Jacob Pinnolis is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Gann Academy, overseeing the supervision, evaluation, and professional development of the faculty. He also teaches Biblical Literature and Philosophy. Jacob has served as the Head of Education at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, edited Gleanings: An Online Journal of Jewish Education for the Melton Research Center, and taught Judaic Studies at the Solomon Schechter High School of New York.
Jacob Pinnolis describes a rich, multi-tiered program of ongoing professional development in his school.
Over the past 6 years, Gann Academy has built a robust professional learning community (PLC), or, more accurately, an overlapping array of professional learning communities. Gann formed these PLCs incrementally, with numerous experiments and revisions, and has gradually developed them into an integrated whole that is transforming the culture of the whole institution. The skills of reflection about their own teaching practice have spilled over into all our interactions with students, in and out of the classroom, as well as with parents. In this article, I will sketch for you the main elements of the learning community we have built and then offer a few reflections on what we’ve learned was critical for the impact these programs have had. We had invaluable help from the Mandel Center at Brandeis (particularly Vivian Troen). She provided a vision of what the end product could be, resources for our learning, and helped us think through each of the major steps in developing the whole array of learning communities we established.
Gann’s professional learning community
Hiring, Supervision, and Evaluation
Hiring, supervision for growth, evaluation, regular feedback, and performance based raises and promotions are not professional learning communities. But some of the most important work in forming strong learning communities at Gann has been a cradle-tograve commitment to support a professional learning community. If you want faculty to take learning seriously, promote those who take it seriously. If you want teachers to assume more instructional leadership, make this a big part of their evaluations and raises. We found that developing a learning culture required rewarding openness and willingness to learn, bringing in teachers who fit the culture we are trying to create, and, when, necessary, parting ways with those who don’t fit. It means coordinating hiring, supervision, and evaluation with the goal of teacher learning and leading in mind.
We hire teachers who demonstrate a commitment to reflection, collaboration, and growth. Our experience has taught us that these are critical for the success of teachers at Gann. To that end, we focus the hiring process on whether candidates show signs of reflectiveness. Did he or she ask good questions to help themselves prepare? Could they reflect on what problems they had in the lesson and what they might have done differently? Are they learning about the students and what the students learned rather than what they “taught”? Teachers who can do this well, without defensiveness, tend to be open to learning. We have candidates observe another class and then debrief about it. Do they show signs of being curious, rather than judgmental, about the choices the teacher made? Do they seem open to the very process of talking about another teacher’s practice? In the long run, creating strong PLCs requires hiring the kind of teachers who want such an environment and have the skills and dispositions to function well with the kind vulnerability PLCs demand.
PLCs are supported by a robust program of supervision for growth. If teachers are used to being observed frequently, getting honest feedback from their supervisors, and continually setting and working on new teaching goals, then supervision supports, encourages, and even requires learning. Our program of supervision for growth asks department chairs to meet weekly (bi-weekly with master teachers) with teachers to set goals for their teaching, to debrief observations, to co-plan, to problem-solve issues in their classes. Ideally, there is a sense of curriculum in which teachers are the learners, slowly developing new teaching skills in manageable increments. The foundation of this learning is observation, feedback, and teacher reflection – lots of observations, typically 6-10 a year, but up to 15-18 for teachers new to Gann. Besides developing teaching skills, the frequency of observation creates a culture of open, public teaching practice; it creates trust that the purpose of observation is growth; it develops observation and reflection skills of teachers and their supervisors; and it develops leadership capacities among teachers and their supervisors. All of this makes the ground firmer for various PLCs.
New teacher induction and mentoring
Teachers new to Gann generally have two years with a mentor whose primary focus is on the quality of instruction. There are 3 overlapping communities of learners. First, the mentor-mentee pairs meet weekly to work on core teaching practices the new teacher needs to develop. Mentors receive training on when to offer direction and when to allow new teachers to reflect productively on their own teaching. Second, the mentors team together to develop their own capacities as instructional leaders, meeting monthly for 2 hours to analyze case studies, read and discuss teaching and mentoring, and ask for help about mentoring problems they are dealing with. Each mentor has an experienced mentor as a coach. Third, the new teachers have their own study group, which besides helping teachers negotiate the culture and quirks of a new school, employs more direct learning strategies aimed at bringing new teachers into the vision of teaching and learning at Gann.
Faculty rounds
For teachers who have completed the induction program, there are faculty rounds groups. These consist of 6-8 teachers across disciplines. Each group determines one core area of instruction and student learning to focus on for the year (effective group learning, for example, or improving student engagement). A host teacher each month has the group observe the class they find most difficult in the area of focus, explains what he or she will be trying in the class to overcome the problem, and tells the group what to observe (what data will be useful). They then debrief the observation according to a strict protocol which aims at prompting the host teacher to reflect more deeply, but which forbids making suggestions, offering criticism, or other evaluation. All the teachers then make commitments to try some new practice and to bring evidence the next month of what they tried and how well it worked (or not).
Department chair rounds
Every department chair is mentored by the Director of Teaching and Learning, and all new chairs have their own coach (someone with previous experience as a department chair). In addition, the department chairs have a Rounds group to learn about supervision, observation, and feedback for teachers. Each month a host chair has all the other department chairs observe them debriefing a teacher (on video). The chairs then meet to debrief the department chair’s practice – Was the chair being directive or collaborative? Did the teacher seem to understand what the chair hope he or she would? Was there a common understanding of what the next steps were? It is an opportunity for department chairs to make public to their peers the process of supervision, to reflect more deeply on that process, and to commit to trying new things in order to get better.
Instructional leadership roles at Gann
A typical growth path for a new teacher at Gann starts with 2 years being mentored, then 2-4 years in Faculty Rounds. With greater experience of teaching and of how PLCs work at Gann, the teacher may become a mentor or facilitate a Rounds group. Each of these roles involves not only training, but participation in continuous learning about the role with a team of peers. After that, a teacher might become a department chair, or take on one of the 5 formal professional development positions at Gann, including overseeing various PLCs.
Thus, starting with the hiring process which sets the stage, from the moment a teacher enters Gann he or she is continuously in one form of professional learning group or other, and many teachers are in more than one at the same time. As an experienced teacher new to Gann said in the middle of her first year, “I realize that teachers have two jobs at Gann – teaching, and learning about teaching.” Every new learning group and every new leadership role is supported with protocols, materials, readings, a support team and/or a coach. And in every one of these micro-communities or leadership roles, the core culture is the same: practice is public, observation is the cornerstone to any real learning, reflection is primary, ongoing commitments to changes and improvements are made to others (peers and/or supervisors).
Reflections on PLCs at Gann
Observation is the foundation
Early in my teaching career, I was telling a mentor of mine about a school I had heard about with a successful prayer program. He asked me, “Have you been to the school to observe it?” The answer was “No.” “Then you don’t really know anything about it,” he told me matter-of-factly, and I realized he was right. One of the hardest habits to break for both teachers and supervisors is the idea that they can improve teaching and learning, or even understand teaching and learning, without observing it. Talking about curriculum, about whether a particular lesson went well, about what we are doing in our classrooms at even the most basic level (“There was a discussion”) is at best evidence about what teachers think is happening, but it rarely matches what most observers would describe or see. Observing well is a trainable skill
and the more one does it, the better one becomes. And the better one becomes at observing teaching, the better one becomes at reflecting on one’s own teaching, and this is the foundation of change and improvement. Almost everyone knows this already, and yet so little actual observation of teaching happens in most schools. It isn’t enough by itself, but however a PLC is designed, it must include everyone observing teaching.
Learning needs to be part of the learning and a common language that results
When Gann started its mentoring program, I was among the first cohort of mentors. That first year, reading and discussing Carol Simon Weinstein’s chapter on “Managing Recitations and Discussions” in Secondary Classroom Management (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003) was a game changer. It provided a common language for mentors to describe what we were seeing – for example, why some discussions seemed so different from others (some were “recitations”). And by carefully explaining the distinction between these two different modes of classroom talk, it became far clearer to me what made a recitation work well and what made a discussion work well. For my mentee as well as for me, confusing these two had been a consistent source of ineffectiveness in our teaching practice. Learning about these practices, keeping them distinct, having a common language to talk about them, and planning them more effectively all came out of doing some learning in the context of working on our practice. Observation and reflection about teaching isn’t sufficient; common learning and a common language needed to be a part of our PLCs for them to work well.
Develop leadership capacities in the work
One of the early problems we encountered at Gann was that we always seemed short of the teacher leaders we needed. It was a scramble to find teachers who were “ready” to be mentors, department chairs, facilitators, etc. Let’s take mentoring: we worried about having mentors whose teaching skills were still very much a work in progress, whose beliefs about teaching and learning and students weren’t perfectly aligned with the culture we were trying to create, or whose personality didn’t seem suited to leaving a mentee the space to develop (or alternatively, wouldn’t be willing to push the mentee if necessary). It took years for us to realize that if we kept waiting to develop people’s capacities before we made them mentors, we’d never have enough mentors, and the growth of overall teacher leadership capacity at Gann would be too slow – mentors are a key part of the pipeline for future supervisors, and instructional leaders. The mistake we made was this – people develop the capacity for many kinds of leadership work by doing the work. If we only used master teachers as mentors, the mentoring program would have collapsed. I know in my own case that improvement in my teaching practice accelerated enormously in 4 years as a mentor, and our general experience has been that the mentoring program improves the teaching of mentors far more than mentees. We have found that mentors change the way they speak and think about teaching as they grow into the role and talk to the mentors already in the program.
A vision of the end as a guide to change in teaching practice
Over time we have seen that the move from reflection to change in teaching practice to improvement in student learning has been slower than we would hope. It isn’t surprising that change is slow. Changing teaching practice is primarily a matter of behavioral change of teachers, not cognitive change. There are beliefs to uncover, unpack, and slowly modify. But if we can develop a vision of the kind of student learning we want to achieve, the reflection that is happening in our PLCs can more quickly translate into teacher practice that improves learning. Having teachers spend some time imagining what student learning would look like in the ideal, can help them work back to the changes they need to make to help that happen. If a teacher wants students to engage directly with one another, asking probing questions, challenging interpretations of evidence, and offering competing hypotheses, then what does the teacher need to do to help them learn to do these things? We have learned from our PLCs that despite their initial beliefs to the contrary, very few teachers have a clearly defined understanding of the sort of learning they want students to be able to do. You can test this out quite easily for yourself – just ask a teacher one thing he wants his students to learn, and then ask what you would observe students doing when this goal is actually happening and keep at this question.
Conclusion
PLCs can be powerful instruments for cultural change. When they work well, they make a school an exciting and challenging place to work; they are a vehicle for continuous growth. Yet, the real question is how much they contribute to student learning, and student moral, spiritual, and intellectual growth. That, ultimately, is what all the effort to create such learning communities is about.