The Center for Teaching sponsored a joint field trip for 2nd grade students from Drew Charter School and The Westminster Schools. Elizabeth Tozzer, Stacey Bradley and Jane Simpkins organized this event that culminating a series of joint projects. Drew Charter School 2nd graders came to the Westminster campus to look at the blue bird houses they sponsored as part of their work on Great Backyard Bird Count Day. In addition, they walked the trail along Nancy Creek, engaged in a water-color painting project of the natural surroundings, completed a sun-print of objects they collected along the creek, and heard a talk from Nancy Jones of the Atlanta Audubon Society, blue heron nature preserve.
While a few adjustments had to be made in the agenda, the teachers pulled off a very successful event between our two schools. The most important outcome from this event is our continued effort to build a strong and lasting relationship between Drew Charter School and The Westminster Schools. Our 12 2nd grade teachers, Elizabeth Tozzer (Westminster art teacher), and Jane Simpkins (Center for Teaching) are successfully helping us reach this goal.
Memory: We are what we remember!
Today was a day of learning. I watched two TED talks that lit up my neurons, showing me connections between the power of music, emotion, and memory in building stronger understanding. Are there ways in our classrooms to use brain-based strategies to improve student understanding and achievement? Neuroscience tells us there are plenty of ways to do this. The writings of David Sousa, Judy Willis, Marcia Tate (see a CFT blog post on brain strategies), and others are paving the way for teachers to learn what neuroscience is telling us about how to improve our teaching to improve the learning.
While these two speakers, Joshua Foer and Michael Tilson Thomas, do not make specific connections between teaching and learning, everything they reference in their talks is fodder for teachers to use in building a more engaging classroom experience for students.
Joshua Foer’s talk, Feats of memory anyone can do, is really quite interesting and compelling. Classroom teachers can learn a great deal about what they might do in their classrooms to improve student learning by employing strategies that enhance student memory. The implication is that teachers would have to learn and practice these strategies themselves and USE them in the classroom to help students learn. The visualization exercise Joshua uses in the beginning of the talk is illustrative of how powerful visual learning can be to enhancing our memories.
Michael Tilson Thomas tells the audience a personal story that shows how his passion for music was nurtured by his parents’ love for music. He then goes on to draw a beautiful connection between music and emotion. It is the bridge between music and emotion that builds a strong and enduring memory. When I listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, these interesting and diverse pieces of music conjure up all kinds of memories in my life that are connected to springtime, New York, and freedom.
Why is music absent from the typical learning environment of most students? Is it because teachers don’t know how to use music as a teaching tool? Is it because teachers do see the value of music as a teaching tool? Whatever the reason, Michael Tilson Thomas demonstrates that the powerful connection between music and emotion can be used to help students engage and remember what they learn.
I would be interested in hearing from others whether the connections between memory, emotions, and music should be used by teachers to engage learners, helping them connect to what we value in our curriculum and hopefully learn it in a more enduring way.
Teachers developing scope and sequence in mathematics
In 1993, Jeanette Gann wrote that professional development is,
an educational and personal experience that enhances or changes teaching practices toward the end of improving student learning. (Arithmetic Teacher, volume 40, no 5, page 286. This NCTM journal is no longer in print.)
Her definition is not far off from the one that Learning Forward developed for NCLB.
The term professional development means a comprehensive, sustained, and intensive approach to improving teachers’ and principals’ effectiveness in raising student achievement.
Ms. Gann asserts that teachers,
need the support of ongoing professional development programs to assist them in bringing about the changes in practices, in their beliefs and attitudes, and in the learning outcomes of their students (page 286).
I assume she means that teachers who see themselves primarily as distributors of content, in the absence of careful attention to the instructional strategies used to deliver the content, might find that some, many or all of their students will fail to deeply understand the meaning and value of the content.
What if the delivery of the extremely well-planned content from a teacher does not resonate with the needs and interests of his or her students? Isn’t it entirely possible that some students might struggle learning and using the content to further their knowledge? Some teachers who deliver content only to be faced with students who are confused often blame the patient. “It’s the student’s fault.” “They didn’t do their homework or prepare sufficiently for the test.” Strikes me this is no different from a well-intentioned parent giving his or her sick and reluctant child cod liver oil to treat the symptoms of illness. We force feed them, test them and then evaluate their understanding through a rather narrow lens.
If professional development is to be useful and effective it should assist teachers to “bring about changes in practice, beliefs and attitudes, and in the learning outcomes of their students.” Otherwise, why invest the resources in our teachers if student learning isn’t the beneficiary?
How many professional development programs have you been to where the content was well delivered, but you failed to use the content to change your teaching practice to improve student learning? In many cases, you may have had good intentions, but rarely do we hold ourselves truly accountable for documenting changes in practice we might undertake or authenticating and documenting how changes in our practice directly improve student learning. These forms of measurement are rarely required by schools that invest resources in professional development.
So what does high-quality professional development look like? What are the ingredients? Learning Forward has attempted to define high-quality professional development through their work on Standards for Professional Learning. I like the way they have developed and marketed this plan. It promotes the teacher as a learner and it ties professional learning to student results. Here are the seven standards,
Professional learning that increases educator effectiveness and results for all students:
- occurs within learning communities committed to continuous improvement, collective responsibility, and goal alignment.
- requires skillful leaders who develop capacity advocate, and create support systems for professional learning.
- requires prioritizing, monitoring, and coordinating resource for educator learning.
- uses a variety of sources and types of student, educator, and system data to plan, assess, and evaluate professional learning.
- integrates theories, research, and models of human learning to achieve its intended outcomes.
- applies research on change and sustains support for implementation of professional learning for long-term change.
- aligns its outcomes with educator performance and student curriculum standards.
Learning Forward is promoting these seven standards as a lens that educators should use when designing and implementing professional development. If the professional development meets these seven standards, then it could be considered high-quality professional development.
So how do we (educators) determine what type of professional development to design and implement for our teachers. First, let’s ask teachers what they need to improve their ability to help students learn. For some of them it will be professional development that deepens their content knowledge so that they can provide a more complete picture of their discipline to students. For others, professional development that enriches the toolbox of instructional strategies used to teach content will help them improve their delivery of content and hopefully student learning. In asking teachers, the assumption is that they understand themselves well enough to determine what they need. So long as schools have a self-assessment process that helps teachers sort through their own needs, with the help of a department chair or principal, we can rely on their feedback to define the high-quality professional development to improve student learning. In the end, it is still the responsibility of teachers and schools to verify that their changes in practice improve student learning. (Click here for a recent post from a workshop by Thomas Guskey on evaluating professional development.)
A second way to determine what type of professional development to design and implement is to collect student achievement data from a variety of resources, mine the data carefully, and analyze the data for patterns that illustrate student learning problems. The DATA WISE improvement process is one formal way of going about this work. Regardless of the process a school uses, results from this work can lead to a clear sense of what students need to improve their understanding of the content and skills we value. Once we have identified a student learning problem and translated it into a problem of practice, rather than “blaming the student,” then it should become clear what type of professional development is needed to address the problem.
A third way to decide on what type of professional development teachers need is through the lens of a school’s strategic plan, especially when that plan is targeted at improving the quality of the academic program and student learning outcomes. At The Westminster Schools, a new strategic plan has been adopted by the Board, administration, and faculty. Learning for Life: A Vision for Westminster asks that teachers and students develop the skill of “problem finding and problem solving” through the essential action of “critical and creative thinking and collaboration” using project or problem-based learning (PBL) as an instructional strategy. To accomplish this goal faculty at The Westminster Schools will need a framework and support for how to create and implement a PBL learning environment or develop and adopt other instructional strategies that lead to the same outcome. High-quality professional development will be one way to achieve this goal.
The final way to determine what type of professional development faculty need is through the school’s evaluation process. If faculty and administrators have a rigorous and transparent process for giving faculty good feedback on their teaching, then the data mined through an evaluation process could be used to help faculty determine their professional growth plan. It would make logical sense to tie the information coming from a formal evaluation process to the data a faculty member shares through their own self-reflection. If these two processes are well integrated then each faculty member, as well as the school, should have sufficient data to assemble a high-quality professional development plan that assures continuous growth of the each teacher.
If you are interested in a rich conversation about the relationship of professional development to teacher evaluation, Hayes Mizell wrote a short but thoughtful piece on Learning Forward’s website (click here).
For schools to fulfill a commitment to build a “school of the future” that meets the needs of all learners, I believe they must commit to the development of a high-quality professional development program linked to a set of standards or guidelines that holds the school and their faculty accountable for stretching their wings and refining their practice with a target of improving the learning experience for all students.
Visioning Session 1: Drew Charter High School
On April 14, we held the first “visioning session” for the new Drew Charter High School. The session was run by architects, Barbara Crum and John Poelker, from Perkins+Will. The first of three workshops was devoted to mining the future. What might education look like in the 21st Century? What are the challenges we face in educating our young people for the future? There were 50 + invited guests from all parts of the Drew Charter community that will engage in these three workshops.
For our first exercise, we were asked to bring an aspirational object that in some way represented our thinking about education for the future. Each of us was given a few minutes to share our object and the reason why we picked it. Here are a list of the aspirational objects people chose and a brief statement of what the object represented to them. (see photos of some of them below)
- My daughter’s magical wand (represents the magic of childhood that we must nurture)
- CAS calculator (represents the power of technology to solve complex problems, a tool for innovation)
- Representation of a globe that could be flattened (it is a “flat world” that we must navigate)
- Picture of my college (100% of Drew students will be college ready)
- Harvard Hat (represents the aspirations we have for our students to go to the college of their choice)
- Cell phone (as a computer it is my source of information)
- IPad (a device that can many uses and wide potential to expand learning opportunities)
- Spanish Dictionary (the need for being bilingual and understanding people in an interconnected world)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (a classic novel that tells a wonderful story)
- Picture of relationships (building and sustaining relationships for the future)
- Wood and carving tool from grandfathers homestead (connections to the past)
- Picture of a child (total complete development of our children should be our mission)
- Team sweatshirt (importance of team work and collaboration)
- Tool, Swiss Army knife (one tool with many functions, adaptable)
- Ring for love and connection (the need to focus on our desire for connection and meaning)
- Picture of Da Vinci’s man, arts, and sciences (development of the whole person)
- Picture of a butterfly (nature and beauty)
- Giraffe (symbolizes that our students will have to stretch for their understanding, a special gift)
- iPad from Apple (innovative design, think different, game changer)
- Picture of tree (represents importance of strong roots, adapt to change, flow with wind)
- iPad (representing innovation)
- Sash for graduation (honors, strive for excellence)
- Kindle fire (we use 10% of our brain power, use more of our brain with technology)
- Glass globe (represents the challenges of caring for Earth, our common home, sustainability)
- Books (the value of the book as a vehicle for learning)
- T-shirt from GT that has Rub Goldberg machine (the interconnecting links between all parts of schooling)
Another exercise the architects had us complete was our view of the biggest challenges we face in educating our young people for the 21st Century. Here was the list of challenges from my group.
- Developing the skills of discernability in an information rich environment.
- Parental involvement in education, drawing parents in as partners.
- The idea that “partnership” is important. Schools alone cannot rebuild a culture of schooling in the 21st Century. It has to be a school-family-community partnership.
- Provide parents educational programs for how to master the challenges their children will face.
- Build a community where parents and teachers are working together, collaborating on the work of raising and educating our children.
- Building respect in our school community
- Solving the fiscal challenges that we are presented with in the 21st Century. Fewer resources and more demands for spending dollars to accomplish our lofty goals.
- Designing and building a facility that can evolve and adapt with time.
- Create a culture where information is valued and encourage our children to see the “library” as a friend.
- How to integrate into our high-stakes, test-driven society a vision for schools of the future that will embrace a more interdisciplinary, project-based learning environment that nurtures innovative thinking?
How will health, wellness and sustainability be a part of the new Drew Charter high school?
- library may not be quiet
- Not let our own experiences with school limit our thinking about what the new high school should be.
- Design a building and program that more effectively incorporates the outside (nature) into the daily school program.
- Health and wellness, an expanded view of what is means to be “heathy Drew”
- A more healthy diet that moves away from fried food to fresh food to resolve the challenges we face with an every increasing population of overweight citizens.
- Develop a more integrated program for health and wellness (PE, outdoor education, etc.)
It was a very productive 3-hour session that all participants seemed to enjoy.
No Child’s Fate is Sealed: Value of School Community
T. Elijah Hawkes wrote an excellent article in this month’s Phi Delta Kappan entitled, No Child’s Fate is Sealed. I want to draw your attention to his article because it was inspirational to me. He captured the most important reasons why school exists for students. It isn’t about the learning content, being on teams or clubs and getting good grades. It is aboutdiscovering yourself in a community of people who care about you. Mr. Hawkes eloquently describes his contrasting experiences at James Baldwin School in New York City that serves a high-poverty area of the city and his experience as associate principal at Randolph Union High School in Vermont. While the two schools’ cultures are extremely different, they share many characteristics in common. He points out that those similarities represent the common aspirations of all good schools that their students grow up to be healthy and fulfilled citizens.
I was fascinated by how Mr. Hawkes told a beautiful story about the value of people being interconnected through their experiences at his schools. Teachers, students, parents and other community members are bound together through their shared experiences in school. The school that successfully builds a strong community has forged a strong foundation for their students. The community they are members of will support them and nurture them well when they go into the world no matter what they do. This comes to light when he tells the story of a boy who returns to Randolph one day looking for a Band-Aid for his injured leg. Why did he return? The reader is left to wonder, but one could only conjecture that the boy felt at home when he was a student at Randolph. The “sense of home” brings with it warmth, caring and love. That’s enough to bring anyone back for a little help.
Mr. Hawkes writes
educators must be animated by a special faith that no child’s fate is sealed, that each one’s mind and life are open for hope and transformation. (page 61)
He goes on to write:
No matter where we teach, educators have to believe that young people can persevere, even with–to quote James Baldwin–”generations of bad faith and cruelty” weighing upon their childhood shoulders.
Good teachers believe in their students. They don’t come to school to fill the minds of their students with knowledge. They come to school ready to engage the minds of their students and help them connect to the community of learners. It is through community and relationships to others that we come to know ourselves. Knowing ourselves is the path to leading a successful, fulfilled and cherished life.
Mr. Hawkes ends his story with a powerful image:
It’s hard work (schooling), but we can do a good job of it, especially if we work in partnership with families and the broader citizenry–and especially if what binds us together is that other tough connecting tissue: Love.
So I hope you take the time to read his piece and reflect on the value and meaning of community in your school. How is everyone connected in your school? Are the bonds strong? I also hope you enjoy his piece as much as I did. Share your thoughts!
