End Passive PD!! The Building Blocks to Professional Growth

 In the end of the year rush, many of us fail to take a breath and be present in the moment.  I am admittedly horrible at slowing down.  I get caught up in all the stress and rush of year end.  To help with the stress (and ensure our marriage makes it to year 20 in 2014) my husband and I rented a little cabin in the woods to rejuvenate and reconnect this past weekend.  Of course, we still talked about our academic administration lives (he is chair of a university Communications and English department)… but somehow the conversation outside the school walls always seems more reflective.

As a college type, he has a hard time with our K-12 theory of “Professional Development”.  The idea that a teacher just sits and passively waits for development to fall from the Sky of the PD Office is very foreign to the PhD.  The things we call innovative – Personal Learning Networks, Personal Curation and Research – he calls standard Day 1 PhD lessons of the Professional Growth Model.  I’ve said it before and am saying again, we in K-12 have to get over the idea that PD equals Training. 

Training: the process of bringing a person, etc., to an agreed standard of proficiency, etc., by practice and instruction

Just what I always wanted when I was a child… training to a standard of proficiency.  Bliss!

What if we took a hint from Fleet and Patterson

Rather than conceptualizing professional development as either enabling participation in formal upgrading of qualifications (an approach that might be seen as ticking off the boxes involved in getting a piece of paper) or as providing steps towards acquiring a recommended change in practice (perhaps a mandated curriculum document), other possibilities may be more useful. For example, the recognition of staff as owners of personal professional knowledge, with intellectual and emotional investment in possible contributions to their own development…

(emphasis mine)

So how to move away from Training to Professional Growth?  Here are my thoughts on the Building Blocks of Professional Growth…

Personal Learning Networks (or as university types call them – colleagues)

Teaching and learning does not happen in a void.  Social learning theory (Bandura) allows that we really learn through observation and modeling.  At it’s simplest, we learn by watching others… ideally by interacting with others on a common experience/topic we can build off their experiences innovating and moving the profession, our classrooms, our personal lives forward. 

Methods to build a PLN

• Twitter – find a #Chat and start learning. The good people at Edudemic have created an excellent list of educational hashtags here.  Not sure how to get started with Twitter?  There are several decent tutorials on YouTube, including this one from Paul Hill. 
• Attend a Conference – particularly one for your content area or school’s teaching paradigm
• Eat in the faculty/staff lounge – get out of the classroom and interact with some in-house colleagues. 

Curating Scholarship (seriously it’s called READING)

For whatever reason, many of us stop reading professionally once we obtain the last required piece of paper for certification (another sign of how we’ve internalized the training model… but I digress).  With today’s resources (i.e. the Interwebs), there is no excuse for not keeping up on current educational theory and practices.  It’s just a matter of setting a reasonable goal (say one article per month) and actually doing it.  I use the term curate because this pillar is more than just reading – we need to “select, organize and present … using professional or expert knowledge”

Resources for curation

• Web-based tool such as Pearltrees, Diigo or Evernote work well for web curation.  Find a great article online? Hit the browser-based extension and bookmark according to category.
• Peruse Amazon.com or your favorite publishers (I like University of Chicago Press and Oxford University Press for the hard academics) for upcoming books in education.
• Find a blog you enjoy and actually subscribe to it! This way, each time the brilliant blogger writes a post you will receive notification. 
• Ask your school librarian – trust me, they love to help find articles and research!  If the topic interests you, it probably will interest them as well (we are a bunch of information collectors as a breed).

Sharing Scholarship

It’s really not enough to sit and hoard information… we have to share it!   Get active and present at conferences you attend. Jump into the conversation during a Twitter chat.  I have said it before, we are our own best resources.

Resources for Sharing

• Recently I started using Scoop.IT! for sharing/curating my web surfing.  Paper.li does a similar thing.  Think self-curated magazine on a topic.
• Link your Curation tool mentioned above to your Twitter of Facebook account.  Then your colleagues can see what you are reading – and your family will think you are really smart.

Creating Scholarship

The final pillar is creation - what we ask our students to do every day!  Think high level Blooms here – analysis and synthesize what you’ve learned from colleagues, conferences, research and reflection.  Write an article, a blog, a book chapter (seriously… Routledge published JD Ferries-Rowe and I … anything is possible).  Promotion and tenure at university requires some creation of knowledge for the future … why should we in K-12 sell ourselves short?  We have a lot to say down here in the trenches. 

Resources for Creation

• Many free blogging sites are available… Blogger, Edublogs, Wordpress
• Respond to a call for papers!  Seriously, it’s how we connected with the editors of The Handbook for Mobile Learning.
• Take all those notes and ramblings from your blog and write a book!  Heck, self-publish… iAuthor or Amazon have tools for self-publishing… who knows, you may change the world J

Paved With Good Intentions

In October, I was sitting in at the Indiana Non-Public Education Association conference in the Indianapolis Convention Center, enjoying new professional friendships with a couple of Lutheran administrators… trying to hold back judgment on the presentation “Common Core Standards and Assessments” by a young man from the Indiana Department of Education.  Admittedly, we were potentially a hostile audience – private school administrators who as a breed tend to lean toward distrustful when presented with legislated educational policies.   However, we were mostly faith-based administrators who whole heartily try, as St. Ignatius would challenge us, to presume good will. 

The good will lasted until slide #4 (the presentation can be found on the IDOE Resources for Implementing Indiana’s Common Core Standards page).  At Slides 5 we leave the hallowed halls of the Common Core and move to the more important issue… the test with which we will MEASURE the success or failure, not of the Standards, but of the children and teachers of Indiana schools.  For us this means the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). 

Let us leave my narrative for a moment…

I’m a primary source kind of gal… And my coursework at Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science (and ensuing Masters in Library Science) makes me a killer on the Google…. I decided to read, for myself, the originating document posted on the Common Core State Standards Initiative website.  Looking over the Introduction (June 2, 2010) and Key Considerations  for the English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects document the good intentions of the document are evident.

Good Intention #1: A Living Work

“The Standards are intended to be a living work: as new and better evidence emerges, the Standards will be revised accordingly”

You may have read the Washington Post “The Answer Sheet” post this week on America’s Next Education ‘Crisis’ – and Who Benefits.   Valerie Strauss looks at who really benefits from the public discourse in education these days and lands firmly with the for-profit businesses selling curriculum, textbooks, consulting and data warehousing software.  The pavement cracks under the cash load… how can a document be “living” when an entire industry is evolving on a static document?  The textbooks, supplemental websites, curriculum pacing guides, webinars… are all being designed around the Standards created and taken off life support.  Let’s not kid ourselves; the Common Core is not a living document.  It died the day the money fell from the luminous Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) data enhanced sky. 

Good Intention #2: A Focus on Results Rather than Means

 “Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identity as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards”

Remember teachers?  Heck, remember professional judgment?  I for one spent years in an undergraduate program to study not only my content area, but also educational philosophy, pedagogy and methods before entering the classroom in 1992.  Contrary to what some would have you believe, the majority of teachers I have worked with over the past 20 years have cared deeply about students… spending long hours planning activities to meet learning objectives, personalizing experiences for individual students and listening to countless stories of “look what I found on the way to school today…”. 

The Goal #3 of the PARCC framework in Indiana looks simple enough.  The test will support these amazing educators in four ways:

Let me give you all a little hint, when one posts a presentation online, one might want to make sure the speaker notes are not visible.  

The speaker notes for this slide let us know that what is meant by “Instructional Tools to Support Implementation” is to provide “content frameworks, sample assessment tasks and model instructional units”.  A pothole in the road…  a fully canned curriculum that anyone could dish out to young people – no need for teachers or their professional judgment and experience.  “Professional Development Models” include PD on implementation of the new assessment and interpreting test data.  “Timely Student Achievement Data” means aligned performance – based assessments throughout the year (DUCK – lost a tire on that one)… And that “Educator-Led Training to Support ‘Peer-to-Peer’ Training”… that’s to train K-12 educators to use the instructional tools handed down by the PARCC folks, i.e. the canned curriculum mentioned earlier.  (Whew – I think I broke an axel)

Back to our presentation…. At this point, the young presenter from the IDOE on that October morn looked earnestly at the now hostile audience and said we shouldn’t worry about what to teach … we should “trust the Standards” (his words) and let them be our guide.

And with one simple phrase the faiths of the world came together in a common question-  how is this good for our children?

The Actual Pavement

Here’s the thing – the Common Core Standards are not bad.  As a jumping off point for the living discussion of best educational practices I’m really okay with them.  The Standards own authors were acting in good faith … but they never saw the jackhammer of market forces coming to bear on education.  This document will become a rally point for those looking to make a profit.  In the 45 states and 3 territories which have adopted the Common Core, the conversation is not about educational standards… it’s about textbooks, testing and budgetary concerns for hiring all those consultants. This isn't about educating children.  This isn't about developing better teachers.  This isn't about improving and innovating schools.  This is about making money in for profit companies…. hiding behind good intentions paving the way …