Rapidly changing issues impacting our schools and communities are driving an immediate and substantial focus on educator learning. It’s important that we implement all that we know in designing and supporting educator learning. Planning backwards, we need to begin with identifying the desired student learning outcomes. What are the most critical areas of knowledge, skills and understanding we want students to develop? With the current world events and our desired future, what are the standards most likely to create students’ current and future success?

With our outcome standards identified, our next task is to decide what students need to experience and do (learning production behaviors) that will generate the desired outcomes. Having identified the learning behaviors, teachers should be informing students, and in many cases parents, specifically how and why these behaviors will impact learning outcomes. This is the step that teaches “how to learn.” It is empowering when one knows what to do to gain a desired learning outcome.

Knowing what the learning production behaviors are, sets the stage for the teacher to design the options for ways to engage learners in those behaviors. This is labeled in the framework below as teacher actions.

A lot of educator learning is built around identifying teachers’ skills, strategies, and tools for creating the options for maximizing learning for ALL students.

A beginning design spot for teachers can be to identify students’ readiness to engage in the learning process. While some students have the necessary background in content and learning skills, others will need scaffolding to support their initial engagement. In addition, some students have passed the readiness stage and need to be engaged deeper or further from the starting gate. Next, the teacher can consider the appropriateness of students working with direct instruction or tackling learning tasks independently or collaboratively with peers. Both the learning production behaviors that are needed and the student’s individual preferences come into play. Student agency can be supported. The mix now of readiness and mode can merge with options of synchronous, asynchronous, and blended models of teaching and learning. While there is great complexity in the multiple twists that planning for learning can take, confidence can be found in knowing that when sufficient learning is not occurring, a few turns can create a new option to try. Feedback from initial plans can guide the direction of the next approach.

Professional development opportunities with coaching and professional learning communities can build the support system for educators to spend their learning time engaged in the most appropriate learning production behaviors. As school leaders, how are you designing the educator learning for your staff? Considering the changes needed to maximize student learning, which staff members are ready to learn? Do some need scaffolding? If so, how will you provide it? Are some staff advanced? If so, how can they best support others and where are the opportunities for them to advance and maybe create new breakthroughs in learning. Where does direct instruction most help and support educator learning? How can synchronous, asynchronous, and blended deliveries provide that direct instruction and create collaborative and independent learning options?

Lastly, as leaders, how are you maximizing your learning options to build your leadership capabilities?

Recently I was conversing with several educators from the same district’s central office team. They shared with me that last spring a decision was made to send all central office staff into the schools six weeks before the state testing date to work with students around common reading skill deficiencies. Teachers identified the students with common needs and they were available for this crash tutoring opportunity.

The week of the test the central office tutors disappeared from the schools and the school life of the students with whom they had been working. As I heard this practice described, I tried to consider “what message” a tutored student would draw.

If they wondered “How important am I?”, I’m guessing the answer they’d reach is, “not very”.  If I were important to these tutors, they would not be leaving. Certainly my reading fluency or comprehension has not made a major increase. So, why did the tutor invest the time during these 6 weeks? Could it be that my test score is important to them? Perhaps, more important than I am.

(I asked one of the central office tutors, “What progress do you think you made with the students during this time”?  She responded, “ I think I had the students interested in reading. That hit me. What a terrible time to leave the learners.)

When teachers are in a staff meeting listening to the principal’s presentation on the test score results for the last year and what should be the focus as the new year starts, what message are the teachers receiving? Are they hearing in that message how critical student learning is in the life of the students? Are they hearing how important they are as professional, caring adults in the life of the students?  Or, are they getting a message that the test scores are most important to the principal….. perhaps, more important than the teaching and learning taking place in classrooms.

When central office staff are meeting with principals and discussing the results of a required state standardized test, what message are they hearing? Are they hearing how important their leadership is in building teaching and learning capacities of the teachers and students they serve? Are they hearing how the central office team is ready to support them in the critical work they do? Or, could it be they are hearing how important the scores are to the superintendent and the board. Perhaps, more important than the school leaders?

In the video How to Avoid Education’s Death Valley , Ken Robinson describes how education is an human system. He suggests that a command- and- control structure will not succeed in bringing about the student achievement results we desire. He says the real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibilities.

This week I challenged a team of central office and school based leaders to consider opening the year with this statement to their teams:

“If you ever feel that the message you are receiving from me is that the test scores are more important to me than you and the people you serve are, please challenge me. Either you have misunderstood my message or I have made a mistake and lost sight of my goal: To support everyone serving students in the quest for learning.”

 I’m hopeful that teachers believing this message from leaders would create the climate for possibilities in their classrooms…and that their students would blossom.

All of you who have been in my training sessions or coaching practices know the increase focus I have personally developed on “student behaviors”.  I believe that the real challenge in teaching is identifying what students need to do or experience that will create the learning outcomes we want. “Teaching my content” is very different from “designing the experiences, motivation and environment” that will lead to student achievement and success.

I found a great list to consider when planning for learning in 7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learningby Katrina Schwartz (Feb 1, 2013).

Pulling from the work of researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the Innovative Learning Environments project, Schwartz’s blog lists these principles: