Sarah Birkeland (sbirkeland@gmail.com) is Co-Director of the Teacher Learning Project at the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. She holds a doctorate in Educational Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard, and has authored numerous research reports, journal and magazine articles about new teacher induction and ongoing professional development. Vivian Troen is Co- Director of the Teacher Learning Project at the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. For over thirty years she has been a teacher, leader, advocate of the professionalization of teaching, and innovator in education reform. She is a consultant to schools and school systems nationally and internationally on issues of teacher leadership and teacher teams. Vivian is the co-author of The Power of Teacher Teams; with Cases, Analyses and Strategies for Success (Corwin Press, 2011).
The authors, from the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University, describe the theory behind the model of ongoing teacher growth they foster in a number of day schools.
Contexts, needs, talents and commitments differ, but one thing appears to be constant: schools cannot improve without people working together. – Ann Lieberman
We all want the best possible teachers for our students. Yet the way that schools traditionally organize teachers’ work ignores everything we know about the complex nature of effective teaching and the kinds of support that help teachers improve their practice over time. To develop excellent teachers, schools must deliberately and strategically develop their skills – not only their skill at teaching, but also their skill at helping each other learn to teach better.
After all, teaching is complicated and challenging work. Effective teaching draws on a wide repertoire of knowledge and skills. Great teachers are much more than subject matter experts: they are skilled observers, researchers, organizers, communicators, empathizers, conductors and traffic cops. Mastering all these aspects of the work does not happen magically or quickly. Similar to practitioners of any craft, teachers must improve over time; no matter how experienced or skilled a teacher is, growth is essential. Every group of students and every new curriculum brings a fresh set of questions and challenges. This is what makes teaching an exciting intellectual endeavor.
Research tells us that teachers’ effectiveness generally improves with experience, yet time alone does not cultivate expert practice (Villar, 2004; Berliner, 1995). If it did, every thirty-year veteran would be a shining example of exemplary teaching. Teachers need structured opportunities to reflect on their experience in order to learn from it. Explaining the rationale behind an instructional strategy so that a colleague can understand it, observing and discussing how another teacher handles a familiar management issue, or hearing a colleague’s perception of a particular student’s strengths and weaknesses allows a teacher to consider anew his own assumptions and actions. Abundant research demonstrates that teachers who have regular opportunities to learn with and from their colleagues are more satisfied, effective and likely to continue teaching (Johnson and Kardos, 2007; Fletcher, Strong & Villar, 2008; Jonson, Berg and Donaldson, 2005; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001; Ingersoll and Smith, 2004).
If we know that teachers learn best with and from one another, why do we see so little generative collaboration in schools? The answer lies in the culture of teaching. Teaching has always been isolated work: one teacher, one classroom, a closed door. There are reasons for this culture. Based on an industrial work model, where individuals do their own piece of work and pass it on to the next worker, school are reminiscent of factories (Troen and Boles, 2003). Teachers may chat in the hallway or swap stories over lunch, but nearly forty years after Dan Lortie famously decried the isolation of the American teacher (1975), norms of professional autonomy and privacy persist. By and large teachers still go it alone (Scholastic, 2012; Johnson, 2004).
Recognizing the disparity between an ideal professional culture and the culture that currently exists in most schools, policy makers and practitioners have begun to create opportunities for teachers to collaborate around issues of classroom instruction. The structures differ, yet the goals are consistent: to bolster teachers’ effectiveness by prompting reflection and the sharing of best practices, improve their professional satisfaction, and build their sense of accountability to one another. Creating structures such as mentoring, peer coaching, Professional Learning Communities (PLC s) or teacher teams is a first step toward reform, but unless teachers are provided with adequate training and “reculturing” (Fullan, 1998), these efforts will surely fail. They will become yet another set of great ideas that don’t even scratch the surface of the “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995), a “grammar” so ingrained that most teachers can see no other way of working.
Envisioning, creating, and sustaining collaborative opportunities for shared teacher growth, for all the potential rewards, is slow and challenging work. Such a dramatic departure from the prevailing history of isolated, autonomous teaching requires, in the words of Judith Warren Little, “action on all fronts”:
The value that is placed on shared work must be both said and Our toolkit of resources for Jewish day schools is freely available at www.teacherlearningproject.com). Since 2005 we have partnered with nine Jewish day schools to help them become nourishing places for teachers to learn. We offer a combination of individualized coaching for each school’s leadership team and periodic multi-day, cross-site workshops that reculture the system and teach teachers the necessary skills of generative collaboration that improves their practice and enlivens their careers.
We focus on the needs of the newest faculty, with the belief that schools that are good places for new teachers to learn quickly become good places for all teachers to learn. Our comprehensive approach to induction has been carefully crafted to put teachers in regular conversation with each other about what good teaching is and how to enact it. (For more information about our approach to working with schools, visit www.teacherlearningproject.com.)
Laying the foundation of strong teaching with the newest members of the faculty involves experienced teachers and administrators alike, prompting productive exchanges about what good teaching looks like throughout the school community.
Our partner schools have made great strides. But even after many years of coaching and support, the leaders in each partner school still see hurdles to becoming productive, sustainable professional learning communities. This is not a surprise. The work of changing an entire school’s culture is far more difficult than school leaders have imagined. To address this issue, each school has taken a different path, addressing different challenges with different strategies. Yet each school grounds its efforts in a commitment to reculturing the school and putting teacher learning at the center of the change.
At the Teacher Learning Project we have also deepened our own understanding of the complex and multi-faceted approaches necessary to build a true professional community – a community that supports the learning of all teachers. Our experience tells us that understanding and acting upon five strategies, or “fronts,” is critical to success when using new teacher induction as a lever for building strong communities of teacher learning. They are:
- Develop teachers’ capacities to facilitate one another’s learning
- Build time for teacher collaboration into the master schedule
- Ground the work in a vision of good teaching
- Appeal to the community’s values
- Think systematically
In the next section we elaborate on the five “fronts” giving examples from our experience.
1. Develop teachers’ capacities to facilitate one another’s learning
Facilitating a colleague’s learning about her own teaching practice requires a different set of skills than facilitating the learning of children. Teachers must be taught how to productively collaborate. The failure to recognize the importance of teaching collaboration skills is a common pitfall of efforts to build professional learning communities (DuFour, 2004; Troen and Boles, 2011).
“Educative mentoring,” a practice in which mentors see themselves as teachers of teachers, is the cornerstone of an effective approach to new teacher induction (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; 1998) and the first step in the Teacher Learning Project’s approach to building school-wide professional learning communities. Effective educative mentoring draws on a wide array of skills, including observing and analyzing classroom practice, using teaching standards as a tool for discussion and analysis, analyzing evidence of student learning, giving effective feedback, asking generative questions, and having difficult conversations. Mentors and peer coaches need structured training in these skills and regular opportunities to practice and receive feedback on their progress. A mentor study group, facilitated by an experienced and knowledgeable mentor or by an external consultant, is one vehicle for such shared learning. (Curricula for mentor study groups are freely available at our website.)
2. Build time for teacher collaboration into the master schedule
The overarching goal of the Teacher Learning Project’s collaboration with partner schools is simple: to put teachers in frequent, generative collaborative conversation about how to improve their teaching practice. These kinds of conversations happen all too rarely in typical Jewish day schools, in part because schools are busy places. There is always more to be done than there is time to do it, and tasks that are not immediately necessary can easily fall to the wayside. We have found that teachers and administrators, who are steeped in schools’ historically isolated culture, may not see an immediate payoff from teacher- to-teacher meetings, and – when weighed against immediate concerns like meeting with an upset parent – are tempted to privilege the more pressing need.
Yet when teachers examine their practice together, frequency and consistency are keys to success. They must have time to visit one another’s classrooms and time soon afterward to discuss what they saw. They must have opportunities to look together at student work and devise strategies for improving learning, and time soon after to evaluate how well those strategies worked. Regular, frequent and substantive meetings build trust and familiarity, allowing for increasingly productive conversations.
If we leave these activities to be squeezed in during lunch hours or after school, they simply won’t happen. The upset parent or towering pile of ungraded papers will always prevail. Therefore it is imperative that school leaders build into the master schedules regular and frequent time for teachers to collaborate. Getting such opportunities into the schedule can pose a significant challenge, but in doing so the leaders convey a powerful message: we value teachers’ collaborative learning, and we are investing in it.
The Teacher Learning Project’s partner schools have approached this challenge in several ways. Some have reduced the number of faculty meetings, saving meetings for discussions that absolutely cannot be conducted over e-mail, and reallocating that time for teacher learning. Others have assigned administrators to cover one duty a week, freeing up teachers to observe one another’s classes. One school, Seattle Hebrew Academy, gave responsibility for the master schedule to the middle school math teacher and asked that she use her professional expertise to solve the logic puzzle of ensuring each mentoring or peer-coaching pair one common planning period a week.
It seemed impossible, but she figured it out.
Another school, Frankel Jewish Academy, has adjusted its schedule so that the last period of one day a week is allocated to teacher collaboration. In addition, leaders have eliminated many regularly scheduled faculty meetings, replacing them with structured and purposeful department team meetings.
3. Ground the work in a vision of good teaching
Early in the Teacher Learning Project’s relationship with each partner school, we asked individual teachers whether they and their colleagues agreed on what good teaching looked like. Not surprisingly, most responded as this experienced teacher did: “I think we all have a general sense of what good teaching is…but I don’t think we’ve made it explicit.” A general sense of what good teaching is may be sufficient when teachers are a group of isolated practitioners connected only by a shared hallway. But when teachers begin to work together to examine and improve their practice, a general sense of what good teaching is does not suffice.
To be most productive, teachers’ shared professional learning should be guided by an explicit and shared understanding of what good teaching is at that school. This vision of good teaching must be more than a set of principles, such as “We value hands-on learning,” or “Our school is child-centered.” It must describe what effective teachers do: how they plan lessons, manage classrooms, present material, assess learning, and relate to children, parents and colleagues.
How does a school community create such a shared vision? It is not necessary to start from scratch. Many different descriptions of effective teaching already exist, in the form of professional teaching standards. In an acknowledgment that it takes time and practice to learn to teach, various organizations have spun those standards out into developmental continua that describe a typical novice’s practice on each standard in contrast to the practice of a typical master teacher. For example, the Jewish New Teacher Project has published a developmental continuum of teaching standards that is widely used as a tool for mentoring in Jewish day schools.
A continuum of teaching standards can serve as the basis for colleagues’ collaboration. These descriptions of effective practice become the “text” that teachers study when working together, serving as the backdrop against which they discuss teaching practices. Grounding teachers’ work in such a document keeps the conversation on teaching, reminds teachers that the work is complex and learned over time, and provides an “objective” measure against which to assess their own practice and to provide one another with substantive feedback.
Teaching standards borrowed from the Jewish New Teacher Project or Charlotte Danielson may prove to be a good fit for your school. Over time teachers and administrators may realize that they disagree with aspects of the vision that the adopted continuum conveys. At that point, the faculty can work together to draft a set of standards that adequately reflects the kind of teaching they most value. After a year of using another organization’s continuum of teaching standards as the basis for their mentoring practice, the teachers in Frankel Jewish Academy realized that these standards did not capture an aspect of good teaching particularly valued at their school: developing students’ independence and character. With guidance from a Teacher Learning Project coach, they collaboratively developed an additional standard, writing and refining descriptions of what teachers do, specifically to foster those qualities. They then incorporated that new continuum into teachers’ mentoring and supervision. As Teacher Learning Project coaches led Frankel Jewish Academy and other partner schools through the process of generating a shared vision, we collected our strategies and tools in a module of exercises for leadership teams. It is called “Creating a Shared Vision of Good Teaching and is freely available at our website.
4. Appeal to the community’s values
To build communities of professional learning, teachers and administrators must see the value of peer collaboration. As we have argued, they must invest energy and money in developing teachers’ collaborative skill, ensuring adequate time for teachers to meet, and developing a shared vision of good teaching. And they must make these investments largely on faith that there will be a payoff in the end, because developing an ethos of genuine and productive collaborative learning takes a long time.
People invest in a new initiative when they feel personally connected to its purpose and see clearly how it connects to their values. Jewish day schools are value-driven organizations, attracting teachers and families who see their own identities reflected in the organization. When leaders can connect to that shared sense of identity, articulating the connections among collaborative teacher learning, who we are as Jews, what we value, and the kind of school we want to create, they draw teachers, parents and board members more deeply into the work. Michael Fullan describes this aspect of leadership as cultivating “moral purpose” (2005). When taking time to observe in a colleague’s classroom – or allocating substitute teachers so that teachers have time to observe one another – is imbued with moral purpose, members of the school community are more likely to stick with it in the face of competing priorities and a deferred payoff.
5. Think systemically
Schools are systems. Each part of a system both depends on and influences the others, and changing just one element – like creating a mentoring or peer coaching program – alters the equilibrium (Fullan, 2005). Therefore, systems thinkers focus not only on what they are trying to change, but also on other factors in the system that may impact or undermine the changes.
For example, we do not usually think of hiring as a stage in new teacher induction. But, in fact, a new teacher’s exposure to the culture and expectations of a school begins the moment s/he steps in the door for an interview. How much do interviewers seek to learn about the candidate’s approach to instruction? What do they communicate about the kind of teaching the school values? Are potential colleagues present at the interview? Is a demonstration lesson required? If so, is the candidate included in debriefing the lesson? The answers to these questions speak volumes about the school’s culture and values. Schools that are striving to build a culture of ongoing, collaborative professional learning must communicate that vision during the interview process and deliberately screen for candidates who are excited by the prospect. Schools with a clear, shared vision of what good teaching looks like must find ways to determine whether potential hires share that vision.
Mentoring and peer coaching are at the heart of a professional learning community, but every aspect of the school’s function, from hiring to budgeting to curriculum to supervision, are implicated in its success. Failure to recognize the interconnectedness of these seemingly disparate processes is another common pitfall in efforts to foster professional learning communities.
Conclusion
Changing the way teachers work – and work together – is slow and difficult. Quick fixes imposed from the outside rarely affect teachers and the prevailing culture of isolation and autonomy. In contrast, the Teacher Learning Project builds teacher learning communities from the inside out, developing teachers’ skill at collaboration and leaders’ understanding of how to align school-wide systems to support the work (e.g. revising the master schedule and aligning the budget to priorities). When school leaders recognize the complexity of change, taking a long-term view and cultivating buy-in by appealing to the values of the community, they create the scaffolding that will support substantive change. In order for teachers to become agents of change, not only must they learn how to collaborate they must also develop a shared vision of good teaching. With the master schedule enabling teachers to collaborate and the school budget supporting teachers extra work, teachers can give careful attention to the systems that impact their instructionally-focused collaboration, and the school will be well on its way to creating a sustainable community of professional learning.
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