Tag Archives: teacher growth

Reflections on ACEL 2014: learning, leading, teaching

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Effective change is a matter of both will and skill. People have to want to do it, and they have to know how to do it. ~ Levin

Passion & Purpose at ACEL conference Melbourne by @debsnet https://theeduflaneuse.wordpress.com/

2014 ACEL Conference lanyard on the Southbank boardwalk: passion & purpose

I have spent this week in Melbourne at the 2014 Australian Council for Educational Leadership Conference, including presenting a breakout session with colleagues about our school’s story so far: of building a professional growth model, based on our own context, vision and beliefs about learning, teaching and leading.

It was affirming to hear the keynote speakers’ key messages reflect the real work that we are doing at my school. Some of those keynote takeaways, as aligned with my school’s work around professional growth and culture were …

We know that teaching is complex

Noel Pearson highlighted for the over 1000 delegates that effective instruction is at the heart of education.

Charlotte Danielson reminded the audience of over 1000 delegates that “teaching is so hard it can never be perfect” and that the complex, demanding cognitive work of teaching required educators’ ongoing quest to improve teaching practice, in order to improve students’ learning. She joked that, while doctors’ work is complex, they get to see one patient at a time; “I would call that tutoring.”

In his panel response to Charlotte’s keynote, Phillip Heath, Head of Sydney’s Barker College, emphasised the importance of focusing on celebrating the full, highly cerebral, in-the-moment and sacred nature of teaching, rather than on exposing and shaming failures, or ticking boxes.

Our school’s model of professional growth and culture is focused on a default position of meaningful teacher-owned growth.

Building minds, inspiring learners

Charlotte Danielson also reminded the audience about the constructivist nature of learning for students and teachers; that learning is done by the learner in an active intellectual process. Danielson pointed to conversations in which an observer or leader advises a teacher after a classroom observation, and in which the teacher passively endures the feedback. “Who is doing the work?” she asked. The Danielson Framework for Teaching, or as she pointed out, any framework for teaching, is a conduit for teacher learning which allows teachers to do the thinking for themselves.

Tim Flannery encouraged educators to encourage exploring, imagining and being open to organismic change.

John Medina shared his knowledge around increasing the brain’s executive function, the part of the brain (responsible for openness to cognitive and behavioural change) that we are attempting to access in our teachers by applying a Cognitive Coaching approach to professional conversation and reflection.

Richard Gerver talked passionately about the need for developing self-managing people and systems. Our model’s key aim is the development of teacher-driven, teacher-owned self-managing, self-monitoring and self-modifying teachers-as-learners.

Leading with clarity, coherence and collaboration

Richard Gerver highlighted the importance of the clarity and coherence in educational leadership.

Tim Flannery encouraged collective wisdom over individual genius, the harnessing of the informed community rather than the singular expert.

Linda Darling-Hammond reminded us that “teaching is a team sport” and that the greatest achievement gains are from those schools in which educators work together with a coherent approach. Beware ‘popcorn reform’, she said, with which we might innovate our way to edu-failure. What we need is to learn from each other’s successes and failures; teachers, schools, districts and nations.

Both Linda Darling-Hammond and Noel Pearson underlined the importance of backward design: having students’ learning outcomes and futures in mind when designing their education. For Pearson, this future was “giving people the capabilities to choose lives they have reason to value.” In particular, he advocates for Indigenous Australians to realise the potential, talent and creativity which afford them real choice and the mobility to orbit between external worlds and their indigenous homes, cultures, languages, traditions and peoples.

Charlotte Danielson reminded us about distributed leadership; it is not the principal but all teachers who are responsible for leading learning in schools. Leading and learning are about collaborative growth, not punitive measures. “We’re not going to fire our way to Finland,” she said. “We need to learn our way there instead,” by  coming together as communities of teachers which use a common framework as a scaffold to provide common definitions of good teaching, a common language with which to talk about teaching and shared understandings about what good teaching is and how teachers might enact it. This, Danielson says, helps to avoid conversations in which teachers and leaders use the same words but mean different things.

John Hattie challenged educators to “change the narrative” of education by building the profession and taking pride in teachers, rather than in buildings, resources, websites or canteen menus.

Yesterday, when presenting at the conference, my colleague described our school’s continuing journey as an “evolution not a revolution”, an ongoing, organic and iterative process which is based in our own context and the needs of our teachers and staff.

We have been taking the approach of ‘go slow to go fast’, deliberately unfurling a new initiative by allowing it to bubble up out of the school’s strategic vision and then be piloted, driven and owned by teachers. We have been attempting to distribute leadership in a project which is connected by clear, coherent, school-wide organisation-aligned threads of vision and practice.

Safety and challenge for growth

Charlotte Danielson talked about getting the balance right between support and challenge for teachers; schools need to provide an environment of trust in which it is safe to take risks in the spirit of ongoing professional inquiry.

This need for balance – between safety in which teachers feel supported and trusting, and enough discomfort to challenge practice and change thinking and behaviour – has been a cornerstone for us in providing the setting for transformation of classroom teaching, professional conversation and collaborative culture.

Thank you, ACEL for an affirming experience of layered, interlocking ideas.

Champagne at Crown Melbourne by @debsnet https://theeduflaneuse.wordpress.com/

champagne view from Crown Casino, Melbourne

New York as a site for insights around teacher growth

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A collection of superstar teachers cannot produce the results of interdependent colleagues who share and develop professional practices together. ~ Garmston and Wellman, 2009

NYC snow dome by @debsnet https://theeduflaneuse.wordpress.com/

As I mentioned in my first post, New York is an apt place to conduct my professional learning visits – next month – which are focused around the roll out and implementation of a growth model of teacher professional learning. Our teacher growth model emerges out of the strategic vision, mission and values of the school, and uses:
– non-judgmental classroom observations
– the Danielson Framework for Teaching; and
– a Cognitive Coaching approach to professional conversations around practice, reflection and growth.

NYC has been rolling out the Common Core Learning Standards and Advance, the NYC system of teacher evaluation and improvement. 2011-13 was the preparation phase, including research such as the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project. 2013-14 was the enactment phase and 2014-15 is the phase for reflection and refinement.

The NYCDOE’s 2014-15 Citywide Instructional Expectations call on schools to:
1. Ensure knowledge of students and their work, and use this knowledge as the starting point for planning;
2. Integrate policy into an established, clearly articulated instructional focus; and,
3. Develop a culture of collaborative professional learning that enables school and individual development.
There is a focus on supporting schools in building coherence among their culture, structures, and instructional core and supporting them in reaching the benchmarks for school quality described in the Quality Review Rubric.

The primary NYC teacher evaluation model – Measures of Teacher Practice (MOTP) – involves each teacher:
– Assessing their own practice against the Danielson Framework for Teaching;
– Being observed multiple times by a principal or administrator;
– Reviewing evidence and artefacts which demonstrate their teaching practice; and
– Receiving feedback on these observations and evidence;
– Receiving student survey feedback.

I enjoyed Lisa Nielson’s post on using digital portfolios to ‘capture practice’ and showcase teacher effectiveness. Lisa says that putting together a portfolio on the four domains of the Danielson Framework is “an incredible opportunity to do something that is rare in the teaching profession. It provides an opportunity for teachers to release the great work they are doing from the classroom and share it with the world. It also provides a common language and method for looking at and sharing the work we do.” My hunch is that many teachers do not see the Framework as an opportunity for growth and connecting through professional conversation. Perhaps this depends on the context in and focus for which it is used?

The immediate difference I can see between the model being developed by my Australian school and the NYC Advance program is one of emphasis. Advance seems focused on evaluation, whereas our focus is on teacher growth. That is, our deliberate default position is one of focusing on self-directed growth, rather than on external evaluation or performance management, although in some situations consulting, collaborating and evaluating might be appropriate.

On their website, the Danielson Group outlines the tension between evaluation and growth: “tension between these two purposes; a system of accountability can feel like an ‘inspection’ to teachers, while one entirely focused on professional learning can result in underperforming teachers not receiving important information about their teaching.”

Charlotte Danielson talks about her framework not originally being designed as an evaluation system, although that’s how it was quickly adopted around the world. Her video on The Collaborative Observation Process explains Danielson’s focus on growth rather than inspection. For my school’s context, this was central to our approach to using the Framework. I look forward to exploring this further with Charlotte when I meet with her next week and later next month.

Certainly my school is passionate about developing the culture of professional learning and protecting the meaningfulness of a formalised reflection process for teachers. Our approach is one in which the teacher is in control of the process; they self-direct their own foci and are Cognitively Coached through their thinking about and reflection on non-inferential data, collected from their classroom practice by a teacher-coach (that is, someone without an administrative position, whose role is to observe, listen and facilitate thinking).

Do any educators have experience with how Danielson’s Framework for Teaching is being used in their schools or districts? I am very interested in successes, lessons learned and stories of schools, leaders and teachers.

Lucky (edu)fellow: beginnings of a flânerial professional trip

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It’s time to bring the magic and wonder back into teaching. It’s time to recover the missionary spirit and deep moral purpose of engaging and inspiring all our students. It’s time to put down the spreadsheets and look to each other and elsewhere for how to get beyond the present turning point so we can transform our society and our schools. Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009

Two months til take off.

How does an Australian educator end up planning her way to New York City for a week, in search of insights into teacher learning, implementing teacher growth models in school contexts and using the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching?

Because she is a lucky fellow.

I have been fortunate enough to receive a travelling fellowship from my Australian school in order to undertake an investigative series of visits to educators, school leaders, researchers and edu-experts in New York.

My meetings and visits cover one week in and around New York City. My week will be focused, as Hargreaves and Shirley suggest, on looking ‘to each other and elsewhere’ for learning and growth: my professional growth, teachers’ growth and the growth of my school’s professional learning culture.

Hargreaves and Shirley’s focus on the transformative ‘magic and wonder’ of teaching reflects my own fundamental beliefs about commitment to student learning. Our core business as teachers is enabling our students to find magic and wonder in the world around them, and empowering them to be thinkers, learners and leaders. As teachers, we should see teaching and learning as wonder-finding, wonder-generating and wonder-full.

The particular context for my upcoming professional trip is my school’s teacher growth initiative, which emerges from the widespread research-supported assertion that teacher quality is a crucial determinant in improving student achievement and learning.

Since 2012, I have been working with a diverse team of teachers at my school to design and pilot an idiosyncratic professional learning model intended to refine individual practice and capacity for self-reflection, appropriate to my school’s context. Another key aim of our model is the facilitation of a more passionate, reflective, purposeful community of professional learners in which individual teachers participate in ongoing communal activity to continuously develop the effectiveness of student learning by improving the quality of their teaching.

So, our aim has been to craft a process which is teacher-centred, teacher-directed and focused on teachers’ capacities for reflection and self-actualisation. We are using the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching and a Cognitive Coaching model of coaching as the basis of our professional learning model. The Framework for Teaching (one of a number of maps for teacher practice, chosen because of its relevance to our specific context) gives us a common language for talking about our teaching, and a targeted specificity of focus for our reflections and conversations about evidence and practice. Cognitive Coaching is helping us to focus on growth rather than judgment, with our notion of ‘coaching’ being one of mediating the thinking of the teacher, rather than providing instructional feedback.

New York is the perfect place to refine our thinking as we continue to roll out our own model. The Danielson Framework for Teaching is one of those approved by the New York State Education Department as part of its implementation of the provisions of Education Law 3012-c regarding annual professional performance reviews (APPR) of classroom teachers and building principals. The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has been implementing use of the Danielson Framework since June 2013, after three years of piloting and researching it in NYC schools.

During my time in New York, I am especially interested to see in what ways schools and districts have been implementing the Framework for Teaching; what might be success stories or lessons learned from their experiences so far; different approaches to school leadership in these kinds of initiatives; how data are collected and used to measure success; and any resources, references or contacts which might help my school, especially in its implementation stage, to begin in January 2015.

Can any educators out there share their experiences of current teacher growth or teacher evaluation systems?