a bit of
determination, and some basic word-processing skills.
-
Digital tools have also changed who I am as an instructor because I've
introduced these tools to my students.
-
I teach my students to challenge the thinking of digital peers with their
comments—and to enjoy the challenges that others make to their own electronic
thinking. At the same time, my students are learning to create, communicate, and
collaborate—and to manage and evaluate information found online
-
Critical Issue: Finding Time for Professional Development on 2009-10-04
-
Creating professional development opportunities that educators need in order to
help all students achieve the ambitious learner goals of reform will require the
support and ideas of everyone.
-
A fundamental lesson learned in the past decade of school reform efforts is that
far more time is required for professional development and cooperative work than
is now available
-
-
Clearly, teachers "need more time to work with colleagues, to critically examine
the new standards being proposed, and to revise curriculum. They need
opportunities to develop, master, and reflect on new approaches to working with
children
-
Professional development can no longer be viewed as an event that occurs on a
particular day of the school year; rather, it must become part of the daily work
life of educators. Teachers, administrators, and other school system employees
need time to work in study groups, conduct action research, participate in
seminars, coach one another, plan lessons together, and meet for other purposes.
Fine (1994) states, "School change is the result of both individual and
organizational development" (p. 2).
-
that curricular planning and decision making rest at higher levels of authority,
and that professional development is unrelated to improving instruction" (p. 2).
-
In addition to finding creative ways to carve out time for staff development,
educators also must explore the most efficient ways to use whatever time is
available. Using technology is one example. Fine (1994) notes, "Technologies can
support and broaden professional learning communities and help teachers make
better use of their time. Through a range of technologies, e.g., the Internet
and video- and audioconferencing, teachers can access both instructional
resources and collegial networks" (pp. 5-6). Some formats enable teachers to
participate when it is convenient for them. Electronic mail and bulletin boards
enable teachers to share information and solve problems with colleagues at any
time. In addition, videoconferencing enables teachers to connect to different
sites without spending time and money on travel.
-
They create another set of dilemmas: Adequate preparation requires extensive
planning. Teachers also worry about the continuity and quality of lessons when
they are out of the classroom.
-
Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Teacher Learning: What Matters? on 2009-10-04
-
To develop the sophisticated teaching required for this mission, education
systems must offer more effective professional learning than has traditionally
been available
-
-
-
The most useful professional development emphasizes active teaching, assessment,
observation, and reflection rather than abstract discussions (Darling-Hammond
& McLaughlin, 1995).
-
Hands-on work that enhanced teachers' knowledge of the content and how to teach
it produced a sense of efficacy—especially when that content was aligned with
local curriculum and policies.
-
Professional development is more effective when schools approach it not in
isolation (as in the traditional one-shot workshop) but rather as a coherent
part of a school reform effort.
-
Teachers attended intensive six-week summer institutes covering science or
mathematics content and then participated in six seminars throughout the school
year that focused on curriculum equity and authentic assessment. In addition,
they received on-demand support and site visits from regional leaders and
contact with peers through newsletters and annual conferences
-
Research on effective professional development also highlights the importance of
collaborative and collegial learning environments that help develop communities
of practice able to promote school change beyond individual classrooms
-
Collective work in trusting environments provides a basis for inquiry and
reflection, allowing teachers to raise issues, take risks, and address dilemmas
in their own practice
-
These opportunities often involve modeling the new strategies and constructing
opportunities for teachers to practice and reflect on them
-
In this model, teachers work together and engage in continual dialogue to
examine their practice and student performance and to develop and implement more
effective instructional practices. In ongoing opportunities for collegial work,
teachers learn about, try out, and reflect on new practices in their specific
context, sharing their individual knowledge and expertise.
-
bump up against individualistic norms and school structures that sharply limit
time for collaborative planning
-
—"thoughtful, explicit examination of practices and their consequences" (p. 520)
that emerged from collaboration on concrete tasks such as curriculum
development, problem solving around students and their learning, and peer
observations.
-
created norms that valued mutual aid above privacy. They shared responsibility
for instructional improvement and supported teachers' initiative and leadership
with regard to professional practice. Because effective collaboration requires
much more than simply bringing teachers together, we need to learn how schools
can form and support teacher learning communities that engage in joint work
-
In terms of structure, they found that smaller school size and common planning
time were key
-
The human and social resources needed for professional community included
supportive leadership, mutual respect steeped in strong professional knowledge,
and a climate that invited risk taking and innovation
-
Researchers who have studied the process of forming a community have found that
it is often slow and fraught with conflicts, silences, and misunderstandings.
-
Like all professional development, a professional learning community's
interactions should focus on improving instructional practice
-
Peer observations of practice
-
Analysis of student work and student data
-
-
Current research suggests that providing intensive,
content-rich, and collegial learning opportunities for teachers can improve both
teaching and student learning. When schools support teachers with well-designed
and rich professional development, those teachers are able to create the same
types of rigorous and engaging opportunities for students—a foundation for
student success in school and beyond.
-
What Can We Do About Teacher Resistance? on 2009-10-04
-
Educational Leadership:Schools as Learning Communities:What Is a Professional Learning Community? on 2009-10-02
-
In fact, the term has been used so ubiquitously that it is in danger of losing
all meaning.
-
Another reform movement has come and gone, reinforcing the conventional
education wisdom that promises, “This too shall pass.”
-
-
The movement to develop professional learning communities can avoid this cycle,
but only if educators reflect critically on the concept's merits
-
deeply embedded in the culture of the school
-
The professional learning community model flows from the assumption that the
core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are
taught but to ensure that they learn.
-
from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning
-
What school characteristics and practices have been most successful in helping
all students achieve at high levels? How could we adopt those characteristics
and practices in our own school? What commitments would we have to make to one
another to create such a school? What indicators could we monitor to assess our
progress? When the staff has built shared knowledge and found common ground on
these questions, the school has a solid foundation for moving forward with its
improvement initiative.
-
- What do we want each student to learn?
- How will we know when each student has learned it?
- How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?
-
On the other hand, the teacher feels compelled to move forward to “cover” the
course content. If the teacher uses instructional time to assist students who
have not learned, the progress of students who have mastered the content will
suffer; if the teacher pushes on with new concepts, the struggling students will
fall farther behind
-
Some teachers conclude that the struggling students should transfer to a less
rigorous course or should be considered for special education
-
Some lower their expectations by adopting less challenging standards for
subgroups of students within their classrooms. Some look for ways to assist the
students before and after school. Some allow struggling students to fail.
-
- Timely. The school quickly identifies students who need additional
time and support.
- Based on intervention rather than remediation. The plan provides
students with help as soon as they experience difficulty rather than relying on
summer school, retention, and remedial courses.
- Directive. Instead of inviting students to seek additional
help, the systematic plan requires students to devote extra time and
receive additional assistance until they have mastered the necessary concepts.
-
Educators who are building a professional learning community recognize that they
must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all.
-
structures to promote a collaborative culture.
-
Some school staffs equate the term “collaboration” with congeniality and focus
on building group camaraderie
-
The powerful collaboration that characterizes professional learning communities
is a systematic process in which teachers work together to analyze and improve
their classroom practice
-
Team members discuss the most authentic and valid ways to assess student mastery
-
For teachers to participate in such a powerful process, the school must ensure
that everyone belongs to a team that focuses on student learning. Each team must
have time to meet during the workday and throughout the school year. Teams must
focus their efforts on crucial questions related to learning and generate
products that reflect that focus, such as lists of essential outcomes, different
kinds of assessment, analyses of student achievement, and strategies for
improving results
-
Schools must stop pretending that merely presenting teachers with state
standards or district curriculum guides will guarantee that all students have
access to a common curriculum
-
intended curriculum often pay little attention to the implemented
curriculum (what teachers actually teach) and even less to the attained
curriculum (what students learn) (Marzano, 2003).
-
Are teachers and administrators willing to accept the fact
that they are part of the problem? . . . God didn't create self-contained
classrooms, 50-minute periods, and subjects taught in isolation. We did—because
we find working alone safer than and preferable to working together. (pp.
126–127)
-
of will. A group of staff members who are determined to work together will find
a way.
-
We will increase the percentage of students who meet the state standard in
language arts from 83 percent to 90 percent” or “We will reduce the failure rate
in our course by 50 percent.”
-
Schools and teachers typically suffer from the DRIP syndrome—Data
Rich/Information Poor
-
Teachers work in collaborative teams for 90 minutes daily to clarify the
essential outcomes of their grade levels and courses and to align those outcomes
with state standards
-
Educators who focus on results must also stop limiting improvement goals to
factors outside the classroom, such as student discipline and staff morale, and
shift their attention to goals that focus on student learning.
-
Educators must stop working in isolation and hoarding their ideas, materials,
and strategies and begin to work together to meet the needs of all students
-
Even the grandest design eventually translates into hard work
-
It requires the school staff to focus on learning rather than teaching, work
collaboratively on matters related to learning, and hold itself accountable for
the kind of results that fuel continual improvement.
-
The rise or fall of the professional learning community concept depends not on
the merits of the concept itself, but on the most important element in the
improvement of any school—the commitment and persistence of the educators within
it.
-
The Influential E.D. Hirsch - Vol 13 No 3 - Rethinking Schools Online on 2009-09-28
-
He argues that children need to master the simpler elements of content before
they can move on to more complex ones, and that all children at a certain grade
should receive this material at approximately the same time without wasteful
repetition from one year to the next.
-
He defends the use of memory and repeated practice and believes that they have
been neglected because of an overemphasis on progressive education techniques --
which, he further claims, dominate U.S. schools.
-
-
most efficient way of delivering knowledge and skills, and is a harsh critic of
"the project method
-
Based on this assumption, he believes there are insufficient pressures on
teachers and schools to promote uniformity.
-
His view of education emphasizes teacher talking to students, rather than
listening to them
-
Hirsch is rightly concerned about the high mobility of poor and minority
children. He believes that a unified core curriculum from school to school would
help significantly. Yet to require that all schools and all children be given
this core curriculum seems radical and unworkable, especially since he doesn't
consider less drastic alternatives, such as allowing children to finish the year
wherever they began school or, for children who move out of the district,
providing extra help to ease the transition to a new school. (Interestingly, in
his more recent presentations, Hirsch seems to back off from his emphasis on a
single core curriculum, apparently forgetting his concern for poor students who
move frequently.)
-
Hirsch uses Japan's and France's more standardized educational system to argue
that our decentralized one is a primary cause of inequality.
-
transmission view of meaning: teachers hold meaning in their heads and their job
is to transmit it in the most efficient way to the heads of students
-
These interactions help us to be conscious of our purposes, to reflect on them
and, when appropriate, to change them.
-
The crystallized quality focuses on the constraints, the existing "meaning." The
fluid quality focuses on the possibility for development and change.
-
Because a child's experience cannot be assumed by a teacher, teaching must allow
for hearing and seeing -- for listening to and interacting with the child
-
There is surely room for targeted practice to take place, where in some extended
sense of the term teachers "tell" and students learn by "rote
-
where teachers engage students in serious conversations, activities, and
projects -- not only with themselves but with other students -- and where
teachers listen as much as they talk
-
More to the point, Hirsch's pedagogy allows few opportunities to challenge these
facts because they are presented in terms of an essential framework that all
students should assimilate
-
Hirsch portrays the core curriculum as less of a prescription and more of a
guide to help teachers in a school think collectively about their goals and
communicate them to parents. He now speaks of his proposal not as the cure for
all the ills of schools but, like a vitamin, one of several nutrients that
schools need.
-
children's interest, self esteem, motivation, experience, etc -- do matter, and
that just throwing vitamins at the schools will not solve their problems.
-
Building the 21st-Century Mind: Scientific American on 2009-09-28
-
I don’t think that any of us knows how best to cultivate the creative mind; but
our current ways of thinking and teaching are excellent at quashing the creative
mind
-
Despite the financial meltdown, the world is getting smaller every day. Unless
we are able to respect those who appear to be different from ourselves, we are
not going to be able to work with them. And unless we behave ethically and
responsibly, we will not be able to enter into trusting relationships with
others and it will become a dog-eat-dog world
-
Professional Learning Communities: Exploring the power of teamwork | CTA on 2009-09-27
-
Educators strive to create an environment that fosters mutual cooperation,
emotional support and personal growth by working together to accomplish
as a team what cannot be accomplished alone. In schools where PLCs are
successful, teachers embrace a "we, not me" philosophy to focus - as a team - on
student learning.
-
often because they were imposed on teachers and micromanaged by
administrators.
-
-
“The term has certainly become sort of a buzzword,” says DuFour, interviewed by
telephone between speaking engagements. “But there is some confusion as to what
it really means.”
-
‘one teacher, one classroom’ but a team of teachers who are responsible for the
success of students
-
Teachers need multiple and varied indicators, and should be gathering evidence
on an ongoing basis. This means asking questions and engaging students in
activities to demonstrate learning
-
But this is a way for teachers to work smarter, not
harder
-
including substantial time for teachers to meet and talk, and policies
that support site-based decision-making and self-directed professional
development planning
-
They need some understanding of why they are doing it and what they want to
accomplish. They need to know what PLC meetings look like. They need to know how
to get started. They need initial training, follow-up and the opportunity to
observe other school sites.”
-
Relax and experiment — “Give yourselves permission to try new teaching
strategies and be unsuccessful.”
-
They ask whether they are teaching the best they can, how they can improve and
what they need to know to do better. When teachers bring that kind of expertise
to the table, I can’t say enough good things about the process
-
Seeing with New Eyes on 2009-09-27
-
One strategy for helping principals and teachers develop their capacity to "see
with new eyes" is to ask them to consider contemporary criticism of schools and
honestly assess their schools in light of those criticisms
-
Teachers believe it is their job to teach, but it is the student's job to learn.
Thus, they are responsible for teaching, but not for learning.
-
-
Teachers have not collectively identified the criteria by which they will assess
student work
-
AllThingsPLC — Research, education tools and blog for building a professional learning community on 2009-09-27
Home
