In a previous blog, I explored how educator learning might be approached through a push or pull model. Push training is traditionally management-driven with information delivered from the top down. Its formally scheduled sending people to training events or programs where they passively receive information, often delivered at a pre-determined time. (I just had a conversation with an educator who shared she was headed to the first day of school for the staff and would be attending a PD session and that she wouldn’t know the topic of the PD until she was seated in the session) Pull training tends to be directed by the learner’s needs and interests. It enables individuals to actively seek and access the specific information they need, precisely when and where it is needed. Pull training has a focus on performance and collaboration, with an emphasis on improving performance, sharing knowledge with others to achieve better results, and actively engaging in communication and feedback to refine understanding.
Jim Knight described these different approaches as outside-in and inside out. (“Real Learning happens in Real Life”) “With the outside in model, leaders identify effective teaching practices and then provide experiences for teachers to learn those practices. With the inside-out model, teachers identify student needs and then match possible teaching strategies to address those needs. Teachers then learn the strategies and adapt them until students’ needs are met.”
In Professional Learning vs. PD: The Distinction Matters, the authors from the University of Utah, who work with educators in schools, describe the need to examine the difference between a “PD mindset” and a “Professional Learning mindset”.
The “PD mindset” appears in sporadic, one-time events, inservice sessions, guest speakers, webinars, and workshops that are not necessarily part of a larger plan or vision.
“Even when they are grounded in research, these activities often do not align with school goals, promote educator voice and agency, encourage learning in community, or respond effectively to students’ and teachers’ needs. Ultimately, a PD mindset attempts a quick fix or offers a small dose of content that is not sufficient to stimulate a change in thinking or practice or address systemic issues.”
The “Professional learning mindset”, centers around accelerating personal and collective learning and closing the knowing-doing gap for leaders and teachers. Shifting mindsets requires reframing the purpose for professional learning and educator support. This shift includes moving from delivering information to intentionally co-designing, with educators, learning and growth opportunities that are grounded in the evidence about what is most needed and most effective.
Andrea Rorrer, Cori Groth and Janice Bradley from the Utah Education Policy Center had earlier joined me on a podcast to discuss using co-construction to build empowerment. “We do not see people as objects of change. The keyword is facilitating. We don’t present to people. We intentionally use moves that allow people to learn and bring their strengths forward in our work of collaboration.”
Ann Lautrette an international school leader and the author of, “The Co-Constructed School,” shared in a podcast how her school applies co-construction as an element of professional learning.
“We’ve established a model of peer coaching that replaced more of a top-down model. We’ve replaced two observations per year by leadership with a peer-to-peer model whereby teachers establish a focus area that they have for a determined period, that’s always extendable. Each teacher has a particular focus area that they want to develop within their classroom. We ask that it be linked to a Departmental Growth Plan, that is linked to the school’s strategic plan, so you have some coordination between what everyone is working on. For example, this year, our focus has been on authentic learning. It’s been a departmental area that they’ve focused on, and each teacher has chosen something or defined their own particular focus area within that broad heading.
Teachers have options of working with either one peer or two and defining whether they would like to work with someone within their department or outside of their department. Then I go through a process of trying to match people up, which is quite challenging, but I try to do that. Over the course of the year, the peers will meet to discuss what their focus area is. They will meet to determine how they’re going to gather evidence of progress within that focus area. They will also include peer observation. But we are very, very keen to say that that peer observation is not evaluative. It’s evidence collection. If I go into my peer’s classroom, I’m going there because they’ve told me they want me to look at something in particular and give them some feedback on what it is. It could be talking to students; it could be looking at student work as well at the same time. It could be just observing the parts of the classroom that the teacher doesn’t necessarily see and then offering that feedback back.
Along with this is the teacher’s ability to ask for professional development that might support them with their focus area. They also have a conversation at the start and the end of the process with their head of department to refine the focus area that they’re setting. What we’ve seen is that teachers much prefer it to a formal observation that is defined on a specific day. They also get to collaborate with people that they perhaps wouldn’t have, especially if they chose to work with someone outside their department. Cross-subject work can result in some great collaborations. We’ve had interdisciplinary units grow out of this because people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other much, have discovered some links in what they’re doing. I think the advantage of this model for leadership is that it’s about trust, because we place a lot of trust in the peer-to-peer pairs they want to grow in their own professional learning. We don’t need to monitor that in minute detail. We don’t need to micromanage that process, we place the structure around the process and then allow people to work with it for their own professional growth.”
How does your leadership build a professional learning mind-set?
