Professional Development
Sandie Albritton, NBCT
EDUL 6017
Summer
Cohort 2007
Learning about professional development has been an eye opening experience for
me! It seems that trust is at the fore
front of any quality professional development program. Many school learning communities have
difficulty functioning due to the lack of trust. Teachers fear retribution if they say the
wrong thing to the wrong person. Through
this web course, I have learned ways to insure trust is developed in a professional
development program. I enjoyed being
able to savor parts of the reading at my own pace. I reread several sections because they
impacted me greatly. Several tips for building trust that I found to be
important are:
I was further struck by the importance of the leader following through with what they agree to do. I have experienced many meetings where decisions and suggestions are made but the school leadership doesn’t keep their end of the bargain. This does not promote understanding! I intend to suggest to my school leadership that they read the book Schools as Professional Learning Communities by Roberts and Pruitt. This text helped me understand several ideas to help transform our learning community.
I intend to take what I have learned about professional learners and implement it at my school. A cohort and I have been working on some ideas about professional learning that we think will help create a strong relationship among our county’s middle schools. The idea that I think would best suit our needs is that of forming a book study group. Since this group will be more informal, we could meet through the county’s e-learn web based classroom.
My school’s professional development is severely lacking according to what I have learned in this class. My administrator began the school year by pushing the idea of forming learning communities based on grade levels. This wasn’t a bad idea but it lacked guidance from the school leadership. Our community started out with tons of enthusiasm. We were looking forward to a new challenge! Unfortunately, our enthusiasm quickly turned to frustration. We weren’t clear about our purpose.
Our community decided to set our own purpose. We determined that improving student outcomes should be our primary goal. Once this goal was set we began analyzing what our students were doing well and in what areas they tended to struggle. We had a good bit of trouble gathering data to analyze. At the inception of learning communities at my school, testing data was held only by the school leadership. As we began to analyze the data we had, we realized that the most effective way to achieve real success was to break up into subject area groups. We suggested this to our school administrators and they agreed.
The subject area learning groups were to meet weekly to discuss learning activities, strategies, and assessments. An idea that came from these meetings was how we can incorporate reading across the curriculum. We came up with journaling in math as a way of having the students read and write about mathematics. Our hope was to instill an understanding that reading and writing are not just subjects for a language arts classroom.
Our school promotes teachers attending staff development activities provided by our local service unit. Any time I have requested to attend a class, my supervisor always approves it. The drawback of these classes is that they are held in a building that is 90 minutes from our school. Trying to get to the class is a challenge. Once you are there, the class is always worthwhile!
The programs our school has on teacher staff development days are not always meaningful. We have had the same collaboration/inclusion presentation every year I have been a part of this staff. The teachers rarely listen because they don’t all have inclusion classrooms. This staff development needs to be more exclusive in its membership.
A major problem that my school faces is lack of trust among staff. Several teachers talk about other teachers in a less than professional manner. I have even seen teachers arguing loudly in the hallway! A couple of teachers run to the principal anytime they do not get exactly what they want. This doesn’t instill trust in all the community members. I think we would all benefit by mutually accepting that we are all good at the field we have chosen and that we should be reasonable in our requests (Roberts & Pruitt, 2003, p.84).
Each year we complete a staff development survey for our administrative leaders. The purpose behind the survey is to determine our needs for staff development. From these surveys, we have implemented training on various aspects of technology. Many of our teachers are “old school”. They still keep grades in a grade book, handwrite letters, and refuse to use the internet. Another item the survey showed that the staff wanted was a time to exercise! We recognized that we all needed the opportunity to get into better shape! We formed a professional learning community around the idea of fitness. This group was exclusive in its membership. They had one requirement; you had to want to participate. Many meetings were lively! The teachers would be power walking throughout the school. As the teachers walked they also talked. What a great way to get to know someone! This group had a clear purpose of becoming more fit. Having a clear purpose kept this group going throughout the school year.
A problem that I discovered based on the readings was that our school needs to incorporate more time to celebrate our successes. We used to do the “hug jug” before every faculty meeting. The jug was a where teachers could write accolades to each other. I got recognized one time because I put together a newsletter for my teammates. It was fun to have what I did shared with the other staff members. The cafeteria manager gave a “hug” to the lead custodian for taking the extra time to help her. Even administrators were given “hugs”. This staff development program stopped when the counselor who was handling it left the school. The “hug jug” has been missed at our school! This was a simple way to build rapport among all staff members. It also kept us energized toward our goal of school improvement. When people get recognized for doing well, they tend to desire that recognition again. I know I did!
I have definitely gained more than three critical insights from this course. The three that I feel have impacted me the most are the stages of group development, book study groups, and enhancing a learning community through mentoring. I feel that each of these concepts will carry me far in my quest to become a school leader. I want to incorporate these ideas in my current role as mathematics department chair and team leader.
My
family is a military one and we have lived all over the
In order to conduct a book study, we will need to have these learning communities set up and functioning. Book study groups can be arranged around what teachers and staff members are interested in. Everyone doesn’t have to study the same ideas. If study groups are formed based on different topics we, as a staff, could learn a great deal. Selecting topics that relate to school improvement could help us achieve our school-wide goal of achieving adequately yearly progress.
Our school also has a high teacher turnover rate. This fact is an impetus for my desire to learn as much as I can about mentoring. We consistently have ten to twelve teachers fresh out of college joining our staff each year. The veteran teachers need to take a novice teacher under their wing. The first year is the toughest and without adequate support many teachers leave the profession. Mentoring a new teacher would help me in my personal reflections about my craft.
One of the questions I want to focus on is how do we maintain the focus on continuous student learning that characterizes learning communities (Roberts & Pruitt, 2003, p.180). We analyze results of state testing each year as a faculty. This gives a picture at the beginning of the year as to what our students’ strengths and weaknesses are. We develop plans to improve on the weaknesses as well as the strengths. We, as a faculty, need to have data collected through out the school year to determine if we are still on the right track.
I have worked in the past with groups of teachers to reflect on the best way to teach the new performance standards. I believe the best direction for me to take in my quest to maintain student learning would be to develop common assessments that we can discuss. Through these discussions we could analyze what worked and what flopped. We could also examine evidence of student learning. Through these conversations we could also develop common ideas on what constitutes exemplary student work. Being the math department chair puts me in a leadership role that I can use to foster gathering and discussing authentic student data. I will utilize the following question from the readings in my focus when dealing with student learning. “What effective strategies have been developed to correct the identified academic shortcomings?” (Roberts & Pruitt, 2003, p.181). I believe this question will help me maintain my department’s focus on improving student learning.
I have another question to explore in depth: how can I foster collaboration with parents in our learning community? Middle schools have historically had a hard time garnering parent participation. The parent wants to become less involved to foster independence for their child. While this is a normal and expected occurrence, we still need parent involvement in the middle school. Elementary schools do a great job including parents. I would like to analyze what exactly the schools are doing that brings the parents in.
One thing that I instituted last year for my team that I believe helped develop more parent collaboration was holding evening conferences monthly. This did enable our team to meet more parents. We were able to develop a strong community of parents that we could call on for support. I would like to continue this by holding a curriculum night early in the school year. I think inviting parents to come hear and see what their child will be learning is a valuable step in creating and maintaining a collaborative environment.
A way that the text suggested was to involve parents as translators. This is a great idea to implement at our school. We recently became the English Language Learners base school. We have many students that speak Spanish and others that only speak Korean. Our county doesn’t have translators available for us. I could establish a list of parents who would be willing to translate at conferences or other important meetings. This practice would go a long way to establish a collaborative environment between the school and parents.
I was also impacted by the information on strategies that will meet the needs of adults as learners. I will be conducting quite a bit of staff development in my new leadership role as teacher leader. Teaching adults is much harder and more complicated than teaching teenagers! I never thought anything would be more difficult than teaching teenagers! I intend to do more research on reluctant learners through the National Staff Development Council website.
I intend to use several of the suggested strategies that I have been exposed too. I can’t wait to use the strategy of carousel. This is an activity that will be easily adapted to my classroom as well. As a faculty, we could begin our school year by working in small groups and come up with our own vision for school improvement. Once the ideas are all posted, each group gets the chance to comment on the proposed vision. What a great way to involve all staff members!
The readings I have done through out this course have energized me for the next school year! I actually can’t wait to get back to work! I’ll be glad when the summer is over so I can implement some of my new found knowledge!
Reference:
Roberts, S. M. & Pruitt, E. Z. (2003). Schools as Professional Learning Communities:
Collaborative Activities and Strategies
for Professional Development.