Some initial reflections from my time so far at the Teaching and Learning 2015 Conference in D.C.:
The first big takeaway: teacher leadership positions need position in the system.
Ad-hoc or “anoint and appoint” teacher leadership simply does not last.
In other words, for teacher leadership to matter, it has to have a place…a permanent place…in a district’s system, hierarchy, contract and culture. It cannot be something someone does for a while because they’re good at it: rather, it must be an expected part of the system.
The first session I attended was “Teacher-Led Professional-Based Learning,” hosted by Lucy Steiner, Mark Sass and Chris Poulos. The info they shared built upon a foundation based on the Pahara-Aspen work (aspeninstitute.org) which explored teacher leadership and building systems that work. Their goal: to help teacher, their schools, unions, and districts implement collaborative, job-embedded professional learning that leads to better student learning.
The panelists shared a shocking statistic: across the nation a school district will often spend six to nine thousand dollars per teacher, per year on professional development. Their point was simple: that investment, often on “outside” experts, wasn’t paying off. Instead, districts and systems would be better off investing that money back into their own system through teacher-led, job-embedded professional learning. Mark Sass put it succinctly: “workshops just don’t work.”
From this particular session, I’m bringing home this key learning, among other great ideas. In their research, this team uncovered the key needs around teacher professional development that works:
1. Time. Not just time to sit and get, but also time to take the work to work and put learning into practice, collaboratively.
2. Relevance. The line you want to hear is “this made my job easier.” (Not in the “now I don’t have to do my job” way, but in the “now I can do my job even better and more effectively” way). This is how we know the professional learning will impact students.
3. Trained facilitation. See my recent post about PLC, Vulnerability and Student Work. Sometimes, even we accomplished teachers need someone along side us to help us learn.
4. Choice. How often does professional development break all the rules of good classroom instruction? All the time if we are talking about differentiation. Teachers need to see themselves in their learning in order for it to work; differentiation and choice facilitate this.
5. Data training. What do we do with data? It isn’t always obvious, especially to those of us with a love-mostly-hate relationship with “reducing students to numbers.” It doesn’t have to be that way, but we need support to know that.
Last, and biggest in my mind:
Trust and autonomy. We need to be trusted as professionals that we will learn and apply the learning… if the rest of the other needs are met from those providing the professional learning, then the last on the list is what makes it endure.
When I have a minute later, I want also to share about some cool things that are happening in Iowa and Connecticut that I want to steal for Washington state and for my district. Of all the states I though I’d be jealous of (Hawaii? Florida?) I never thought I’d be jealous of Iowa…
I helped gather a group of teachers together with the superintendent of my district to talk about this distinction between positions and jobs. Teacher leadership is not simply about adding instructional coaches to schools, but rather creating district roles for teachers to have a greater impact on instructional decisions and practices. Districts that can distribute leadership capacity around improving instructional practice gain ground on two fronts. First, they are able to enrich themselves by holding on to teachers seeking leadership roles in their existing area of expertise, and second they provide meaningful investments in newer teachers who are in their most vulnerable years of the profession.
No offense intended toward Iowa 🙂 …much respect in fact! More in a future post.