What should teachers expect from school leadership in the support of teacher growth? What expectations should school leaders have of teachers in their investment in professional growth? Katherine Hamilton, vice president of programs for Ensemble Learning explores these questions with Steve.  Designing for teachers as professionals is key to generating educator learning that impact student success.

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Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.290] – 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.

[00:00:29.960] – Steve

Professional development that impacts teacher learning and student outcomes. Our podcast guest today is Katherine Hamilton, Vice President of Programs at Ensemble Learning, where she oversees the development, implementation, and evaluation of all programmatic activities, with a focus on leadership for multilingual learner equity and implementation of high-quality dual language programming. Katherine has nearly 15 years of experience in K-12 education as a former secondary mathematics teacher, an instructional coach, and a Director of Curriculum and Instruction at a public school network in Los Angeles. Katherine specializes in effective teaching and learning, instructional leadership, and overarching strategy to ensure equity for all student groups. I’ve asked Katherine to join me in an exploration of the investment in professional development. How do we make that investment so that it’s truly focused on teacher growth for increased student success? Welcome, Katherine.

[00:01:46.020] – Katherine

Thank you for having me. Excited to talk about professional learning.

[00:01:49.800] – Steve

Terrific. For starters, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction to Ensemble Learning and your role there?

[00:01:59.000] – Katherine

Yeah, absolutely. So Ensemble Learning is a nonprofit. And I like to say that we have the luxury and the privilege of focusing really just on equity for multilingual learners. And we know in today’s age, teachers, school leaders, just have about a million things on their plate. And so really, we come in and partner with teachers, school leaders, schools, school districts, and really help them reduce the noise and look directly at their multilingual learners. We do that with professional learning and coaching, leadership growth through walkthroughs, but really just looking at culture and instruction for those students who are still working on their academic English.

[00:02:44.010] – Steve

Talk a little bit about the specific role that you play.

[00:02:47.850] – Katherine

Yeah. In my role as VP of Programs, I get to really see everything that we are doing across the United States and ensure that the work that we are doing has this through line from the services we are providing directly to actual behaviors of school leaders, of teachers, the practices that they are making part of their day-to-day work, and then again, that through line into student learning. I get to sometimes work directly with our clients, the person on the ground, having those leadership conversations. And then sometimes I’m behind the scenes with our team, really strengthening the way we deliver professional learning or coaching, ensuring that it’s research-based and ensuring that we are really aligned with the needs of our students.

[00:03:40.280] – Steve

So when I looked at your background and knowing we were going to explore professional development, I’m wondering what experiences you had as a teacher and perhaps as an instructional coach that have influenced your beliefs about quality professional development.

[00:04:03.900] – Katherine

Yeah, that’s a great question because I think a lot actually about a specific time in my career. It was early in my teaching career. I was actually in my second year of teaching, and we had had a leadership change at the school. The first principal, the principal who had hired me, was very instructional-focused. I received a lot of support, professional coaching and professional development, and he left our school between my first and second year. And that second year, I was really fortunate. I had a really great team of colleagues. We all really cared deeply, but we were all pretty early career teachers. It was a school that had opened just a couple of years prior, so it was just a very young staff. And we had a new principal, but he didn’t have that same instructional background. And in collaboration with a couple of my colleagues, we came to we’re not going to get the support and the development we need unless we really spearhead it. And we were really lucky that our principal is very collaborative with us. But we basically went to him and said, hey, we have this plan of teacher-driven professional learning.

[00:05:15.070] – Katherine

These are the things we know we need to work on based on what our students need, what we need. And we built some systems around professional learning and then peer observations and walkthroughs, peer coaching. But that was one of the most fun experiences. There was so much joy in that year, in the day to day of working with my colleagues. And it had this aha of, you know what? I actually really enjoy working with adults and thinking about teaching and learning and coaching adults more than I enjoy teaching the 15, 16-year-olds. And that says a lot. I’m a total math nerd. I taught high school math. I love it. I love students. But I really realized intellectually that we have to think really deeply about the support we’re providing to teachers and think about it as the whole system of what teachers experience. Most of their day is with students, and they’re really analyzing, checking for understanding, understanding what their students are doing. And we have to really think about how we provide those professional learning experiences in a real job-embedded, coherent, relevant way. And so that year really influenced, I think, my deep beliefs about we have to provide professional learning that is accessible to teachers, that is relevant, that is – when you’re meeting with them in coaching or in PD, I want their eyes to light up and say, yes, this is what I need.

[00:06:49.730] – Katherine

This is what I’ve been struggling with. And so those beliefs really permeate everything that I continue to do. And we think about a lot when we go into a school, we’re also outsiders coming in as Ensemble Learning. So we have to work twice as hard to make that relevance, that coherence, that meaning for teachers.

[00:07:11.590] – Steve

There’s a thought that’s going through my head as I was listening to you. What I was hearing is PD is part of the process instead of PD is the process. There’s a place you’re going, and And because of that, you brought the PD in. But I think too often, the PD is seen as the isolated process.

[00:07:38.490] – Katherine

Exactly. PD, you have to think of really the whole system and how all of these pieces play together. The whole experience teachers are having in their career and professional learning is a piece of that and helps the journey. Exactly.

[00:07:55.620] – Steve

So talk us through the approach that you take there as you as you plan PD to support the clients you’re serving?

[00:08:05.010] – Katherine

Yeah. A really big piece for us is we try to almost embed ourselves in the district and learn as much as we can about their current situation. And so before we build out a PD plan or a partnership with a school, we’ll do an audit. We’ll go in with the leaders, we’ll observe in classrooms, We have a baseline look for some of those foundational practices that serve multilingual learners well. And we’ll look at the data with the leaders. And then we’ll also ask a lot of questions. Tell us a lot about your staff culture. Tell us about the experience level of your teachers. Tell us about your current school strategic plan. What are you working on? Our goal really is to say, well, here are the things that we see need we need to make some progress on in order to better serve your English learner students. But how do we build coherence with the work you’re already doing? Because if we come in and say, oh, we know you’ve been working on writing over here. You’ve been working on this, but hey, we’re coming in and you need to do this other thing, we’re not going to see the impact.

[00:09:23.870] – Katherine

And so it’s really figuring out, they’re already on this stream, the school year’s started or going, and how do we jump in and paddle along with them versus being the salmon swimming upstream. So what we will do is take all that audit data, all that information, and we really synthesize it into a goal that we work on with the school. And then we will outline the series of how a series of professional learning will build upon itself. And then also going back to that systems view, what are the things that we’re doing between that professional development to keep the learning going and moving forward and to provide that differentiated support for a school? For example, we’re partnering with a school in the San Francisco Bay area that when we went into classrooms, there’s a lot of teacher talk and not much student talk. Our goal was really, how do we support academic student talk that then can lead to stronger writing, can lead to deeper textual analysis, a lot of things that lead to deeper literacy practices. Really thinking about the series of professional learning that takes bite-size pieces that models and breaks down practices for teachers, gives them then a chance to plan and practice, and then bring back feedback about how it worked in their classroom to the next PD.

[00:10:58.420] – Katherine

And so really breaking it down, we obviously go with the less is more. I would rather you implement one meaningful practice than me to teach you six strategies that none of them work because it’s just too much.

[00:11:17.490] – Steve

It’s interesting because I’ve been in this field a long time. But very early in my career consulting and working with schools, the realization I made that most schools tackle way too many things through the limited amount of PD time and resources they have – they’re touching on everything where one thing deeper is much more likely to have an impact on teacher growth and student learning.

[00:11:55.430] – Katherine

Yeah, you get it. Exactly.

[00:11:59.340] – Steve

There’s this good feeling of we’ve hit all these things, especially in the elementary schools, because they’ve got all that content for all the different teachers, and their goals are all over the place. To zero in on a piece of PD that they’re really going to stick with is necessary but difficult.

[00:12:25.400] – Katherine

The parallel is we coach teachers to shift their mindset from did I teach it to did they learn it. As school leaders, as consultants or professional development providers, we have to do the same thing. It’s not did I teach it? But did they implement it? Did it impact students? And it’s really about holding ourselves accountable. Often the narrative gets spun, “oh, we did this PD, and then the teachers didn’t do it.” And that’s just wrong. Teachers are amazing. They want great things for their kids. And we have to go back to, did I present the PD? Did I set up the activities in the PD such that they could, without much more lift, go implement it? Then also, what are the activities around the PD? How did I follow up with coaching? How did I follow up with an accountability reminder? What are the other strategies and as coaches or leaders, shifting our mindset around my success is your success. When you implement it, when you see the impact on students, that’s how I measure my impact.

[00:13:45.680] – Steve

So I’d like to look at expectations. And I’m wondering if, as a teacher, what expectations should I have of school administration, regardless regarding professional development? But then flip it as an administrator, what expectations should I have of the teacher regarding professional development?

[00:14:11.100] – Katherine

Starting with the leader, I think the most important thing that a leader needs to do is set a culture of we’re all continually learning and we’re all continually improving. And without that culture, it’s hard to then hold each other accountable or have these expectations for each other, leaders and teachers, of really engaging and putting a lot of effort towards professional development. And so I think as a teacher, you can expect, you can hold your leader accountable, you can request that we are setting a culture where all staff are dedicated to our students, and we are dedicated to continually learning and improving so that those students are best served. And I think it’s really hard because I’ve worked in a lot of school systems, and I know that this isn’t the case. But I will say the schools that we work with that are most successful have leaders who believe developing teachers is one of their most important responsibilities. And as a teacher, I think about this, and I actually go back to when I was in grad school and they were coaching us on applying for jobs, and it was all of our first teaching jobs, they really helped us think through what’s the culture?

[00:15:45.510] – Katherine

What’s the PD? What’s the support that you want to have? And so those are the questions I was asking at career fairs of principals, of recruiters, and saying, Tell me what PD looks like. Tell me what coaching looks like. And that’s what I think teachers should demand and expect is that I’m going to be supported professionally with coaching with PD. And on the related, I’m also going to be celebrated for all the things that I do well, because you have to have both sides of that coin to be able to put in that time and energy to try new strategies. You also have to be poured into and respected and celebrated for all the amazing things you are doing with kids. On the flip side for a leader, if you set that culture of continual improvement, the expectation that we are invested, we are engaged. But also, I think a real key is that we also collaborate transparently. There’s nothing worse than giving a PD as a leader. Teachers seem engaged. You set the expectation okay, we just did this activity and this planning, and so you’re going to go implement this with students. And then you as a leader go into classrooms and don’t see any of it happening.

[00:17:10.860] – Katherine

And to me, there’s a breakdown there in the collaboration and the transparency, where I think you need to have a culture where if a teacher is not going to take what they’re learning in coaching or in PD and implement it, there’s a barrier. There needs to be an open culture where they can say to you, I have concerns about this or this isn’t going to work. And so I think it sounds weird, but the expectation that teachers are going to give you feedback and be transparent with you and be collaborative with you, I think is really important. And it’s really that collaborative, we are all in this together, going back to that culture, we’re all supporting students. This is hard work, and we’re all continually learning and improving is really at the core of those expectations. We can hold for one another in those different roles.

[00:18:04.090] – Steve

It’s interesting. I’ve been big on talking about teacher growth being connected to hypothesis. As an individual teacher, I form a hypothesis that if I did this change, it would produce this change in students, which would increase student learning. So in effect, in my head, when a school or a system makes a PD commitment, there’s a hypothesis. So if I go back to just the example you used, if there were more student talk in the classroom, it would increase student success. And so now we’re going to look at PD, and the PD that we’re offering says, if as a teacher, you use these strategies, our hypothesis is that those strategies would cause more student talk, which would lead to this. I laid that out because then in effect, I need the teacher to be a partner with me in testing out our hypothesis. If you implement this strategy and it doesn’t produce what we were looking for it to produce, we all own that. But we all need that feedback because it may mean there’s a modification or a change we need to make in it. I’ve thought through if more often PD could be provided as a hypothesis rather than as a solution.

[00:19:46.410] – Steve

We already know this is going to work if you’ll just go do it. I think it doesn’t open the right door for the teacher.

[00:19:56.840] – Katherine

Yes. I think a lot about the way that we facilitate PD, that hypothesis, sometimes we refer to it as, here’s our theory of action. If we do this, then we do this. And it makes me really… My aha is, how can we make that more transparent in PD? I think we will provide for teachers the research behind the why. We’ll talk about in these studies with an increase in student talk, they measure these impacts on culture and student engagement. They measure this impact on student, their academic language growth. But I think what you’re speaking to is there’s still a gap because for many teachers, they can say, okay, in that one study over there, but for my students in our current context, I’m not convinced. That’s something I think is really powerful. If we can be more transparent about that hypothesis and then welcome the, what hesitations do you have about this? One of the things that we do to somewhat address it that is a more recent practice of ours is between professional development sessions, we go in and actually do a couple of demo lessons with collaborating teachers to demonstrate the strategies with their students because that continues to be a barrier of, oh, you showed us this strategy with adults.

[00:21:36.540] – Katherine

Maybe you showed a video of this strategy with other kids. And I’m not convinced that this hypothesis is true for where my students are right now. And so we’ll do some co-planning with the teacher, and then we will actually go in as the coaches, and we will demonstrate, which we can really pick out a little bit of the nuances of the strategy and highlight those for teachers. And we’ll have the leader come in, and sometimes they’ll film it to show, but really to show the hypothesis. We believe it can be true. We believe it will work with these students. But I love that point, and I think that could be a great way for us to increase bringing teachers in and saying, you’re a part of this journey. This is the hypothesis. PD is not happening to you. PD is happening with you. We’re doing some action research together. This is our hypothesis. We’re going to try it. We’re going to bring back the data and say what worked for our students.

[00:22:35.730] – Steve

It’s part, for me, of seeing teaching as a profession. And profession is an experiment developmental field. So it really doesn’t matter how many different places, how often this research was repeated and caused the result. There’s still not a guarantee that in this classroom with group of kids, it’s going to happen. But as a professional, I owe it to the organization. I owe it to my students to run the test. And so honoring the teacher as being part of the test rather than the teacher being the required person to implement.

[00:23:24.390] – Katherine

Yeah, I love that shift. Check in with me in six months, and I’ll report.

[00:23:31.760] – Steve

Alright – let’s do it. I’ll tell you where I also ran into that was working with curriculum people when they bring a new curriculum program and they talk about fidelity. If fidelity is that the teacher has fidelity to assisting in carrying out the experiment. We think this new curriculum is going to bring about this change, and we need the teacher to assist us in implementation and finding out, versus, too often, fidelity gets interpreted as the teacher following the script, which then the teacher doesn’t see his or her ownership in the desired outcome.

[00:24:18.800] – Katherine

Yeah. It just really increases that level of collaboration among all adults. Too often, to go back to that transparency, too often, especially with curriculum adoption, teachers see challenges with a new curriculum instead of creating the space to say, hey, here’s what we’re seeing. This is this experiment. Let’s bring back the data. Let’s talk about it. Because there’s this over focus on fidelity, check, you’re doing it, then they actually just hide. I feel like they have to hide. I’m going to hide that I’m not using it. I’m pulling from my old curriculum, and I’m going to hide it. The principal is walking in, or I’m pulling out the new book. It’s like, who is that good for? That’s not good for anyone. But we haven’t set up the conditions for that collaboration and transparency and trust of all professionals.

[00:25:27.760] – Steve

I’m wondering the role that you see PLC’s play in the implementation of PD.

[00:25:36.210] – Katherine

Yeah, I think we have to think really strongly, again, as this whole system of development and think about PLC’s as a little bit like the sandbox at times. We have this hypothesis or we have this theory of action. We’re working on this strategy in PD, and we’re having teachers and try it. PLCs are that opportunity to do a number of things. One, often we will guide schools to do a student work analysis protocol to really let’s gather the data of we tried this student talk routine, students talked, we provided language supports for them to talk, and then they did some writing. Let’s look at that writing. Let’s see what are the impacts we seeing of the strategy. And PLCs are like that sandbox where they can look across classrooms, across different student needs, and bring back and say, here’s what I’m seeing in the student work or the student outcomes. And also can be that lower stakes place to bring questions that peers may have a better viewpoint than a principal or a coach coming in. And  I love PLCs as a structure, whether you call them PLCs or grade-level teams or content teams.

[00:27:06.670] – Katherine

Any type of teacher-led collaboration structure is just a really great time to honor the expertise that other professionals are bringing. Sometimes in our professional development, we embed a little PLC component of it because we know that teachers need moment to connect and honor and ask and answer little questions of, oh, how did you do this? Oh, that makes sense. Okay. I’m not going to raise my hand in the whole group in a PD because that feels silly, but it lowers, in the same way student talk, lowers our students’ effective filter. Teachers need that collaborative time, too. But I think it’s our role as PD facilitators or as school leaders to provide the coaching or maybe a protocol or guidance for those PLC leaders to really draw the through thread of, here’s what we’re learning in professional development, here’s the hypothesis, why we’re doing it, what we think the impact is going to be, and then here’s the tool for you or a protocol or training, coaching for you as the team leader to make sure that we’re using this time in a really structured way. I was absolutely really guilty. I loved my colleagues when I was teaching.

[00:28:32.660] – Katherine

And if you didn’t have some of that clarity, you would go and you would chat and you would tell funny stories about your students, and you wouldn’t necessarily get as focused as you needed to. And so as leaders, we have to really pour into those teacher leaders to be able to keep the eye on the prize and keep moving towards the hypothesis and the goals and bring that data back.

[00:28:58.010] – Steve

The word for me as I’m listening to you is reflection. It’s creating that space that increases the reflection for the teacher because that’s where the teacher’s learning is going to be. We can trigger it for each other in the PLC.

[00:29:15.670] – Katherine

Yeah, exactly.

[00:29:17.900] – Steve

Well, Katherine, I have to say this has been as delightful as I was hoping it would be. But before I let you go, I’m wondering if I can steal a bonus component proponent piece. Not what I had laid out and asked you to do, but I’ve got a lot of instructional coaches who listen in to this podcast and school-based leaders. I’m wondering if I have some people listening who have multilingual learners in their school, but their school isn’t at the level of supporting the individual teachers who are working with those learners, there’s not a program in place. And those teachers are turning to their instructional coach who may not have a background in working with English language learners, I’m wondering if you got a couple of starting points as to where those coaches might turn. What are some resources that might be available to them?

[00:30:26.150] – Katherine

Yeah, there’s a lot of great research coming out and strategy is coming out because in the United States. English learners are the fastest-growing student population. And so it’s you’re not serving them now. You probably will be in the next 10 years. I’ll start with culture because we know culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is king. So the first thing is really unpacking with those teachers, how are they welcoming students into their classroom? How do they talk about language in the classroom? And do those teachers, if they’re not bilingual themselves, how can they communicate to a student coming in – “Wow, you’re bilingual. That’s amazing.” As we’re working, we’re going to work on your English. But if sometimes you need to use your other language to help you out or to process or to share your ideas, please do that. Because bilingual brains are amazing. And students who develop bilingualism, they have more synapses for their brains to fire. They have two languages to tap into. And so that sounds really simple, but if you are a teacher who hasn’t taught multilingual students, it’s not something maybe you think of. So really making sure that student feels welcome and celebrated and that you are welcoming their other language into your classroom because that might be a way that they access content better, that they progress better, because sometimes they’re going to be focusing on the English, and sometimes they’re going to be focusing on the science concept or the math concept or things like that.

[00:32:05.240] – Katherine

And even saying to them or coaching parents, if you’re reading a novel in class, help them source it in their home language at the library or things like that, that really literacy is literacy and developing that literacy in their maybe stronger language is still going to be great. And so first, it’s just that really welcoming celebratory culture for that student. The second thing I like to say is thinking about some of the basic language that’s going to start to be the building blocks where students might be struggling. And I go to two really key language supports that aren’t going to be foreign to teachers, but I think I’m going to encourage teachers to use with a lot more consistency. And that is sentence starters and sentence frames, we often over-focus on vocabulary. We’re doing this math problem and we’re talking about perimeter. And so that’s going to be the word on our word wall. That’s really important. We don’t stop doing that. But students often need help with what we call the “mortar words,” the words that they’re going to use around perimeter. Perimeter is our brick. They need help. Okay, perimeter, I know what that is.

[00:33:29.330] – Katherine

But If I’m tasking the students or the writing prompt is tasking the students to explain how they solve for perimeter, just knowing the word perimeter isn’t going to be enough. And so sentence stems or starters sentence frames can be really helpful to get students thinking about the language around the academic vocabulary. The best way for a teacher to start with sentence frames is to actually backwards plan and to look at what would be an exemplar answer that my student would give to this problem? And let me think about how would they solve it or how would they start it? So if the question asked, explain how you solve for perimeter, you In my head, I’m going, I solve for the perimeter by adding up all the lengths around the edge of the garden, something like that. And so I might say, let me see how it goes by just giving my kids that starting point. And so you have perimeter up on the board, but also underneath saying, I solve for perimeter by… And at least giving them that starting point. And I’m not asking teachers, you don’t need to go research the best ways.

[00:34:46.980] – Katherine

It’s literally just from your head, from a exemplar, and just giving some of that language to get started. And fun fact, that’s going to help all your students. A lot of students struggle to get their ideas out, that’s going to lower that effective filter, not just for your new English learner, but really for all students as they’re learning how to express themselves.

[00:35:11.210] – Steve

Thanks for the PD. [laughter]

[00:35:12.450] – Katherine

[laughter] Fun stuff. To be honest, I use sentence starters – I have a three and a five-year-old, and when I can see that they’re frustrated or something, as a parent, I use sentence starters to sometimes lower the cognitive load and help them get out the meat of what they need to say and not worry about the language around it. So it’s a win for all.

[00:35:36.960] – Steve

It’s a critical communication scope.

[00:35:40.140] – Katherine

Yes.

[00:35:41.060] – Steve

Well, Katherine, thank you so much. Tell listeners how they could follow up with you. If they have questions, want to learn maybe more about what Ensemble Learning does.

[00:35:50.820] – Katherine

Yes. I always say, if you have listened to this podcast, you are now officially in the Ensemble family. So you can visit our website, ensemblelearning.org. My email is there. So if the two strategies I suggested are not enough and you are stuck, please send me an email because we can chat. I can share some more with you. I know how hard teachers and coaches work, and so any way that I can be of service. We also share a lot on our company LinkedIn page. Again, Ensemble Learning. You’ll see these three little graduation hats. It’s cute. But we share a lot of resources there. We have a learning center on our website that you can take a look at planning tools, blog posts, things like that. We just are excited to connect and spread the word around supporting multilingual learners.

[00:36:42.250] – Steve

Well, we’ll put the links to those into the podcast later. Thank you so much.

[00:36:46.780] – Katherine

Thank you. I loved hearing your ideas, too. I’m going to shift some of my thinking. So thank you so much.

[00:36:53.410] – Steve

You’re welcome.

[00:36:55.850] – 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 and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.