The PD Curator

How to Design Peer-to-Peer Professional Learning That Elevates Teachers and Teaching

Lauren Porosoff

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781416629900
• eBook ISBN: 9781416630425
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

One of the best ways to learn how to be a better teacher is by watching, listening to, and experimenting with the practices of great teachers, including those in your own school.

The PD Curator is about how professional learning experiences can become more inclusive, participatory, cohesive, and effective—and about the role teachers and leaders can play in creating those experiences. That role isn't so much administrative as it is curatorial. Just as art curators can legitimize artists by including their work in a gallery or exhibit, PD curators have the power to legitimize the work of an array of teachers. They help create immersive intellectual, emotional, and social experiences—all while caring for the professionals and the profession.

In this book, Lauren Porosoff explains how PD curators* Structure teachers' schedules to make time for in-house professional learning.
* Select content and create a process for how people interact with it.
* Fit the often disparate pieces together into a meaningful whole.
* Discover whether the event has been successful.

The practical tools and protocols in each chapter will help you plan professional learning that taps into the expertise and interests of a diverse staff. Canned sessions that don't connect with teachers' actual needs will be a thing of the past. Instead, you'll discover ways to support teachers in sharing ideas and trying out new practices that advance student learning. In doing so, you'll empower teachers and students alike.

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Chapter 1

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Building Foundations for Professional Learning

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When my daughter, Allison, was a toddler, my mother-in-law took us to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The photos from that outing make Allison look like an art connoisseur as she posed in front of different paintings. But, really, we zipped through the galleries since she had little interest in just looking at the art. I felt bad. We were at one of the greatest museums in the world, with seemingly all the time in the world, to see art that was there for the seeing, and my kid just wanted to go to the café. Still, even with her refusal to "do" the museum, she understood, as a toddler, what "doing" the museum would have meant. That's because the environment was arranged to encourage a very particular set of actions—looking at and lingering over paintings.

Museum curators are experts at arranging environments to influence how people relate to the things on display—and to one another. Art historian Svetlana Alpers (1991) calls that special way of focusing attention "the museum effect—turning all objects into works of art" (p. 26) and catalogs a dizzying number of decisions that exhibition designers make to create the museum effect:

The way a picture or object is hung or placed—its frame or support, its position relative to the viewer (Is it high, low, or on a level? Can it be walked around or not? Can it be touched? Can one sit and view it or must one stand?), the light on it (Does one want constant light? Focused or diffuse? Should one let natural light and dark play on it and let the light change throughout the day and with the seasons?), and the other objects it is placed with and so compared to—all of these affect how we look and what we see. (Alpers, 1991, p. 31)

In other words, designing a museum exhibition is more than just putting art or artifacts on view; it's also about designing an environment that encourages a particular type of viewing.

School environments are not necessarily designed with adult learning in mind. (We might argue they're not even designed with children's learning in mind, but that's a topic for a different book.) No school I've ever visited has a room called "the professional learning center," and I've never seen a teacher's schedule that has a dedicated PD period.

Unlike museums that might devote an entire room to a single object and encourage visitors to spend as much time looking at it as they wish, time and space in schools are scarce. Even if you like the professional learning ideas presented in this book, you won't actually use them if you don't think you're set up to do so. Therefore, before we turn our attention to leading in-house professional learning, let's explore how to make time and space for it.

There's nothing I can do or say that will give you more hours in the day or more square footage in your building. Instead, this chapter will offer ways to help you use the time and space you do have for professional learning.

Making Time for Peer-to-Peer PD

When I started working at a school we'll call the Isidore Topial School, I was excited to learn that teachers met often in different configurations. In the middle school division, most of us taught four sections of the same course, which meant we had to prepare just one set of lessons and assignments. That freed up time to give more substantive feedback on student work, give extra help to students who needed or wanted it, talk to parents, and meet with one another.

Our weekly schedules included two grade-level team meetings during school hours. One was called "student review" because we discussed individual students about whom we had concerns, shared strategies that worked for them, and developed plans for supporting them further. The other meeting had no special title (although in the early years, it was called nonstudent review). At those meetings, we planned for our advisory periods, field trips, guest speakers, family conferences, and anything else we did as a grade level outside our academic classes. Over time, as those programs became more entrenched, we stopped feeling like we needed that second meeting and eventually discontinued it.

In addition to the grade-level meetings, we also had one weekly after-school meeting where the full faculty came together to hear presentations or have discussions in small groups. Occasionally, we met with our colleagues who taught the same subject at department meetings, the agendas for which department chairs had the autonomy to set. During these meetings, the group would make decisions (such as whether to order new materials), discuss schoolwide initiatives (such as how we planned to use a summer book within our content area), or plan for future instruction (such as how to teach about an upcoming election).

Topial also had two in-service days per year, which was when we could come together with teachers from the elementary and high school divisions (though we didn't always do that). Beyond attending these mandatory meetings, many teachers chose to meet in various configurations. For example, when I taught 6th grade English, I frequently met with the other 6th grade English teacher. I also volunteered for various committees and task forces.

Although Topial had an ideal structure for peer-to-peer professional learning, we rarely engaged in it during our meetings. Some team leaders and department chairs tried, but they either didn't do it often enough (or meet often enough) for the learning to feel routine, or they faced resistance because they were perceived as pushing their own agendas. If one 7th grade team leader asked her team to keep meeting twice a week to do PD together but another team leader only met once a week, it felt unfair. There were even teachers who approached our union reps to ask if they had to attend what they perceived as extra meetings when they were already going to so many—most of which felt unnecessary. Sometimes it seemed as if the only thing we did more often than go to meetings was complain about them!

There will always be people who simply don't want to do what they perceive as more work. For many of us, though, the issue was the meetings' content rather than their frequency. We attended lots of meetings to hear information that could have been relayed in emails. We talked about the same students repeatedly without changing our methods of intervention, let alone our curricula or pedagogies. We listened to out-of-touch guest speakers tell us things we already knew or that wouldn't work at our school. We listened to administrators blame and shame us without reflecting on their own practices—or worse, they offered vague praise without appreciating the excellence within our ranks. We listened to the same few white people pontificating. So many meetings were a waste of time at best.

At one point, frustrated by all those meetings, we (ironically) organized our own meeting to come up with better ways to use all that meeting time! We brainstormed topics we wanted to explore together. Although our principal told us we could form professional learning groups, he made attendance mandatory and the work itself directionless. That satisfied no one; those who thought there were already too many meetings felt like the learning groups just added to their workload, whereas those who wanted to do more purposeful PD felt like they were designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and appease an angry faculty. In the end, our grassroots attempt at in-house PD faded away—like so many other initiatives.

For our purposes, we can learn two lessons from my former school's numerous meetings:

• No matter how often teachers meet, it's important to prioritize peer-to-peer professional learning during those times. That doesn't mean every meeting must be used that way, but the more time you devote to PD, the more actual learning you make possible—and the more meaningful those meetings feel.
• If you want to do peer-to-peer professional learning, you need to build time for it into the schedule and calendar. That doesn't mean the only way to do this work is the way my former school did, by having teachers meet three times per week, plus twice a year for in-service days. But the more time you allocate for teachers to meet with one another, the more time you have for PD.

Using Scheduled Meetings

If your school has in-service days or scheduled late starts, you can use those for in-house PD. You can also devote any full-faculty or departmental meeting time to professional learning. If you typically use meeting time to distribute information, you can send out that information in an email or video instead. (You might worry that some teachers won't read the email or watch the video, but the truth is that some teachers won't listen at a meeting either, and sending information digitally allows you to track clicks.) If teachers use meeting time to plan curriculum or programs, discuss individual students, analyze data patterns, or make decisions, then you might feel like there's no time left for peer-to-peer learning. In that case, you can make a values-based decision about whether it would be worthwhile to take time away from some of these important activities so teachers can learn from one another.

Arranging Substitute Coverage

Another option is to arrange substitute coverage for classes while teachers engage in professional learning together. If your school offers substitute coverage for teachers who attend offsite conferences, why not do the same when teachers attend in-house PD events? Odds are you won't be able to provide subs for the whole faculty at the same time, but most of the PD formats presented in this book occur in small groups, and these groups don't need to meet concurrently.

Creating Opt-In PD Events

Alternatively, teachers can meet after school or during summer break, in person or virtually, using an online meeting platform or social media chats. If you ask teachers to work outside their usual schedule, pay them for their time.

Structuring Teachers' Time

Figure 1.1 has a set of questions to help you reflect on how your school structures teachers' time beyond their contact hours with students. There is no right or wrong answer to any question. However, if any of your responses make you at all uncomfortable, notice that feeling, because it might mean you're out of alignment with your values.

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Figure 1.1. Questions About Structuring Teachers' Time

• Which of the following does your school use?
  • – During-school meetings
  • – Before-school meetings
  • – After-school meetings
  • – Late starts
  • – Early dismissals
  • – In-service days
• In what configurations do teachers meet?
  • – Full faculty
  • – Subject-area departments
  • – Grade-level teams
  • – Interest groups (such as committees or task forces)
  • – Professional cohorts (such as for new teachers)
• What is supposed to happen at these meetings? What actually happens?
• Do these meetings occur daily? Weekly? Monthly? A few times a year? Why that frequency?
• Could at least some of these meeting times be used for professional learning?
• How often could different types of meetings occur? Whose permission would you need to hold meetings more frequently?
• Is there ever resistance to teachers meeting? If so, where is that resistance coming from?
• Who creates teachers' schedules? Why that person or group?
• How does the person or group that creates teachers' schedules decide who's free at the same time? Are there, or could there be, periods when those who teach the same subject or grade level are available? If not, how might the teachers who are available at the same time form professional learning cohorts?
• What is the process for proposing changes to the schedule? For deciding on changes? For evaluating whether the changes had the desired impact?
• When was the last time the schedule was tweaked or overhauled? Why then?
• Do teachers call those times when they're not teaching free periods? Planning periods? Prep periods? Something else?
• What might happen if a period called professional learning appeared on teachers' schedules?

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At this point, maybe you feel like you could make the time for in-house professional learning— whether by using the meeting time you already have or by tweaking your schedule to create that time—but you have a feeling that your faculty isn't ready to use their time that way … or you can't convince the person who makes scheduling decisions to do this because they don't think it's going to work. That's because time is only one structural consideration that shapes what will and won't work in a school.

Orienting Teachers to Learning

Although museum visitors might quickly infer the rules of engagement—as Allison did at a very young age—they still need time to figure out which exhibits they want to visit, how long they'll stay in each one, how to get around the museum, and so on.

Professors John Falk and Lynn Dierking (2018) explain that first-time museum visitors behave differently than people who visit frequently: "Much of the first-time museum visitor's attention is absorbed in orientation, way-finding, behavior modeling, and general efforts to cope with novelty. The frequent museum visitor, by comparison, knows where they are going and how to behave; they are able to focus more on exhibitions than are first-time visitors" (p. 52).

Maybe you've witnessed similar "efforts to cope with novelty" when educators not used to learning together attempt to do so. Topial had four divisions—two lower schools, a middle school, and an upper school—but we hardly ever all met together. Even when meetings were on my division's campus, I wasn't used to being there for that purpose and with that group of people, so there was a sort of disorientation I had to get over. I wasn't sure where to sit because my familiar colleagues were spread throughout the room, interspersed with people I recognized but didn't know, with people I didn't even recognize, and with people I'd talked to in the past but whose names I'd forgotten. As a result, at least some of the mental energy I could have devoted to learning was spent searching for people I knew, observing how those I didn't know were reacting to the presentations, and looking for potential allies in my learning and work.

We know that people need time to figure out their surroundings and find their way. That's why many schools have an orientation for first-year students. Kindergartners might have a week of half-days so they can get used to their classroom and its routines—and so they can start getting acquainted with their teacher and classmates. Incoming high school students also have an orientation day so they can find their way around the building and meet their teachers before starting any academic work.

But even though we use the word orientation to refer to such events, it's more of a psychological process. We orient ourselves to our physical, temporal, and social contexts. That is, we get used to the building, schedule, and groups in which we find ourselves. It's not that we can't do any learning or work before we've gotten used to those surroundings; even first-time museum visitors look at, appreciate, and remember the art—but it's a different overall experience. If we want teachers to engage fully in peer-to-peer PD and get more out of it, then we might consider how we structure their day-to-day physical, temporal, and social contexts to orient them toward learning from and with one another.

Structuring Interactions to Promote Learning

Before I started working at Topial, I was at a place we'll call the Wile School. At Wile, we didn't have nearly as many meetings as we did at Topial, but teachers' time and space s were structured in a way that encouraged more informal learning interactions.

Wile faculty members who taught in the same department shared an office. As a 6th and 7th grade histo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Case for Peer-to-Peer PD
• Chapter 1. Building Foundations for Professional Learning
• Chapter 2. Make It Inclusive: Preparing for Professional Learning
• Chapter 3. Make It Participatory: Structuring Professional Learning
• Chapter 4. Make It Cohesive: Organizing Professional Learning
• Chapter 5. Make It Effective: Assessing Professional Learning
• Chapter 6. The Self-Reflective Curator
• Conclusion: Stepping into the Curator Role
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright