Gratitude, awe & delight: lessons from Pollyanna

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

“The game was to just find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas.” ~ Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna

suburban rainbow

As the parent of two pre-school age children, I sometimes wonder about the age at which we are expected to be less excited by the world and more serious about it. At our local park, there are always children rolling down the grassy hill, rolling themselves over and over into dizzy giggles. On occasion, I have joined in with my own children, but a ‘grown-up’ covered head-to-toe in grass and leaves, or with scraped knees from climbing trees, or cupped hands filled with meticulously-chosen sea shells, doesn’t seem appropriate somehow. Yet I have been known to race out of my classroom to get a better look at a rainbow, jumping and clapping my hands, a line of bemused high school students trailing behind me. Recently, my small children and I have been playing with mirror-ball Christmas decorations in the late afternoon sunlight, painting the walls with light patterns.

mirror ball joy

Finding daily magic, seeing things from new perspectives, and allowing ourselves daily moments of presence, connection and wonder are surely the starting points for gratitude. One of my fondly-remembered childhood stories is that of Pollyanna, the girl whose ‘glad game’ and glass-full outlook changed those around her. With her rainbow-maker prisms, physical symbols of everyday magic, she promoted thankfulness, wonderment, the search for everyday magic and trying to see the good in life. In Pollyanna’s exchange with John Pendelton, they bring magic to each others’ worlds, tranforming dreariness into a fairyland of wonder:

It was toward the end of August that Pollyanna, making an early morning call on John Pendleton, found the flaming band of blue and gold and green edged with red and violet lying across his pillow. She stopped short in awed delight.

“Why, Mr. Pendleton, it’s a baby rainbow–a real rainbow come in to pay you a visit!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together softly. “Oh–oh–oh, how pretty it is! But how did it get in?” she cried. …

“Well, I suppose it ‘got in’ through the bevelled edge of that glass thermometer in the window,” he said wearily. “The sun shouldn’t strike it at all but it does in the morning.”

“Oh, but it’s so pretty, Mr. Pendleton! And does just the sun do that? My! if it was mine I’d have it hang in the sun all day long!”

… in a moment he was slipping off the pendants, one by one, until they lay, a round dozen of them, side by side, on the bed. “Now, my dear, suppose you take them and hook them to that little string Nora fixed across the window. If you really want to live in a rainbow–I don’t see but we’ll have to have a rainbow for you to live in!”

Pollyanna had not hung up three of the pendants in the sunlit window before she saw a little of what was going to happen. She was so excited then she could scarcely control her shaking fingers enough to hang up the rest. But at last her task was finished, and she stepped back with a low cry of delight.

It had become a fairyland–that sumptuous, but dreary bedroom. Everywhere were bits of dancing red and green, violet and orange, gold and blue. The wall, the floor, and the furniture, even to the bed itself, were aflame with shimmering bits of colour.

“Oh, oh, oh, how lovely!” breathed Pollyanna.

At the end of this exchange, Mr Pendelton says “I’m thinking that the very finest prism of them all is yourself, Pollyanna.” Pollyanna’s view of the world influences those around her. She is prismatic in the way she acts as a medium through which others’ joy and gladness can shine.

Greenflea Market, NYC

On my recent trip to New York City, I was reminded of Pollyanna. I visited the chandelier stall of Montenegrin-born Ljatif Mecikukic at the Greenflea market on Columbus Avenue. This stall is one which I have visited on all three of my visits to New York. Previously I have photographed its sun-splitting glinting crystal prettiness, but this time I also brought home a little ring of Pollyanna-style prisms, my own rainbow-making iridescence-radiating magic, stashed in my suitcase. A little Spanish chandelier from the Upper West Side:

prismatic chandelier

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the USA. As I, across the world, watch the light dance through my NYC prisms, I am contemplating Pollyanna’s ‘glad game’. My gratitude list includes:

Incredible support from those around me, which allows me to enjoy the multiplicity of roles and joys I have chosen: as parent, educator, PhD candidate, wife, daughter, sister, friend, adventuress, flâneuse, rainbow-seeker.
Being celebrated for being myself by family, friends, colleagues and PLN, no matter how random, left-of-centre or nerdy that is.
Being supported in my always-learning always-living, by my family, critical friends, affirming friends, PhD supervisors and online PLN.
Opportunities for professional and personal adventures, including macro ones like international travel, and micro ones like waterfall-clambering with my children.
Immersion in the power of storytelling: through reading the stories – real and imagined – of others, and through my own narrative research, my work as an English and Literature teacher and this blog. It’s an honour and a privilege to hear others’ stories.

Most of us don’t live in a naïve state of perpetual optimism, and there are circumstances and life events which make being glad, thankful or grateful, very challenging. Hopefully by looking for the good in situations (and in people), and by being present in our daily lives and conversations, we can connect for long enough to feel delight, awe and wonderment (thank you, Costa and Kallick). We can be the prisms which help others see beauty in life, themselves and others.

Broome beach, a place for reflection, wonder, delight & sand between toes

Why blog? Personal evolution & community transformation

Posted on November 16, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. ~ Ernest Hemingway

doorway

I began this blog a few months ago as a way to explore, record and share my thinking around a particular self-directed professional learning experience: a trip from Australia to New York intended to gain insights around teacher effectiveness, teacher evaluation and teacher growth. The trip was amazing personally and professionally. I met with schools, school leaders, teachers, researchers and global edu-experts who challenged and inspired.

Now that initial blogging purpose is sated and I find myself wondering: should I continue blogging?

My first instinct is: yes. And that mainly emerges out of the enjoyment I have found in reflecting, writing, sharing and engaging with others as a result of my posts. I alluded in post about social media for educators, this post about being a connected educator and this one about finding your professional global tribe, that Twitter has been invaluable in connecting me with other like-minded (and non-like-minded – just as important!) people. Blogging, however, allows for much more developed thinking than tweeting. Twitter can facilitate 140 character conversations, but it doesn’t allow you to burrow deep into ideas and give them a shake. So since blogging, I have been blogging about blogging, and now I’m at it again.

My reservations about continuing a blog are primarily about time. I am a parent of two pre-school age children, an educator at an Australian school, and a PhD candidate who is two years, 150 pages and 300 references into my thesis (more about how I juggle those things here). Right now as I write a blog post about whether I’ll write future blog posts, there is a long list of other things I could be doing.

And yet, here I am.

Partly because this blog has allowed me to explore my own thinking around my work and study. It is a free space to write. I have my PhD to write too, but blogging is a space in which I can write without pressure and with more freedom of style and content. It keeps me thinking and learning and connects me with other thinkers and learners.

I also know what other blogs give me. They can be transformational, inciting change, encouraging action and inspiring thinking through the sharing of stories, expertise and others’ intellectual struggles around big and small ideas. They promote reflection, conversation and growth, in the blogger and the reader. Perhaps my own musings might provide insights for others, open a window to my context, challenge another’s thinking or facilitate connections across geographical and philosophical boundaries?

So I feel propelled to continue blogging, but I wonder how that journey might evolve, if anyone will read my posts, and if that even matters. Certainly I would (will?) be a blogger who blogs when I have something to say, rather than to chase numbers of clicks on a page.

possibilities

Developing reflective practitioners: a conversation with Charlotte Danielson & Cindy Tocci

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

As our understanding of teaching expands and deepens, we need a vocabulary that is correspondingly rich, one that reflects the realities of a classroom where students are engaged in learning important content. Such a framework is valuable for veterans as well as novices as they all strive to enhance their skills in this complex work. ~ Charlotte Danielson, 2007

fall colours

Brilliant fire-coloured fall foliage frames Princeton’s historic Nassau Inn, where I sat in a booth with Charlotte Danielson, creator of the Framework for Teaching, and Cindy Tocci, executive director of the research arm of Educational Testing Service. Somewhere in the wooden table is Albert Einstein’s name, where he carved it when he was a visiting professor at Princeton. After explaining my school’s journey with our teacher growth model, we talked about coaching, the Framework for Teaching and the challenges of maintaining a reflective transformative professional culture.

What is a coach?

One question raised was about the level of expertise of the coach: was conversation expertise enough, or was it more useful to also have content expertise? Our team of teacher coaches will often work with those outside their own area of expertise; this builds connections across school boundaries and allows the focus to be on pedagogy and the teacher’s own reflection, rather than on content. Another related question was raised about the potential space between a feedback-based (judgement given) approach to coaching and a reflection-cognition-based approach (no judgement given).

Charlotte challenged that “the opposite of judgement is not ‘do nothing’.” A collaborative approach was suggested as an alternative, in which teachers work together in a conversation to solve problems of practice or generate ideas for improvement, in which both teacher and coach are participating in the conversation as reflective educators. This speaks to some feedback we have had from teachers about their coaches not being ‘in’ the conversation and feeling that being Cognitively Coached was a one-sided unbalanced experience. In a coach-as-collaborator conversation there would need to be clarity around how much of the coach’s self it is appropriate to insert into the conversation, and how much content expertise the coach would need to meaningfully contribute to the discussion. There would still need to be restraint in resisting the urge to solve another’s problem for them and in the tendency to advise someone to teach using your own teaching preferences.

For us, I think the default position for the coach still needs to be the facilitator-of-another’s-thinking role, but there may be room for collaborative approaches to the parts of the conversation. Is collaboration appropriate for us in this context? Or perhaps peer collaboration in which teachers really work together in this way is an appropriate strategy for our teachers to pursue for their growth outside the official coaching conversations?

Princeton leaves

How to apply the Framework for Teaching?

Charlotte and Cindy both noted that, while it is important to strive for accuracy when using the FFT, it is important that teachers, coaches and managers not get too caught up in the micro-analysis of detail, or looking for all the dot points. In fact, Charlotte has been developing a more holistic, less broken-down ‘clusters’ model which encourages teachers to look at the big ideas of the Framework, as an alternative to the original document. This alternative might be a way for our teachers to focus on the big things happening in their classrooms, rather than minute details of lessons.

How to develop understanding of the Framework for Teaching?

Master Coding of teaching videos was explained as a difficult but powerful exercise in developing an attuned, precise understanding of the Framework for Teaching and forging shared understandings of its language. Videos of classroom practice are useful for teachers in showing how the Framework components translate into practice, and for coaches in developing a common understanding of the Framework and what particular levels of performance look like in practice. Collecting video footage of lessons involves:

Choosing a range of short lesson snippets (e.g. 10 mins) which relate to particular Framework components;
Ensuring audio, as well as visual, quality is good, especially if students are doing group work (how do you capture what students are saying? How do you decide which groups to listen to?)

Videos should be watched and independently scored, followed by conversations around the reasons for those individual scores, in order to reconcile individual perspectives into a group agreement.

Videos of coaching conversations also have a place in helping coaches to deepen and develop their coaching practice.

These kinds of rigorous processes take time. Charlotte and Cindy both highlighted the importance of a slow implementation process in which groups develop their understandings together.

We also talked about using the Framework for Teaching for teacher self-reflection purposes and also for student reflection on the sorts of learning and environment of their classroom. My school has been experimenting with different teacher self-evaluation tool possibilities, as well as perception surveys, but hasn’t developed a concrete approach to asking students how their classrooms rate against the Framework for Teaching.

How to encourage regular reflection between formalised processes?

Another challenge raised was that of developing the learned skill of reflection in teachers in between these formalised reflective processes. How do we know teachers are reflecting regularly on their practice in order to grow their practice? How can we make sure teachers are asking themselves:

What did my students learn today?
What did I learn about my students today?

Any model of teacher growth has this challenge: outside of the formalised process, how do we encourage and ensure meaningful reflection and growth on an ongoing basis?

IMAGINE

Transformational adult learning and growth: a conversation with Ellie Drago-Severson

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware. ~ Martin Buber

Columbia University

It was my privilege to meet in New York with someone whose writing has shaped my PhD research and my school-based work in building a teacher growth model: Ellie Drago-Severson.

Ellie is a developmental psychologist and Professor of Education Leadership and Adult Learning & Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her ‘four pillars’ of professional learning are: teaming or partnering with colleagues within and outside the school; providing teachers with leadership roles; engaging in collegial enquiry; and mentoring (or coaching).

While I have read her work (including Helping teachers learn: Principal leadership for adult growth and development, 2004; Becoming adult learners: Principles and practices for effective development, 2004; and Learning for leadership: Developmental strategies for building capacity in our schools, with Blum-DeStefano & Ashgar, 2013) it was most interesting to hear her stories of working with teachers, school leaders, schools and districts to help them apply learning theory to practice. One example was of a school which, after working over time on the learning of its teachers, now consistently achieves the highest student achievement scores in its district.

Teachers College

Ellie’s examples of working with educators were based in some fundamental principles:

Teachers are adult learners who own their own learning and should be provided with choices. They should be able to choose if they are ready for growth. Even in mandated programs they should be able to choose their own paths.
Developmentally, learners may initially want ‘the answers’ or to be told how to improve, but the aim of adult learning should be to develop self-authoring individuals. Coaching should aim to grow individual capacity (e.g. Developmental Coaching, Cognitive Coaching).
Talk defines and drives behaviour (similarly to the beliefs of Adaptive Schools I explored here). Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation (2002) looks at how language determines feelings, governs action and impacts learning. As well as talk, the quality of listening has been confirmed by research to be a developmental support for learning.
Change should start at a slow pace, with volunteers, building momentum and reach over time.
‘Push back’ (resistance or questioning) should be welcomed and explored.
The key to learning is a trusting nurturing environment in which people feel ‘held’; they need to be simultaneously supported and challenged. It is vital to spend the time building culture and developing group norms and ground rules for confidentiality.

Strategies that Ellie uses when working with educators include:

Exercises from Developmental Coaching, such as those which help individuals to identify the underlying beliefs driving their behaviour and build a plan to address those beliefs;
Informal ‘drop in / drop out’ lunches to which staff are invited but not required. Lunch time conversations based on professional readings and the question ‘What might this look like in your practice?’
Journals for teachers / coaches / leaders as a sacred technology-free space for thinking.

There are many affirming ideas here for my school’s work in designing and implementing a teacher growth model, including the importance of a trusting environment, the role of talk and language, deliberately going slow, and providing scaffolds for ownership and differentiation of learning.

Some questions that arise are:

To what extent are we differentiating our teacher growth process for teachers? Is it enough for their experience to be one of meaningful, self-driven ownership?
What further strategies might we employ to build the cognition and engagement of teachers in their own learning (such as optional journals and online portfolios, or informal lunches to talk about teaching)?
How might we support those staff who are not yet self-authoring learners to develop their capacity for self-directed learning?

trust & rapport from the High Line

Teaching Matters: the challenges of putting theory into school practice

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

The personal is linked irrevocably to practice. It is as if the teacher is his or her practice. Teacher practice is the maximum point of vulnerability. Classroom teaching is the arena of greatest anxiety and insecurity. ~ Goodson, 1991

Teaching Matters

It’s amazing how flying across the world can result in familiar conversations! In my meeting with New York City professional development provider Teaching Matters, the same challenges and tensions came up for both our contexts in terms of professional learning, supporting teachers and developing distributed leadership: time and buy-in. That is, finding appropriate time for teachers to thoughtfully engage in meaningful work, and providing the philosophy and conditions which allow teachers to buy in to that work.

Teaching Matters is an independent provider of customised professional development to teachers and leaders of New York City public schools. Their aim is, by partnering with and training teachers and school leaders, to increase teacher effectiveness, raise teacher performance and positively influence student learning. Their organisation is built on a philosophy of sustainable change; that is, to build capacity in the schools with which they work, in order to help each school to build its own effective teams and teachers. They base their work in a belief about the capacity of teachers to be leaders and for schools to be vibrant places of distributed leadership. Their job, as they see it, is to help schools develop their own cultures and skill sets to ensure effective leading and teaching.

Understanding the busyness of being a teacher and the need for workable, applicable solutions for teachers, Teaching Matters balances its work between building schools as professional communities, and providing accessible protocols, tools and techniques for use in teaching, assessing, improving instruction, establishing PLCs, coaching and leading. Teacher buy-in, for them, is linked to teachers’ perceptions about change being something which will be manageable as well as useful. They are therefore highly aware of the need to support teachers professionally while also saving them time and work. The problem of innovation fatigue – “another additional thing” constantly being added to teachers’ workloads – seems an international phenomenon which needs to be considered when designing anything new to be implemented in schools.

My work on professional learning and growth is within my own school and with my own community, whereas Teaching Matters needs to “synergise” with the diverse school cultures and people with which they work. Much of their work is based on that of Daniel Venables, author of A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams (2011) and How Teachers Can Turn Data into Action (2014) and founder of the Center for Authentic PLCs. Venables focuses on the development of high-functioning professional learning communities to facilitate positive school change.

We discussed the challenge and opportunity of leveraging data to monitor and inform change, such as teacher self-reflections against the Danielson Framework to, for instance, allow the identification of community professional development needs.

A question that came up in our meeting was around the use of the Danielson Framework. My school is using it for teacher growth, through cycles of observation and coaching, but to what extent might it also inform teacher planning or the work of teaching teams?

I heart NY

One of the Teaching Matters foci – data-driven collaborative inquiry as a way to improve student outcomes – sits snugly with my school’s work on developing a data-supported coaching cycle of teacher reflection and growth. Interestingly, one of their documents suggests that the best teams of teachers are those who teach the same content and share the same learning goals.

The Teaching Matters approach to peer observation involves the following steps of a teacher being observed by one or more members of their teaching team:

A pre-observation conversation in which the teacher outlines the lesson context and the teacher and observer/s discuss the time and focus of the observation (20 mins).
A classroom observation (or video) in which the observer/s takes notes on what the teacher is doing, what the students are doing and what practices are being used by teacher which relate to goals for student learning (30-45 mins).
A post-observation conversation in which the observer/s share observations, questions, constructive suggestions and future steps/strategies (45 mins; protocols are based on ‘Conversations: Turning Points Transforming Middle Schools,’ Teachers working together to improve instruction (4, 2) 2004)

Our model differs to this one in:

its length of lesson observation (ours are 2 x 20 minutes, rather than 1 x 30-45 minutes);
the type of data taken (our observers take all non-inferential data – just what happens rather than impressions about what is happening); and
its approach to post-observation conversation (ours is a Cognitive Coaching approach which does not involve ‘constructive feedback’ or lesson advice; our teacher coaches are there to guide the teacher’s own thinking about their lesson rather than provide comments about it themselves).

While our coaches do find that seeing others’ lessons influences their own teaching, this is not a formalised part of the conversation for us; the conversation is focused on the teacher being observed. I can see the Teaching Matters model as very useful collaborative work: peers in the same team observing each other’s lessons and using that as a basis for team discussion of pedagogy. Perhaps this might be something we can add to suggestions for strategies that teams can use to collaboratively develop pedagogy?

While working in content-similar or year-level-similar teams allows for collaboration on and experimentation with similar approaches, my school has also found value in teaming teachers from disparate parts of the school to broaden perspectives while also connecting teachers around those aspects of teaching which are common across year levels and subject areas.

Like Teaching Matters, what we want to provide for our teachers and leaders is both a philosophical foundation and a useful toolbox of processes and strategies, to help teams and individuals self-direct their growth.

HOPE at 7th & 53rd

Context is king in teacher growth: connecting with the Upper East Side

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

It is not down in any map; true places never are. ~ Herman Melville

school on the Upper East Side

Today I visited a school on the Upper East Side of NYC which is in many ways similar to my Australian school. While they have vertical campuses and we have horizontal ones, both schools have some similar structures, similar values, a focus on the whole child, similar expectations of teachers and a similar desire to build a context-appropriate model for teacher growth, collaboration and professional culture.

Like us, they have been grappling with how best to design a model which fits their school context and their teachers’ needs. Their challenges are similar to ours: finding a model which is school-appropriate, and time for managers and teachers to enact it in a meaningful way (rather than as a tokenistic ‘tick a box’ process to be gotten through).

In speaking with administrators and teachers, this school’s model for teacher growth has a similar goal to ours: to facilitate meaningful, evidence-enriched conversations around teaching practice which encourage teacher reflection, collaboration and growth. It is being piloted with middle managers this year and its components include:

A supervisory model in which the line manager is the observer who leads the pre- and post- observation professional conversations;
A set of school-customised descriptors which emerge from fitting the school’s expectations of their teachers within some elements of the Danielson Framework for Teaching;
The teacher receiving a score from the line manager based on how the line-manager rates the teacher against those school-customised descriptors, on a four point scale;
The teacher receiving clear specific feedback from the line manager about areas of strength and weakness; and
Use of Folio Collaborative to manage the lodging and monitoring of the process. One thing I particularly liked about Folio Collaborative was its ‘spotlight’ function in which staff are able to ‘shine a spotlight’ on a colleague’s practice by adding moments of celebration or excellence they have seen.

class windowscape

I can see the value of, as this school has, developing a customised series of descriptors of ‘what teaching looks like at this school.’ It allows staff to see clearly the alignment with the school’s core values, allows the school to own the language, and provides a more streamlined document than the hefty-feeling Framework for Teaching which can seem daunting. This streamlining may be seen to dilute the complexity of the Framework for Teaching and the precision of its rubrics which allow teachers to easily find a place to fit their lesson evidence, based on clear research-supported descriptors at each level of performance.

Where this school’s context is different to ours is in their history of performance review processes. While my school has a series of well-worn processes for recruitment, permanency/tenure and appraisal/review/evaluation, this school does not have existing processes and is looking to put them in place in a way which is beneficial to its teachers. They are looking to develop a feedback system which stems mainly from managers, while we are looking to move towards a less manager-driven and more teacher-driven model in which teachers are self-managing and self-directed in their growth, relying less on external influence to judge and grow their practice.

music corridor

Our use of Cognitive Coaching is the cornerstone of our conversations, placing our emphasis heavily on the coach (that is, a peer-teacher for 2 years, and then a line manager in the 3^rd year) as non-threatening facilitator of teacher thinking, rather than feedback-giver and scorer.

The one thing this visit certainly affirmed for me is that context is king. It is important for each school to work with its own mission, values, plan, teachers and managers to grapple with what the most context-appropriate design is for their particular situation.

Many of us seem to have the same goal. We each need to find the path that works best for us, our teachers and ultimately our students.

the world is our neighbourhood

Lessons on Teacher Evaluation from Westchester County

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. ~ Marcel Proust

Today I met with an administrator at a school in Westchester County, New York, who spoke to me about his experiences with teacher growth and effectiveness models being developed and implemented in and around New York State.

It was interesting to hear first-hand about the constraints and pressures on the New York public education system. It seems that laws, funding and standardised testing have had a profound impact on the way teacher effectiveness is being measured and pursued in the State of New York. My understanding is that a law mandating that schools only receive an annual 2% increase in funding has resulted in sometimes severe cuts to leadership roles in schools, curriculum programs, pastoral infrastructure and resources. By the sounds of things, some schools still have middle leadership positions like Heads of Faculty / Curriculum Supervisors, but many have had to lose these roles, putting all the pressure and responsibility on principals and assistant principals.

Additionally, conditions of the No Child Left Behind funding include State-approved teacher evaluation measures. So while Charlotte Danielson published the Framework for Teaching in 1996 with a view to promoting conversations with teachers about practice, it is now used for scoring and assessing teacher performance on a lesson by lesson basis.

Approaches to classroom observations vary. In some places whole lessons are observed and a score given for each and every component in Domains 2 and 3 of the Danielson Framework. Another approach is to take observation data and see which components emerge as the most dominant in a given lesson. Another is to focus data collection and conversation around components which teachers have identified as areas of focus in a pre-lesson conversation.

Each year, teachers receive an effectiveness score, based on a very “paperwork driven” system which includes:

Observations from their administrator (60%)
School-based pre- and post- year testing (20%); and
Student scores in standardized national tests (20%).

Each teacher’s score is available to parents (“Your child will have Mrs AAA who received a score of BBB and was rated Highly Effective/Effective/Developing/Basic”?). The school also receives a publically published ‘report card’ based on its students’ test results and its teachers’ effectiveness scores. So teachers and schools are quantitatively scored on their apparent effectiveness. Interestingly, the administrator I spoke to said that his personal experience of the scoring of teachers by these measures presented a highly inaccurate picture of their effectiveness.

It seems that this quantifying and scoring of teachers and schools leads to a skewing of the teacher effectiveness model. Administrators might, for instance, give their teachers false ‘highly effective’ ratings. Teachers might teach to the test. The administrator told me that teachers began seeing themselves in terms of numbers (“I’m a ‘3’”) but that “you can’t quantify highly effective teaching.”

While in Australia schools are often measured by league tables based on standardised testing, we certainly do not have the same pressures as those in the United States.

This administrator’s reflections on what could and should work in a teacher evaluation and growth system were:

The focus should be on teachers talking about their practice, not on numbers;
The Danielson Framework should be a tool for growth, conscious competence and developing a common professional language among teachers;
Schools should ask what it means to be a ‘Danielson School’: a community of learners who think and talk about teaching practice, and in which professional development is aligned with the Framework;
Money and time are both significant challenges to meaningfully and effectively developing a meaningful model which encourages teacher growth, especially in a United States context; and
Teacher-administrator/coach/observer conversations should be based on invitational questions which encourage cognition, but there are situations in which teachers may need more direction or support in terms of talking about evidence or reflecting against the Framework; there is an expectation that the teacher is engaged in the process and prepared for pre- and post- conversations.

A teacher growth reconnaissance mission: takeoff

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren’t well enough to travel. ~ Sir Vivian Fuchs

For the last few years I have been working with others in my school on a consciously-developed, research-based and teacher-driven model for teacher growth and professional collaboration. Our work over the research and pilot years has been based in some central assumptions around learning, school change and leadership: that all teachers have the capacity for reflection and growth; that going slowly and deliberately will result in more positive roll-out; that leadership is distributed; and that leaders are responsible for facilitating the self-driven self-managed learning of others, rather than telling, advising and solving.

Pleasingly, our work so far seems to be fostering that which it originally set out to cultivate by:

developing a common language for and shared understanding of ‘good teaching’;
strengthening professional culture by connecting teachers across the school, and by formalising professional conversations about teaching practice;
depersonalising classrooms, with teachers more open to and familiar with having others in their lessons;
providing a formalised process of reflection which is meaningful to teachers, allowing them to improve their teaching and develop their capacity for reflection while honouring their individuality and respecting their capabilities; and
supporting teachers as leaders and experts, both in their collaboration with others and in their own capacity for self-reflection and growth.

Our experience continues to be that our work on teacher growth has subtle immeasurable ‘butterfly effects’ across our teaching, relationships and communities.

Grand Central

As I explained in my very first post and another post, I now have the privilege of traveling to New York in order to gain some international insights for our Australian work.

Sitting in the departure lounge at Sydney International Airport I am reflecting upon what I might find during my time in New York visiting educators, researchers, trailblazers and edu-organisations. It’s time to ride on a big jet plane and find out.

awaiting departure at Sydney International Airport

Kaleidoscope selves: find your tribe

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

art journal page: Alice in Central Park

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle. ~ Alice, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

José de Creeft’s Alice in Wonderland bronze statue glimmers in Central Park, polished by children’s climbing hands. Alice, of Wonderland fame, is a character who resonates with me. She is ingrained enough in my thinking that she makes more than a passing appearance in my PhD thesis. What I love about Alice is that she is open to new places and perspectives. She is curious, receptive and constantly wondering. She thrives on meeting new creatures and on having unusual, wondrous experiences. She is the imaginative adventuress who at once embodies childhood awe, strong self-assurance, rationality and fear-conquering daring. In many ways she is a flâneuse of Wonderland: wanderer, wonderer, learner and observer.

The question of self is not straightforward. Various aspects of our tangled selves collide and interlock. Or perhaps, rather than tangled webs of gossamer self-threads, we are each kaleidoscopes of self. Forged from a range of asymmetrical elements, we form the spectacularity of the beautiful changeable selves we are when viewed together through a cylinder of mirrors and light.

my bronze-cylindered Arcana kaleidoscope has wheels made of glass and semi-precious stones: this one is by Australian artists Robert Cook & Jocelyn Teh

My kaleidoscopic self is made up of a number of different selves which my @debsnet Twitter bio attempts to unify:

Wanderer. Wonderer. Dreamer. Reader. Writer. Creator. Educator. PhD researcher. Passionista. Disruptor. Imaginer. Innovator. Flâneuse.

Not included are other personal selves like parent, spouse, child, sibling, friend. There are many contexts in which I share all or some of these self aspects. As the kaleidoscope turns and the light changes, people see different patterns reflected from me.

mandala-like patterns as seen through my kaleidoscope

My self-threads splinter, intertwine and blossom, as they do through the kaleidoscope viewing hole.

As I reflected in a previous post, connecting with other educators is for me about being my learner self. Connecting and collaborating widens and globalises my perspectives, while encouraging my own thinking and reflection (see Tom Whitby’s recent post about the relationship between connection and reflection). My teacher self is informed daily by my experiences as a parent, my own learning as a PhD candidate and my online participation. My Twitter interactions are influenced by my daily experiences of parenting, researching and working in a school. My parenting is influenced by my teacherly and researcherly thinking about learning and development. My PhD research self interacts with other researchers on social media as well as being informed by my in-practice educator immersion in my academic topic of study. My PhD itself incorporates me as learner, educator, writer, reader, creator and self-conscious researcher. And here on this blog my posts tangle together the threads of my learner, teacher, researcher, parent, writer and artist selves.

A dear friend of mine recently sent me this quote which I’m sure resonates with many of us:

When you find people who not only tolerate your quirks but celebrate them with cries of ‘Me too!’ be sure to cherish them. Because those weirdos are your tribe. ~ Nanea Hoffman

It strikes me that many of those with whom I connect, in life, in education, in research and in my online PLN, are those whose quirks are similar to mine. Their kaleidoscope colours reach out to me across time, space, geography and social media.

I was recently involved in a Twitter chat with a number of educators. A few people in the chat began talking about being proud to be dorky, to be okay with failure and to constantly be learning. When I tweeted back ‘yes – fellow geeks unite!’ there was a chorus of ‘amen’ and ‘ditto’. I felt like I’d been high fived over Twitter. Here were my fellow weirdos, people who I’ve never met, connecting with me from across the world. “Yes,” they were saying, “In this moment, I get you and you get me.”

Next week I fly to New York to connect in a very real and immersive way with fellow educators, researchers and thinkers who will widen my perspectives. Perhaps I will widen theirs by sharing my Australian story. As this blog attests, I am hoping that my trip will allow my total and joyful submersion in all my aspects of selfhood. I will be thinking, writing, note taking, photographing, drawing and flâné-ing my way to new connections, new reflections and new perspectives.

The word kaleidoscope comes from the Greek words kalos, eidos and skopeō which essentially translate together into ‘beautiful form to observe’. Here’s to finding the beauty in others’ idiosyncrasies and to each of us finding our quirky global tribe.

find wonder, find perspective

The Connected Learner: Reflections on Connected Educator Month #CE14

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

spring in my garden: iceberg roses blooming

Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. ~ Mark Jenkins

As Spring springs here in Australia and Fall falls in the USA (where I am headed in two weeks), I have been reading a lot about how October is Connected Educator month. You can read more from Craig Kemp (Twitter as PD), Tom Whitby (on the connected mindset) and Pernille Ripp (the downside to being a connected educator).

It has me wondering: what about being a connected learner? Because for me, being a ‘connected educator’ means connecting to be challenged, to be supported and to learn.

Twitter is a platform which allows plenty of connection and learning. On Twitter I …

Learn from others around the world – educators, thought leaders, researchers, students, people in other industries, friends and like-minded individuals. I get to read others’ ideas and share my own, and this means I am in a constant place of learning.
Contribute to a localised community hub of learning and thinking, sharing ideas on-the-spot such as at conferences during presentations; I simultaneously contribute to and consume the stream of learning-community responses.
Engage with people with whom I disagree, thereby engaging in debate and widening my perspectives. Corinne Campbell has written about why we need to be careful about the ‘echo chamber’ and only connecting with those who mirror ourselves.
Connect to those in similar situations to myself. This is why I follow #phdchat and #acwri, because as a working parent who is also a PhD candidate (read more about that here), I am not part of a student or researcher community, apart from during my supervisory meetings. Engaging with these hashtags allows me to learn from others while feeling that I am not alone in my PhD experiences. It means that when I am deep in my researching or writing burrow, I can send a shout out (a Twitter SOS, if you like) about my research experience (something that most people in my day to day life don’t connect with) and feel connected to others in the same boat. It allows me, in my moments of isolation and academic struggle, to feel heard by someone out there! I agree with George Couros in his post about why we need to be able to find these kindred spirits outside of our own immediate contexts.

Now, with this recently-begun blogging experiment (Will it continue after my professional learning New York trip? That is yet to be decided!) I have been connecting by sharing my musings (in more than 140 characters), my photographs and my journal scribbles. The very act of writing helps my thinking and the growth of my professional ideas. The subsequent connections with others is about mutual interest and growth. Blogging has helped me refine my own thinking while widening my global learning community (or professional learning network).

Similarly to the ACEL Conference at which I presented this month (you can read my reflections here), my upcoming visit to New York will have me really connecting, face to face, with inspiring thinkers, school leaders, educators and researchers, with whom I have found connections through various avenues, from introductions to cold-emailing. Here Clara Galan reminds us of the importance of connecting in real life as well as in the virtual world.

So for me October is definitely Connected Educator month, but more than that, it is about connected learning. Educators and others around the world connect online and in person, learning together to grow themselves and come up with better outcomes in their arenas of work and influence. Fellow nerds of the world, unite, in any and every way you can!

O, Manhattan!

the édu flâneuse

Blog reflections by Dr Deborah Netolicky

Category Archives: Education