Personalized Professional Learning

A Job-Embedded Pathway for Elevating Teacher Voice

Allison Rodman

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416627586
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Formazione professionale

It's time to say goodbye to "sit-and-get, one-size-fits-all" PD sessions and embrace professional learning that meets the needs of all teachers.

Allison Rodman's Personalized Professional Learning provides district and school administrators with a roadmap for transforming existing professional development programs into more effective and innovative learning experiences that elevate onsite expertise while still aligning with school and district priorities.

This book is a step-by-step guide for diagnosing, planning, executing, evaluating, and refining teachers' professional learning. Supported by research and informed by the experiences of educators across the United States, it distills best practices for adult learning into clear advice and ready-to-use tools. Curious about what it looks like to commit to a personalized approach that prioritizes teacher voice and provides meaningful opportunities for co-creation, social construction, and self-discovery? Rodman provides answers and a clear way forward.

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Part I: Voice

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Teacher input must be valued, trusted, and utilized. This cannot be a token invitation to the conversation but must be meaningful and linked to decision-making opportunities. It is essential that teacher voice is not only heard but is an integral driving force as education policy evolves.

Quaglia & Lande,
Teacher Voice: Amplifying Success

One of the first lessons teachers learn in their certification courses is how to find (and use) their "teacher voice." Yet, once they are in the classroom, too often this voice becomes muted, overshadowed by education policies, programs, and processes constructed by individuals who will never be called upon to implement them. Unfortunately, this is also the case in professional learning. Teachers shuffle through a series of mandated workshops and seat requirements to maintain their certification, irrespective of their actual developmental needs and interests as learners.

Part I explores how leaders can honor teacher voice by collaboratively establishing a vision for growth—inviting learners to share in "the what" and "the how" of learning early in the process. Chapter 1 delves into what it means to build a culture primed for learning: identifying school goals and growth opportunities and balancing and aligning these goals with individual teacher needs and interests. In such a culture, teacher voice is not just heard; it's a driving force for personalized professional learning.

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Chapter 1

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Establishing a Vision for Growth

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Build a Culture of Learning

Principal preparation programs spend a fair amount of time exploring school culture, but once leaders enter their buildings, the concept of culture is too often conflated with the idea of school spirit. Before designing a personalized professional learning program, it's important to carefully tend to the school's learning culture. Critical questions to ask include the following:

• Is this a place where both students and adults learn?
• Is learning openly modeled by all members of the community?
• Are mistakes celebrated as learning opportunities, or brushed shamefully aside?
• Do individuals (leaders, teachers, and students) collaborate and share naturally to improve each other's practice?

Most important, is school culture part of the school administration's strategic plan and weekly to-do list in the same way curriculum implementation and school safety are?

Culture plays such an important role in organizational success that most major companies now employ chief learning officers (CLOs) who focus solely on the flow of the company and its employees as a learning organization. Korn Ferry Hay Group's (2016) study of more than 7,500 executives from 107 countries found that

driving culture change" ranks among the top three global leadership development priorities. "Culture is no longer seen as an afterthought when considering the business focus of an organization," said Noah Rabinowitz, senior partner and global head of Hay Group's Leadership Development Practice. "Culture is the X-factor. It's the invisible glue that holds an organization together and ultimately makes the difference between whether an organization is able to succeed in the market or not." (Smith, 2016, para. 2)

The same is true when it comes to school success. In The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge (2006) outlines the importance of components such as personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. In his complementary book, Schools That Learn (Senge et al., 2012), he advises,

If you want to improve a school system, before you change the rules, look first to the ways people think and interact together. Otherwise, the new policies and organizational structures will simply fade away, and the organization will revert, over time, to the way it was before. (p. 19)

Before we focus on the how and what of professional learning, careful attention must be given to the why (Sinek, 2009).

Changing school culture is not a single step but rather a series of micro-decisions and consistent messages that communicate, "This is a place where we all learn and grow." Here are some questions for leaders to consider:

• Do you regularly celebrate staff members' progress and growth as well as their achievement? For example, do you share only AP scores, or do you also share that an AP teacher attended a conference to learn new instructional practices to help improve these scores? Consider facilitating regular conversations with teachers about books they are reading and workshops or conferences they may be attending. Keep a running list of these learning activities and include them regularly in staff communications. As a school leader, I kept an electronic notebook with a section for each teacher. This enabled me to capture information and share it within the school community as well as publicly via social media, valuing and reinforcing teachers' self-directed learning.
• Do all administrators consistently participate in (not just lead) professional learning opportunities? If it is worth your teachers' time, it should be worth yours as well. Commit to attending select professional learning opportunities on site throughout the year. Sit with teachers and engage with them as a participant (not an observer in the back of the room). When selecting your learning experiences, identify topics or areas where you personally want or need to develop. Be transparent about your own implementation challenges and the steps you are taking to overcome them.
• Are there systems in place that enable staff members to share best practices with one another? Some schools use "pineapple charts" organized by teacher and class period to invite others to observe new strategies being implemented in their class. These charts are posted in a high-traffic public space, such as the main office or staff lounge, and are not simply artifacts but a key component of their learning culture. At other schools, #ObserveMe invitations with teacher-identified growth targets welcome coworkers to observe classroom practice (in person or via video) and provide honest and open feedback.
• Do you regularly survey staff members to collect information about how you can continuously improve? Perceptions can sometimes be more powerful than reality. Do your staff members see the school as a learning organization? Are they proud to work there? The Hay Group's Culture for Learning study (Hobby, 2004) outlines a "culture sort" activity that can support you as you facilitate this type of data collection with your staff.

Student learning is affected not only by professional learning but by systems-level learning as well (Knapp, Copland, & Talbert, 2003). Before leaders can dive into designing effective professional learning for their staff, they must be exceptionally clear and focused on the goals of the district and school, including the degree to which current policies, programs, practices, and resources align (or don't align) with those goals.

Seeds for Growth

See Jennifer Gonzalez's (2016) blog post "How Pineapple Charts Revolutionize Professional Development." For more information and examples of #ObserveMe in action, see Robert Kaplinsky's (2015) blog post "#ObserveMe."

Seeds for Growth

The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook (Peterson & Deal, 2009) can help you identify the different components that make up school culture (ritual, ceremony, history, stories, architecture, artifacts) and provides component-linked "Crucial Questions" to reflect on within your own context.

Identify Your School Goals

When designing professional learning, consider Thomas Guskey's recommendation to begin with the end in mind: "What outcomes do we want to achieve, especially with regard to student learning, and what evidence best reflects the achievement of those outcomes?" (2012, p. 41). Vision and mission statements shouldn't simply hang in the main office or on conference room walls; they must actively drive all the organizational learning that takes place—at the system, professional, and student levels. Highly effective and carefully designed professional learning simply will not have the desired effect on student growth and achievement unless it is directly correlated with these goals.

Leaders should use vision and mission statements as guideposts to self-assess school and teacher progress. For example, if a district's vision is for students to graduate as adaptive problem solvers, to what degree are students provided meaningful opportunities to practice this skill across grade levels and disciplines? What learning opportunities have been developed for teachers to learn about, practice, and refine ways to effectively integrate adaptive problem solving into their instruction and assessment?

Seeds for Growth

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Schooling by Design: Mission, Action, and Achievement (2007) provides leaders with a roadmap for addressing system-level learning and aligning policies and programs to a district's or school's vision and mission statements.

Determine What Your School Needs

After establishing the big-picture goals, leaders need to honestly self-assess the degree to which they are providing opportunities for sustained progress toward those goals.

No school is perfect. We all have room to grow. It is essential, though, to allocate professional learning resources into empty buckets rather than full ones—even if the needs are challenging and unpopular. Too often, schools offer professional development sessions on topics they have "always" offered, regardless of whether there is a need. As a result, the learning landscape becomes crowded with perennial flowers that look nice rather than strong and well-maintained trees deeply rooted in the school's goals. There is a danger in continuing to tend to "best practices" we think are effective, but which in actuality do not result in student achievement gains. Following TNTP's Mirage report about the current state of teacher professional learning (2015), education researcher Mike Schmoker (2015) responded by affirming that we do, in fact, know what works in adult education; we just have not acted on it. He emphasizes the importance of selecting the right initiatives:

We must insist that schools and districts conduct a far more methodical, painstaking study of any practice or program before they adopt it. School and district leaders should be able to tell teachers that the practices they have studied and selected, with teacher participation, are the very best, most amply supported practices. (pp. 18–19)

Leaders have a responsibility to focus teachers' attention on these core needs rather than planting new flower beds full of the latest trend or initiative. Similarly, care should be given to the core areas most in need of pruning—not those that are self-sustaining. Schmoker continues:

We must focus all of our available time and energy on these initiatives alone, to an extent unseen in the reform era. If the word "focus" means anything, it means we must direct all professional development time and personnel, and teacher collaboration, to a severely reduced number of powerful and proven practices. (2015, pp. 18–19)

For example, if effective communication is critical to a school's mission but teachers already design strong instructional activities to support this goal, it should not be an area of focus for professional learning. Conversely, imagine a district that wants its graduates to be powerful, independent critical thinkers but has a history of emphasizing instructional activities that are highly structured and overly scaffolded. In this case, professional learning probably should focus on strategies related to rigorous expectations and the gradual release of responsibility, even if teachers are resistant to moving their practice in this direction.

Establishing a vision for professional growth comes back to intentions—to the why of the learning undertaken. As Guskey (2014) puts it,

The format and content of professional learning activities are vitally important and must be thoughtfully addressed. But just as you must decide a journey's destination before you can determine the best route, you must clarify the goals you want to achieve in terms of better educator practice and improved student learning before you can judge the value, worth, and appropriateness of any professional learning activity. (p. 12)

In order for a learning organization to grow, leaders need to identify the kind of professional learning that will supply the key nutrients. This means self-assessment: taking a look at your desired outcomes and seeing how close you are to where you want to be.

TAKE ACTION: Identify your school and district goals and assess your progress toward them.

Tool 1 in Appendix A prompts you to identify your district and school vision, mission, and goals and complete an initial inventory of where you stand relative to these objectives.

When completing a self-assessment, consider a variety of different forms of data, including the following:

• Student growth or achievement data from standardized assessments
• Student growth or achievement data from local assessments and performance tasks
• Student progress and success after graduation
• Teacher observation and evaluation d...