Thought Provoking Email

Last night I received this email from L after I sent out the assignment rubrics and marks yesterday morning.

 

הי ניקי, לראשונה מזה  14 שנות עבודתי בהוראה, קיבלתי התייחסות כזו אישית ממדריכה בהשתלמות.

 תודה ושנה מצויינת

ל

Translation: Hi Nikki, This is the first time, in my 14 years teaching, that I have received a personal response such as this from a leader in a professional development course.

Thank you and have an excellent year,

L.

Answer same day:

ל, ריגשת אותי!

שבת שלום,

ניקי

Translation:

L,

You moved me!

Good Sabbath,

Nikki

 

Most of the teachers wrote back and returned my blessings for a good new year and a few remarked that they hoped I would run additional courses in the future. Some commented again on the positive learning experience they had received.

I was struck by L’s response but realized quickly that instead of smiling to myself and enjoying the compliment, the remark troubled me and opened up a flow of questions:

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What did I do that was seen as being so personal?

Is this really (so) unusual?

What causes a teacher to feel seen and heard in a learning framework?

What does the Education Department have to say on these issues? Are there guidelines? Is this an issue?

Why is personal response so absent in many professional learning frameworks?

and maybe more importantly: Is this the dialogue that is so missing in the eyes of a few of the teachers I have interviewed for my PhD. It is indeed becoming more and more apparent that this is a key concept!

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I have complained in the past that the decision to shorten courses to 30 hours makes it far more difficult to form significant relations with the lecturer and within the group. I have written often that it bothers me that I don’t know all the names of the teachers in these groups and I don’t always know how to match the narratives I read on the online campus with the faces I see in class.

What is the connection between personal attention and response to significant learning? We talk about it all the time in reference to pupil learning and it is somehow disregarded when considering teacher education.

Where do I place emphasis on personal and professional relationships in these courses?

I begin my courses with the letter I write to participants. The letter, inspired by the work of Dr Julian Kitchen, tells about myself and the way I see the course. In my experience, it immediately forms a sense of intimacy between myself and the teachers individually. The letters I receive in return have a personal tone to them and many teachers remark that they were excited to read my letter and to have a chance to present themselves in their own words.

Another feature of the course is the opportunity to write a narrative about the teaching of writing. Teachers are invited (required) to compose a text which describes a successful project, lesson or interaction, to present a dilemma or a problem or to describe another aspect of their work in detail. Teachers are given the stage on the online forum and then receive significant feedback from peers – compliments, thoughtful questions, ideas, advice, empathy etc. In addition, I respond, in length, personally to each and every teacher narrative. A face to face session invites the teachers to further engage in peer conferencing and evaluation surrounding the narratives before revision and reposting on the online forum.

The final assignment of the course is mainly reflection on what happened in the teachers’ classrooms and what significance the learning experience had for them personally and professionally. Maybe this opportunity to look inward and to communicate those thoughts with others contributes to the feelings of sharing and personal connection.

I return the assignment with a rubric explaining the grade and a personal comment. Usually I write which part of the assignment I found most interesting. After reading L’s email, I ask myself  how other lecturers communicate with teachers about their assignments. Are the assignments returned? Are marks sent by email? What kinds of comments are written?

It seems I have little knowledge about what really goes on in other courses. I need to follow this lead as it will throw a lot of light on the stories I am hearing in my interviews with teachers.

 

 

Assignments in…

paper

My computer is now full of assignments sent in by the teachers who participated in the course at Z.

Formally, I have to read the assignments, fill in the rubric I created and gave along with the task, and assign a final grade to each teacher. I also will need to write a few sentences to each participant before I send the work back by email. In addition, I need to choose three assignments, one at a very high level, one of medium quality and one at a low level and submit them to the Department of Education.

I am curious to read these reflective texts and to compare and contrast them with the feedback these teachers wrote on the last day of the course.

Last year, after I read the assignments, I went back and chose sections that I wanted to use in my paper at the AATE/ALEA conference in Hobart. These quotes were an important part of my presentation. On the other hand, I didn’t know how to use those reflective texts in my research.

As I don’t yet have ethics authorization (that’s another story…) these materials will have to remain in the background, as the backdrop for my own narratives about these courses. I see these texts as a means of looking at the professional learning achieved by the teachers from different angles.

What I need to do now, I think, is to revisit each assignment, after I have graded it etc, and highlight different themes which arise. I imagine it will be easier if I keep some kind of table with the name of the teacher and page number relating to a particular theme – comparison with other PD frameworks, experience writing narrative, change in classroom practice etc. Then I will be able to revisit relevant texts and also see which themes are more prominent. I am sure that the next batch of papers, from the group at A, will be very different, even though they received the same task.

In addition, I should be trying to identify participants who may be willing to be interviewed in the future.

By the end of April, I will have around 100 of these assignments. It is a shame that I can’t relate to them as data in the normal sense but these teachers did not sign an ethics agreement at the beginning of the course. I am limited to using them in my own reflection and study.

An extra task will be recording comments and my own reflections on improving the course. Just as I made several changes this year, I am sure I will receive ideas for new modifications from reading these papers. If I leave this reflection to next September it will be a far more difficult process and will be less effective.

I am going to save trees and ink and work on screen with this. I’m not sure I will manage but it is certainly worth a try.

 

RF image: http://www.images.com/

Inquiry into Effective Strategies for Teacher Professional Learning – Victoria

Freewriting 2 – 15 minutes of thinking

Today I’m going to have another go at writing in general about my thoughts on the report before I begin pulling it apart and analyzing it section by section.

There were many points in the report which pleasantly surprised me and many that sound fine in the framework of a government report but it is obvious that when they reach the field they will be completely different. It will be interesting to see how many of the internal conflicts will be resolved. An example of one of these conflicts is the recognition that there are a great variety of PL options and the importance of teacher choice and autonomy on one hand, and the need for control, documentation and quality control on the other. Another is the time and energy which are recommended for investment in PL and the fact that there are no effective practical suggestions for lightening teachers work load in order to make PL an integral part of a teacher’s work load.

The question addressing the connection of teacher learning to measurable student outcomes remains unclear. The committee realises that it is not always possible to evaluate PL by evaluating student achievement levels and also the fact that not all PD aims at changing student achievement levels – behavior management studies are an example of this.

I cannot understand the internal Australian politics – why on earth does each state need a separate policy and separate frameworks for determining teacher advancement and development? I wonder what happens when teachers move interstate? How does this report interact with others I have read recently?

I am interested in the learning opportunities made possible by university – school partnerships and am sorry that there are no such initiatives in my area in Israel – they probably exist in the large cities.

I was happy to see that online options for PL are gradually becoming viable.

The report is long and very detailed and I am interested to see what effect it will have.  

Creating Collaborative Relationships of Power in Literacy Teaching-Learning

This book describes another example of university-school collaboration project aimed at teacher learning.

A unique feature here is that the teachers determined the direction of inquiry and not the academic researchers.

The term collaborative here is used to describe the way the teacher researchers learned to work with the uni researchers AND how they learned to involve their students more in their whole language classrooms.

The authors discuss the production of knowledge about teaching and quote Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993, who explain that often knowledge about teaching is formulated in academic frameworks and then transmitted to teachers.

Pappas and Zecker also cite Gitlin (1990) who points out that most in most educational research, issues studied are almost never initiated by teachers. This balance of power in research implies that teachers have nothing to contribute from their professional knowledge.

“Teacher research promotes a new, distinctive way of knowledge of teaching because it privileges teachers as those with the authority to know about teaching” (p. 4).  

“Showing and talking about particular features of their teaching that were working well gave the teachers feelings of accomplishment and demonstrated strategies that others might try… On the other hand, airing difficulties or vulnerabilities in inquiries afforded opportunities to obtain new ideas or directions to consider” (p. 6).

The theory that all humans construct knowledge through social interactions = “socioconstructivist perspective on literacy” (p. 7).

  • Wells, 1994b
  • Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992

Vygotsky – 1962, 1978

  • Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995
  • Moll, 1990
  • Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989
  • Wells, 1994a, 1994b, 1998
  • Wertsch, 1985, 1989, 1991

Pappas, C. C., & Zecker, L. B. (2001). Introduction: Creating collaborative relations of power in literacy teaching-learning. In C. C. Pappas, & L. B. Zecker (Eds.), Teacher inquiries in literacy teaching-learning: Learning to collaborate in elementary urban classrooms (pp. 1-13). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates.

Professional learning = Student learning? / Doecke & Parr

Today I reread the first chapter of Doecke and Parr and was surprised that the notes I had made previously didn’t make the blog or the methodology chapter.

Points I will add are:

  • Through writing teachers can explore their professional lives and “refine their understandings of the complexities of teaching and learning” (p. 9).
  • “This is obviously of benefit to the students in their classes, although those benefits do not necessarily translate into tangible outcomes that can be easily measured” (p. 9).
  • “… qualities that teachers value most in their students’ learning-intellectual curiosity, a willingness to engage in exploratory talk, imagination, a preparedness to collaborate while also accepting a degree of autonomy, a capacity to engage in metacognition and reflexivity-are the very same qualities that characterize their own professional learning. Teachers who engage in practitioner inquiry are much more likely to be able to generate a ‘culture of inquiry’ in their own classrooms” (Reid 2004, p. 12 as cited here p. 12).
  •  writing 3 fold: writing as artefact, writing as process, writing as medium – see p. 13. I can link the writing in my thesis to these concepts.

 

 

Doecke, B., & Parr, G. (2005). Writing: A common project. In B. Doecke, & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing = Learning (pp. 1-16). South Australia: Wakefield Press.

 

Can’t get much clearer than that – PD = teacher collaboration

In this letter to the new president of the US, Lieberman and Pointer Mace call for a move from traditional PD for teachers to a model of PD based on the collaborative learning  from teacher experience and knowledge. The authors explain that “Teachers work in isolation and only rarely have a chance to observe their colleagues or talk about their teaching work” (p. 226).

“But professional development, though well intentioned, is often perceived by teachers as fragmented, disconnected, and irrelevant to the real problems of classroom practice” (p. 226).

The authors claim that traditional top down forms of PD do not recognize the particular needs of classes, the teacher’s own knowledge and that there are varied ways of achieving successful learning in schools. (p. 227).

“Instead of creating the conditions for teachers to teach each other, support their peers, and deepen their knowledge about their students, teachers are being given a “one size fits all” set of professional development workshops that deny the variability of how teachers teach, and how they and their students learn” (p. 227). 

The article also explains the social aspect of learning, that people learn through interaction with others. “They learn through practice (learning as doing), through meaning (learning as intentional), through community (learning as participating and being with others), and through identity ( learning as changing who we are). Professional learning so constructed is rooted in the human need to feel a sense of belonging and of making a contribution to a community where experience and knowledge function as part of community property. Teachers’ professional development should be refocused on the building of learning communities” (p. 227).

  The NWP is quoted as a successful model of PD through teacher collaboration (of course the teacher as writer is also involved here).

Another example is the networked communities in the UK (studied by Jackson, 2006; Jackson & Temperley, 2007). “The school networks helped to create practitioner knowledge (from teachers’ experience), public knowledge (from research and theory), and new knowledge (from what was created together). (p. 229).

“These networks of teachers from different schools managed to raise achievement for students, taught the participants how to work collaboratively linked yo “rigorous and challenging joint work”, and managed to build trust in helping make teaching public as they developed and distributed leadership among the teachers (Earl, Katz, et al., 2006)” (p. 229). 

 See: Networked Communities

http://www.ncsl.org.uk/networked/networked-leo-search.cfm

http://www.nlcexchange.org.uk

Gallery of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org

 “Living archive” of teaching practice

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/insideteaching/

“The teacher communities described here exhibit the best we know so far about effective professional development. They focus on instruction; are sustained and continuous, rather than short term and episodic; provide opportunities for teachers to lern from one another both inside and outside the school; make it possible for teachers to influence how and what they learn; and engage teachers in thinking about what they need to know (Hawley & Valli, 2007)” (p. 233).

 Lieberman, A., & Pointer Mace, D. H. (2008). Teacher learning: The key to educational reform. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(3), 226-234. Retrieved from http://jte.sagepub.com  

Getting Teachers to Write – narrative draft

notebook_sized.jpg 

While writing this thesis I was running a professional development program for teachers of grades two to six. The name of the twenty eight hour course was “Improving Literacy in a Heterogeneous Class”. The teachers voluntarily signed up.  I began the course by asking the fourteen teachers participating to fill in a questionnaire about themselves, their teaching experience and their expectations of the course. I included a list of possible topics and asked them to mark those most relevant and important to them. I was not surprised to find that the most pressing topic for all of the participants was the teaching of writing and supporting struggling writers.  I opened the third meeting by asking the teachers to write for ten minutes in silence, the topic being an experience they have had teaching writing. I told them that we would be discussing those pieces after the writing period was over.  One teacher immediately left the room, a toilet or coffee break I assumed. Another took out her cell phone and began clicking furiously. Others doodled quietly in their notebooks, began listing points or began to fill lines with Hebrew script.  I sat and watched them, uncomfortable with the squirming that was going on in several of the seats. Each minute that went past was like five, my watch didn’t seem to move. I forced myself to wait ten minutes, resisting my urge to cut the time down to seven or eight minutes.  Silence was kept in the room for most of the time, although occasionally there were embarrassed giggles or a whisper.  When the time was up, some of the teachers were still busily writing their narratives and were sorry to stop. Others looked relieved and were waiting to get on with the seminar.  In the discussion that followed I was interested in hearing what had happened to the participants in those ten minutes, what they had felt and what they had experienced and done in that time.  Many of the teachers commented that they are unused to writing on demand and that they felt uncomfortable. Some confessed that they are not used to writing at all. Several remarked that the time limit and the expectation of sharing their writing pressured them. At least two of the teachers didn’t write at all in the ten minute period. Only two or three confided that they enjoyed the writing experience.  We looked in detail at what had been done in that time and saw how the writing process is different for different people. Afterwards we discussed the implications for these differences in our classrooms. One of the teachers who didn’t write anything, an experienced grade six teacher, explained to the group that she isn’t a writer. “People are either born writers or they aren’t, I’m not” she said. The group discussed this statement. Is it true? If it is, what does it mean for the teaching of writing? I added that this is one of the major misconceptions held by struggling writers in our classes.  I asked the teachers if anyone was willing to share their text with us. Two of the first volunteers started to tell their story without looking at the page. I stopped them and reassured them that it is clear to everyone that this is the roughest of rough draft but that we want to hear what is on the paper.  Two of the pieces we heard were well structured, interesting stories. We were amazed by the writers’ style and clarity. At the end of the session I explained that our next meeting would not be face to face, that we would be meeting on the virtual campus. Each teacher was required to do three things, firstly to revise her story about the teaching of writing (or write another story) and to post it on the assigned private discussion board. The second task was to reflect on the teaching story and on the experience of writing one, I supplied possible directions for this. The third task was to read stories from other group members and respond.  It took ages and lots of encouragement for the first teacher to post a story. She wrote about a poetry anthology she had successfully produced at her school. The poems were all connected to Israel’s sixtieth birthday. This teacher told how she had created a poetry unit suitable for each different age group, chosen appropriate poetry to teach, and encouraged the children to write. Every child in the school had writing published in the festive booklet. She told her story modestly but proudly and expressed her personal excitement and satisfaction with the project. A few days after this story appeared, comments began to appear, most of them congratulating the teacher on her success in the project but also on being the first to contribute a story. Questions also appeared. Gradually a few other stories appeared on the site and the discussion was lively.  Unfortunately only five of the participants took part in the discussion. At our next meeting, I devoted time to the oral reading of those stories posted on the campus and gave those teachers time to share their experiences with the group. I was sure that my enthusiasm, together with showing the participants that it is possible to complete the task, would motivate the others to write and share their stories. A few weeks later, I am still waiting… Although I know that time is a central factor in any work I do with teachers, here I know that the type of task assigned was significant in the low rate of participation.  I am continually aware that these teachers have not been asked to write anything of this nature for a very long time, some of them since they were at school. Another factor is that in a twenty eight hour course many of the teachers do not know each other and may feel vulnerable as a result.  I have tasted this kind of work with teachers and find it far more meaningful than choosing a topic, planning a lecture or a workshop, giving them my knowledge or experience and going home.  When I read the stories written, I was greatly aware of what I have been learning, that every teacher has something to say, that each teacher possesses professional knowledge which can be a wonderful starting point for collaborative learning. S, a second year teacher, had been very quiet and reserved in the first two sessions. We discussed writing in the third meeting and I brought examples of authors talking about the writing process and about how laborious composition is. Suddenly, S shyly told the group that she keeps a personal diary and that because she lives alone she comes home and pours her day into writing. She confessed that writing is an important part of her day. The narrative S wrote and posted was written in very simple language but told a very powerful story of her battle to get her second grade pupils to write. She told us how she used to spend each Sunday morning hearing stories from her class about what they had done on the weekend. She was frustrated that it was always the same children who related experiences and that many remained silent. She told that it was difficult for many to choose just one experience to share.  One day, S gave her pupils special notebooks and told them that they were going to write what they wanted to share from their weekend and that afterwards those that want to can tell their story. She was shocked by the result. Firstly, everybody wrote, including those who usually don’t share and her struggling writers. Secondly, many more children were willing to tell their stories. S, excited by this lesson, decided to continue.  In the weeks that followed, S asked her pupils to write every Sunday morning and was happy that the children wrote willingly and that the texts produced were more and more complex. More and more pupils asked to share their work. As a result of the reflection S did when writing her narrative for our group, she started asking the class to write on other occasions, after recess for example. Another addition was that she herself started writing while her class was busy with their heads down. She used the time for reflective writing on teaching issues. In the weeks that followed, writing became an accepted mode of communication in S’s class. When children were involved in an argument or had a problem, she asked them to first organize their thoughts by writing them in the notebook and that afterwards she would be happy to listen to them. It worked. When S got to school after her day off, she would find a pile of notes waiting for her on her desk. Subject teachers who taught the class were surprised when they began to receive written communication from the young children.  S received positive feedback on her work from the members of our group and also heard ideas for continuing and expanding her work. I found it very satisfying that through this activity she realized that she has something significant to share with a group of experienced teachers. Many of the veteran teachers certainly had something to learn from this shy and nervous early career teacher. I realized that S was similar to her shyer pupils, those that only dared to share a story when they had it firmly on paper.  There is no tradition of composing teacher narratives and collaborating on them in this part of Israel. There are presently no formal options for professional learning through dialogic writing and discussion. Despite the fact that this small scale experience was only partly successful, I am optimistic that significant learning frameworks can be established for Israeli teachers in this direction.  In order to succeed, I believe teachers need to know ahead of time that this will be the framework of the seminar and that they know they will be committed to experience the writing and discussing of teacher narratives. A mix of experienced and early career teachers is likely to be preferable – building on the enthusiasm and burning need for collaboration amongst newer teachers and the experience and knowledge of veteran educators.  I have already taken the first few steps. I have surprisingly managed to convince the coordinator of language and literacy in the northern area of Israel, that this is the way we should be going in our PD for next year. Most of the courses we will be offering will deal with the teaching of writing and they will all be structured around teacher collaboration and the writing and sharing of narratives.  If we begin with a respect for the knowledge the teachers bring with them and their honest desire to raise the achievement levels of their pupils in writing, I hope they will sign up and then be open, flexible and active participants.