100 Posts in 100 Days
Our faculty and staff are in the throes of preparing to usher in the new school year for our students next Monday. We are in the throes of professional learning, planning, and preparation. I’ve been paying particular attention to how we support teachers and their learning this week. (See Post 92: “Make ‘Em Beg”, Post 93: “Professional Learning Environments”, and Post 94: “Nudges”). Specifically, I have been contemplating three questions:
- How have we arranged their learning environment so that they can take full advantage and optimize their learning?
- What resources, learning challenges, and supports will nudge them this week that will help them hone their craft as educators?
- How do we engage their curiosity and creativity so that they want to learn (beg for) more?
This post is about engaging our teachers’ curiosity and creativity.
There are a number of things I could write here. I could talk about starting off with an inspirational video, the use of storytelling to set the stage for work to come, activities such as hexagonal thinking routines and adaptations, or providing classroom examples. All of these approaches and activities have been used in the last couple of days. Individually, each activity is an invitation for our teachers to engage in the work. Collectively, though, I’m thinking of two conceptual ideas that are present in the design of our learning sessions this week.
Who’s Doing the Work?
I don’t know the source of the following quote (and if anyone does, please tell me!), but it has stuck with me for nearly 20 years:
School should not be a place where little people come to watch big people work.
In other words, students should be actively working and engaging with material in their classes. They should not be watching and listening while teachers do all of the thinking and talking. Likewise, teachers in a professional learning session should not be sitting and listening to a colleague talk for hours without interacting and processing the content. So, I’m noticing who is doing the work in our sessions this week.
Collaboration
We have a set of seven Professional Learning Design Principles at Graded. One of them is that we foster collaboration amongst our teachers. The learning we are doing this week and are planning for this year will largely be done in grade level teams (at the lower school) and departmental teams (at the middle school and high school).
This is a strategy used by schools all around the world. Largely because when it is done well, it works. Collective teacher efficacy has an effect size of 1.36, making it one of the most positively impactful strategies to influence student learning.
Forming the collaborative teams is just the first step. It is how the teams work together and the kinds of work that they do that will make a difference. Our structures this week utilize social persuasion and affective states. While studying together we are uncovering pre-existing beliefs and creating cognitive dissonance. We are developing a culture of wonder, inquiry, and exploration. We are also setting the stage for shared goal setting (mastery experiences) and other forms of collaboration, including peer observation and feedback (vicarious experiences).
(For more on collective teacher efficacy, visit https://www.jennidonohoo.com/.)
A Final Thought
Teaching adult learners is not easy. They bring with them a wealth of prior experiences that influence their thinking, behavior, and levels of engagement. It’s easy to jot down that planning interactive and collaborative activities are ways to engage teachers’ curiosity and creativity. We are facing challenges in having all of our teachers and teams fully engage. So, we’ve revisited our plans for tomorrow’s sessions and are making some adaptations that will (hopefully!) enlist increased levels of teacher interaction with the material. Or, more bluntly, require the teachers to be doing the work. Let’s see how it goes.🤞