Tammy Jochinke, Head of Teaching, Learning and Innovation at the Dubai American Academy, created a process for 240 teachers to design professional growth plans based on a hypothesis from asking the question, “What do my students need me to learn?” Tammy shares the importance of focusing on student success with teacher autonomy and curiosity. Teachers were supported in PLC groups and a colleague who served an impact partner.

Contact Tammy: t.jochinke_daa@gemsedu.com

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Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.310] – Steve [Intro]

Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.790] – Steve

Building Teacher Professional Growth Plans that Impact Student Success. The guest on our podcast today is Tammy Jochinke from the Dubai American Academy. I had the great opportunity to connect with Tammy a little over a year back, and we worked together during this year to map out a plan for a teacher professional growth plan at her school. And I was I’m anxious to have Tammy join us and share her experiences and her insights. So welcome, Tammy.

[00:01:08.860] – Tammy

Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:12.720] – Steve

For starters, would you give people a little bit about your background and then give them some information about the Dubai American Academy?

[00:01:20.900] – Tammy

Absolutely. So first and foremost, proud New Yorker. And when just jotting some notes down, I realized I have tipped over into more years as a leader than as a teacher. And that is so important in the work that we’re about to talk about because we really needed the teacher voice. So a bit about me, a New Yorker, as I said. New York City public school teacher. I was a high school teacher. I taught Earth science and biology, Lower East Side. And I was an assistant principal at a small IB school, also public in the Bronx. And then fate took me to Dubai with my husband, and I landed with the GEMS Network of Schools. The first three years, I was the K-12 Director of Curriculum. Then I transitioned over to Dubai American Academy 10 years ago. The And in my first five years, I was in the high school as Assistant Principal and then Principal. Now I’m in my third year, going into my third year as Head of Teaching, Learning, and Innovation at Dubai American Academy.

[00:02:28.480] – Steve

Well, Tammy, you and I met when I was at the NESA conference, Near East, South Asia Office of Overseas Schools conference and I was doing a presentation about a professional growth plan built around hypotheses more than goals. And you contacted me right after that session.

[00:02:51.810] – Tammy

As I do. [laughter]

[00:02:53.060] – Steve

[laughter] I was wondering, what is the initial piece that caught your attention during during that presentation?

[00:03:01.780] – Tammy

I think number one, and it’s going to come up as a theme because it is the most important thing, number one was student success. And student success is how we drive all of our decision making at DA and all schools. But I think what piqued my interest, I think, grabbed me back to when I was a science teacher and hypotheses, curiosity, and just that curious piece. And I know that my school is not unlike any other school where teachers are feeling like things are added and things are added and things are added, and they feel like they don’t have time. But when you are curious about something, time falls away, and you get so excited about digging into research. And I was thinking about, we always set professional goals at our school and all the schools that I’ve ever worked at. But how many how many times do we remember what our goals are? How many times do we go back to our goals and think about them? And so as I was listening to you, and then when you and I sat together for a model coaching session during that session, it really piqued my interest of, I’m curious.

[00:04:18.960] – Tammy

I want to set a hypothesis for myself as a leader and then see how it can affect students. So the students were always the end goal. And so really, I think it was that hypothesis that it’s the student success, yes, but it’s also the autonomy and the curiosity that it brought.

[00:04:41.740] – Steve

It’s powerful for me that you put that word curiosity out there, because I talk about that so much from the vantage point of what teachers need to be making happen in a classroom for students. But I don’t think I carried it to that fullest extent that it is the curiosity that’s now motivating the teacher around the investment that they’re making in the growth plan.

[00:05:08.710] – Tammy

Yes, because it’s their hypothesis, and it’s about their kids.

[00:05:15.520] – Steve

So you laid out an initial plan. So you want to describe for us the initial plan or the initial structure that you mapped out?

[00:05:25.420] – Tammy

Sure. Well, first I needed to see if it was going to work. So you and I had a good conversation, I would say a year and three months ago, and we were talking about hypotheses, we were going back and forth. And I had a small cohort of action research middle leaders under my wing. And I shifted the conversation with them to start to think about their action research question as a hypothesis. And this was a way for me to start to understand how to shift this as well before I rolled it out into this academic year. So I rolled it out really spring of 2023. And this is where we iterated and in those three months, you had one-on-one sessions with those leaders as well and I think through that  process, we created buzz, we were planting seeds, but most importantly, for myself, who’s leading the learning at the school, I needed to really refine the process. And it’s completely iterated from a year and a half ago, but I needed to refine the process with my action research teachers. So we planted the seeds there, and then we had these great ideas.

[00:06:46.200] – Tammy

And I knew that I needed teacher buy-in, and I knew that I needed teacher voice. Going back to what I said about 12 years as a leader, 20 years ago, I was in the classroom. I needed the teacher voice. So I threw out a survey. I’ve got 240 teachers at my school. I sent out a survey, and I got about 20 responses that they wanted to sign up to be part of the thinking group, the brainstorm group, for the professional growth committee for next academic year, which is this academic year. And I said yes to everyone but what I made sure I did have, and this is where I needed to tap a few shoulders, was I needed people that were brand I knew to DAA. And I found someone that had only been at the school since second semester, so he’d only joined last January. And I also had someone here from 20 years that they’d been at DAA for 20 years. So I made sure that I had that breadth. I also made sure that I had counselors. I made sure that I had middle leaders. I made sure that I had at least one assistant principal.

[00:07:52.050] – Tammy

I made sure that I had send teachers, gifted and talented teachers, you name it. I made sure that I had them all covered from IB down to KG1. And that was really important because we needed the breadth of experience and curriculum as well. So that thinking group, I’m big into retrospectives. And there’s one that I love, and it’s called the Starfish. And if you want, I can send it to you. It’s this great starfish analogy. And in the corners of the starfish, it says, what do we want to do more of, less of? What do we want to stop doing? What do we want to start doing? It’s a more complex version of the stop, start, continue that a lot of us have used. And we just put it on this big piece of paper, and we just wrote and we iterated and we put questions around it. And of course, when you do these things, you see trends, and you start to put the trends together. And what did we see? We saw things that were coming up in our population. As with most schools in this region, we have an increasing Russian population. We have an increasing EAL population in general.

[00:09:08.790] – Tammy

We are a proud, inclusive school. We’re about 12 to 14%. But that’s not in a lot of our international teachers wheelhouse. We have some teachers that are not used to maybe class sizes of 20, 24. They’re used to 18. So we saw a little bit of class size. We also saw things that were really important to our school for this academic year, which are two new resources that needed attention, especially in our elementary and our middle school. We took on a new resource for phonics called UFly, which is phenomenal, by the way. And we have a new resource, K-8, Illustrative math. So you saw what was on teacher’s minds. And here’s the guiding question, and this guiding question did not come from me, and I am sure it came from you and I know that it also came to a small group of us when we saw Dr. Jenn Ricks at a conference as well. And the question is this: What do the students need me to learn to be successful for them. So not what do I need to learn. What do my students need me to learn?

[00:10:28.290] – Tammy

And it really just turned that curiosity of, hold on, no, it’s not about me. It’s about my kids. And so that’s where it started. And through that professional growth committee, again, we iterated, we iterated, and we made sure that we realized that we really needed to go slow to go fast in the right direction.

[00:10:50.110] – Steve

So I know that when you rolled out your new plan this school year, you made effective use of teacher leaders. You also designed opportunities for teachers to be sharing the work that they were doing at different times during the year. So would you fill a little more detail of those two items and how they played into your plan?

[00:11:16.780] – Tammy

Absolutely. Because when you want something this big in a school, our size of 3,200 students and 240 teachers, you need to make sure that the PLCs or the pathways, and I’ll go back to that autonomy and teacher choice, we wanted to make sure that the pathways that we laid out were broad enough and that covered what the students needed as well. So the first thing that I made sure of is facilitation skills matter. And when you have a PLC or when you have a team or even when you have someone engaging in action research, you need that person to have facilitation skills of other adult learners. So one of the pieces that I made sure of is that every single PLC leader, team leader, or action researcher was part of our adaptive schools training. So I made sure that they had adaptive schools training. We’re in year two of that as a school. Our goal is 100% by 2026. So all of our facilitators were on that training. I then brought those leaders together and we went through what is a PLC? We used, obviously, your framework for that as well. And how do we effectively lead the learning of adults?

[00:12:40.840] – Tammy

What we came up with, and again, this came from our professional growth committee, is that in order for us to really see if a hypothesis is going to work is if we put people together in impact partners. So that word impact was really important for us. We’ve been using that word well over the years, but we wanted to define it more, and we wanted to make sure that people were properly supported by having another person that when they came into someone else’s classroom, they were focused. So when impact partners came together, those impact partners were within the same PLC. So they already inherently are part of something that they care about, something that their hypothesis is about. I’ll back up even more. Let’s say a PLC is about a question around phonemic awareness. They have a group of students that those students are not picking up on the phonemic awareness of the unit. And they would like an extra set of eyes in their classroom to sit next to one or two or three students that are not not picking that skill up. Sit next to those students and watch those student production behaviors to see what is happening there.

[00:14:10.560] – Tammy

Are my instructions not landing? Is there something that I need to do for, let’s say, the scaffold? Is the environment not right for them? What is it that is or is not landing? Is it working? Is it not working? What is the impact there? So the impact partners, they’re not giving feedback on the teacher’s quality of instruction. No, they’re giving feedback on the impact of their strategy for that specific hypothesis. So it’s very targeted. And when we were speaking to teachers about impact partners and target students, when we talked about one to three students, you could see people’s shoulders just relax because we weren’t talking about a hypothesis and action research on 70 kids. No, we were talking about a very small cohort of kids that if you were to learn about these kids, you can use what you’ve learned for the other kids in the room. And so it decreased. People exhaled a bit. It didn’t feel burdensome. And in fact, it increased their curiosity as well.

[00:15:28.280] – Steve

So how did you form the PLC groups?

[00:15:31.590] – Tammy

We did a survey and asked that one simple question: What do your students need you to learn? When I stood up in front of the teachers in August, now, I’ve been an administrator for a long time, and I know that in August, there’s a very few amount of things that you are able to say to teachers and them be able to think about because what do they want to do? They want to go to their classroom. They want to set up their room. They want to set up their binders. They want to set up their folders, their cubbies, their bulletin boards, their class. I get it. I was a teacher. So I started small, and I intentionally started to plant seeds. So I got up in front of them and I said, We’re going to be curious this year. We’re going to think about what you your kids need you to learn. And I said, For the first six weeks, you’re not going to see me in a full staff meeting for six weeks, but I want you to think about your kids, the kids that are in front of you. Do you have more EAL learners than you’re used to?

[00:16:46.010] – Tammy

Do you have someone that perhaps has dyslexia that you’ve never supported before? Do you have a student that isn’t following directions, but you’ve never encountered this behavior a year before? What is it that’s new in front of you that you need to learn to support that one kid, two kids? So I left them alone for six weeks, and it worked. Again, I got back in front of them. I said, okay, now it’s the beginning of October. What have you started to think about? What do you need to learn for your kids? What are the trends? So that survey went out, and I got feedback, and I started to see trends as as we would. Very similar trends to what we saw the year before, phonics, math. We started to see things that we didn’t think we were going to see. And I loved it. And one of them that stood out to me was, I really want my students in Arabic to speak more. We want their motivation, their ability to stand up with confidence and speak more. So it went to the granular, and then it was quite big. One of the things that I learned a couple of years ago was that every single person needed their first choice.

[00:18:11.440] – Tammy

Every single person needed to sign up for something that they wanted to sign up for. And I say that because I made the mistake of the year before giving people three choices, and then some of them got the third choice because I was trying to even out PLC numbers. Well, rookie mistake, that didn’t work. Now, I had PLCs. Some of them were only four, and some of them were 15, and that’s okay. I also gave the option for teams. I also gave the option for action research. I’ll explain the difference between the PLC. Well, I think PLC, we all understand. A team is quite different. Yes, they all had a hypothesis, but I had a team that wanted to dig into ATL skills. So it wasn’t really about looking at a student. It was looking at a school policy or procedure and seeing what is best for the school right now, which would then affect the students. I had a K-12 counseling consultation group that came together and said, we want to do case-based studies. We want every counselor to come to one meeting, and it be their meeting, and they do a problem-solved, problem process type of a protocol.

[00:19:31.750] – Tammy

We had people that said, you know what? I’ve done PLCs, I’ve done teams. I really want to learn about vocabulary for my dyslexic students. So we had about seven teachers that did action research. We had about five teams, and then we had 22 PLCs, and every single person got their first choice. So again, that autonomy, that ownership, the curiosity, everybody was in engaged because they self-selected that.

[00:20:03.720] – Steve

So the PLCs formed. You gave time during the year for those PLCs to meet. Then within the PLC’s, people had an impact partner, and that impact partner might do some peer observation with their partner as part of it. Those are all pieces that year.

[00:20:27.760] – Tammy

Yes.

[00:20:28.680] – Steve

And then I know ended the year with something you called the Mississippi Slice. Tell us about Mississippi Slice.

[00:20:39.730] – Tammy

Sure. Can I go back a little bit to PLVs? Because I really do want to have this also known that in year one of anything, man, we learn. I think as leaders and teachers, we also have to stop and adjust when we see something isn’t working. I had lofty plans that people were going to get into each other’s classrooms four times over the year. That didn’t happen. So the first three PLCs were called Setting the Stage. And it was the groundwork, team building, adaptive schools, inclusion activities, getting to know you, but also forming impact partners. And yes, we’re colleagues. But when someone else comes in your classroom, that is intimidating. So we needed that bond, that relationship to be built. So that was really setting the stage, setting the groundwork. And then the PLVs, we wanted them in between the next four PLCs. But quickly, I learned, and I’m really glad that people were able to knock on my door and say, Tammy, I wasn’t able to. Tammy, I wasn’t able to. And then I stopped and I sent a staff survey and I said, let’s get real. How many people were able to get into each other’s classrooms from PLV number one?

[00:22:10.170] – Tammy

50% said they couldn’t. I said, all right, that’s okay. If you could that’s great. If you can’t, let’s try for March fifth. So most of our PLVs got between two and three visits done, and that was fine. And I think that’s the other thing I really wanted to just convey here is is that in year one of implementation, we have to be flexible as leaders as well. So we got about three PLVs in there, which were great. The goal of the PLVs, and from the very beginning was, you need to track progress over time. You’re going to collect student work over time because now you have your target students. We’re not talking about 70, we’re talking about three kids. You keep their work in a portfolio. And then over the year, we’re going to get to something called a Mississippi Slice. Now, it seems like I made this term up. I didn’t mean to. I promise you I didn’t. So let’s go back to my protocol training in New York City.

[00:23:22.960] – Steve

It didn’t sound like a New York City term to me. [laughter]

[00:23:23.840] – Tammy

[laughter] No, it’s not. It’s not at all. But here I was. I was in New York City. I was in Manhattan. I was at a national school reform protocol training, which was one of the best trainings I’ve ever had, and they have the best protocols. And when I was there, I heard about a slice. Now, somehow in my mind, it was called a Mississippi Slice. Turns out it’s a Chicago slice. It will forever be known at DAA as Mississippi Slice in Dubai, Mississippi Slice. And I’ll tell you why. So Mississippi Slice is this, is that you collect student work over time to see that student’s progress from September to May. You can do this with assessments, you can do this with artwork. You can do this with anything. But where you put in a strategy, you can say, Here’s where I put this strategy in for phonemic awareness. Here is where I put this strategy in for my student that I found out that’s dyslexic. Here’s where I put this strategy. And you see the nuance and the impact that strategy had, even if it’s small, on the student work. Perhaps the student writing went from one sentence to two sentences.

[00:24:48.570] – Tammy

That’s impact. Perhaps that student that was in the podcast room for Arabic was only able to speak a couple of words, and now they’re saying a whole paragraph. That’s progress. And so we collected work over the whole year, and that was communicated from the beginning of the year. So on June 11th, we had an art gallery style session where we closed down the high school floor. We were very lucky. All the kids were gone from assessments. I pulled out the student desks into the hallway. Every single PLC had their own section of the hallway. And I ordered every single teacher, so there were 300 slices of Mississippi mud pie in these little boxes with a little fork.

[00:25:43.050] – Steve

I love it.

[00:25:45.100] – Tammy

It was delicious. It was absolutely delicious. So delicious that I got more emails and WhatsApp the next day and that night about the Mississippi mud pie than anything else. But in all seriousness, what I asked people to do to set up this gallery is to set it up like a gallery. I did not want people to be standing at a poster and explaining what they did. No, I wanted it to be a journey. I wanted it to be a Mississippi meander down a river, down a journey. This was my hypothesis. These were some of the strategies that I use. And then the student work was laid out over time. October, November, January, April. We’re going to forget about the floods because nothing happened for those weeks. And then at the end, we saw the impact. And so it was a really nice culminating of the year’s work. And it was all of the PLCs. It was all of the teams, and it was all of the action researchers. So 240 teachers came together over a slice of pie and the impact that they had on students.

[00:27:03.160] – Steve

Very cool. What a celebration.

[00:27:05.790] – Tammy

Yeah, it was great.

[00:27:08.400] – Steve

So what insights are going to carry into next year from what you learned this year?

[00:27:16.680] – Tammy

I think one of the things that we do well at DAA is that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don’t do that, but we do stop and reflect, and we iterate. We do not rest on our laurels. There are very good things that have come out of this that we will continue next year. We will continue with hypothesis. I even wrote a staff email and I said, you may have changed your hypothesis. That’s good. That means you’ve learned. And I even gave them a document to change their hypothesis. We’re going to make better hypotheses next year. We’re going to be more tightly aligned. Perhaps you were in a PLC, but now you want to do action research. So we’re going to keep the bones of what we’ve created here. We got a lot of feedback that perhaps there was too much time in between visits and the next PLC. So I want to take that into account as well. I’m going to reconvene my leaders and my professional growth committee and do a real end of year debrief, what went well and even better if. But really, we’re going to keep the bones of it because so much of it was impactful and people left even more curious.

[00:28:31.420] – Steve

That’s the big payoff, really big payoff. Well, Tammy, thank you so much for sharing both your enthusiasm as well as your details as to what you did. Is there a way that the listeners could touch base with you? If they have a specific question, what’s the best way for them to do that?

[00:28:53.530] – Tammy

Happily, give my email address. It’s t.jochinke_daa@gemsedu.com.

[00:29:14.010] – Steve

Terrific. Thanks again.

[00:29:15.892] – Tammy

Thank you so much.

[00:29:16.720] – Steve

Have a great summer.

[00:29:16.740] – Tammy

Thank you. You too.

[00:29:21.870] – Steve [Outro]

Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.