Facilitating Communities of Practice

Overview

Professional educators at my school site do not currently engage with one another in communities of practice. That being said, our school is in its 2nd year of founding and given the circumstances of remote learning and the pandemic, we did not have the opportunity to come together to set protocols of collaborative meetings. Given these circumstances, we have only had logistic and operational meetings. Nonetheless, this lack of communities of practice has a significant impact in relation to student learning and well-being. First, the lack of professional learning or communities of practice impacts student learning because we do not have any opportunities to collaborate on learning strategies for students or discuss new or researched-based instructional strategies. We could better meet the academic needs of our students and thus influence student learning if we were able to collaborate, analyze and reflect on such instructional strategies. Second, by not having professional learning or communities of practices, we are impacting student learning because we are missing out on an opportunity to support our English Language Learner (ELL) students. Communities of practice would be a fruitful opportunity to discuss the levels and subsequent needs of our ELL students and learn from each other how to better support them. By meeting regularly, we could share growth that we have seen and what has worked or not worked in terms of instructional strategies for our ELL students. Third, in relation to student well-being, the fact that we do not have professional learning or communities of practice prevents us from discussing student culture in our classrooms. If we are not meeting or collaborating on student behavior or student culture, we do not have opportunities to discuss students’ comfort or happiness at the school site, which can manifest in behavior, attendance or academics.

As for the data, at my school, there is a significant gap in data between ELL students and their English-proficient peers, specifically in the area of math. There are both quantitative and qualitative data points to support this focus area. Quantitatively, ELL students at our school performed on average 46.5% lower compared to RFEP/IFEP students. Qualitatively, Designated/Integrated ELD observations, interviews/audits of teacher experiences, interviews with the Director of ELD and a review of ELAC meeting minutes all indicate that we are not doing enough to support our ELL students in reaching their full potential and giving them access to rigorous instructional standards. Thus, the main issue that I am addressing in my community of practice is focusing on supporting our English Language Learners, specifically in the area of math.

Given my school’s context and data related to student learning and well-being, the most important issues that I will need to consider in preparing to co-facilitate and support a community of practice to engage in collaborative professional learning are: (1) operationalizing a community of practice and (2) creating a culture built on trust. Given that this will be our first community of practice, one important issue that I will need to consider in preparing to co-facilitate and support a community of practice is to operationalize the meetings. This includes setting a time that works for all group members, creating/setting collaborative norms, communication norms, how we will handle disagreement, and the like. It will be important for me to front load information and model how to engage in a community of practice during the first planning meeting. Before my group members are able to trust the process, they need to be aware of what the process is.

Secondly, given the context at my school, it will be essential to intentionally plan and foster a safe space so that the adults can feel comfortable sharing their experiences, including mistakes, and being open to offering and receiving feedback. Based on the student data, it is clear that there is a discrepancy in academic achievement of ELL students compared to non-ELL students, thus I hope to center our problem of practice around this topic. Because the quantitative gap is so apparent, it will be important to create a community of practice in which the adults feel comfortable having conversations that require a sense of honesty and vulnerability. Discussing the student data could lead to more uncomfortable topics of conversations around implicit and explicit bias around certain demographics of students and their families, thus it will be imperative that we create a strong community of practice centered on trust.

Main Activites:

Our problem of practice is focused on our ELL students needing support in understanding and using mathematical language to acquire deep understanding of math concepts. As noted in the meeting minutes, we first reviewed some of our school’s demographic data, including 92% of our population being Hispanic and about 60% being ELL students. In terms of student learning data, we came to this problem of practice conclusion based on 2 main data pieces: (1) our ELL students are performing on average 46.5% lower compared to RFEP/IFEP students on the CAASPP over the last 3 years and (2) there is a difference of 34.2 percentile points on the our most recent NWEA assessment of ELL and RFEP/IFEP students. In addition, we also decided to move forward with math specifically because the current STEM field does not reflect the demographics of our students and the school. A group member also mentioned that by focusing on this problem of practice, it can impact other data pieces such as our social-emotional learning behavior scale that reflects student well-being because students will feel more comfortable and confident in their learning spaces.

I co-facilitated to help the group make their selection by creating and modeling a space where each group member was able to share their thoughts and opinions. To facilitate the group’s selection of the problem of practice, I first presented the data and strategically allowed think time. I then intentionally asked an open ended question to allow for the members to share their initial thoughts and reactions. This created an atmosphere that was centered around discussion and naturally, I saw group members building off each other’s ideas. When I noticed 1 group member was not very participatory, I specifically asked what thoughts she had and she shared that she agreed with everything thus far. In addition, before we moved on to strategies, we ensured that all group members were in 100% agreement. Ownership among the group members came directly from all group members giving their input and communicating effectively. The group also ensured that our problem of practice was aligned to our school’s mission. Building off of Knowles’ (1984) adult learning theory, all group members were thus involved in the planning, had high relevance to all group member’s daily work and was problem-centered.

The group’s rationale for selecting this evidence-based strategy was based on research that a group member shared entitled Language Objectives: More Than Just Vocabulary (Regalla, 2012) as well as some personal anecdotes. This strategy includes writing and posting not just content-based objectives, but language objectives that incorporate a specific and explicit language skill needed in order to fully engage in the math lesson. By incorporating language objectives in math, we are also addressing anecdotal findings, which found that math teachers did not see themselves as ELD teachers. In addition, we are also aligning to the CAELDS that Ms. S2 mentioned in the discussion, which are specifically designed to support ELL students. The group will learn about this strategy by doing independent research of any media type related to the problem of practice and then share our findings in the subsequent meetings on a rotating schedule.

The group and I plan to monitor and analyze the initial results by collecting 1 set of student work to analyze that correlates to the language objective. We plan on analyzing this first set of baseline data to get a general sense if it is supporting ELL students by calculating average perfect proficiency of ELL students vs. RFEP/IFEP students. We hope to analyze the progression and average mastery of each day’s lesson of our ELL students, in hopes that by incorporating language objectives, our ELL students are better able to achieve mastery.

Reflection:

One strength in co-facilitating a COP is my ability to understand and access the group’s experiences and use them as assets to help develop relational trust, which is critical to developing a true collaborative mindset. As an equity-driven leader, I recognize that everyone brings unique and valuable perspectives. Throughout the meetings, I intentionally turned it back to the group to solicit the individual group member’s expertise instead of giving my initial forethoughts. This communicated to group members that I value their experiences and that their voices should be heard. This relates to the research by Knowles (1984) mentioned in Step 1 in which he states that “as a person matures, they accumulate a growing reservoir of experience that becomes an increasing resource for learning”. The COP that we created built off of this principle because my co-facilitation allowed for us to serve as resources and allies for each other based on our experiences, as demonstrated in Video Clip 2 for example when Ms. S shared her conferring notes template from her previous experience with the whole group.

Another strength of mine in co-facilitating a COP was my ability to create an environment of collaboration, which is critical in being an equity-driven leader. I achieved this by ensuring that all group members had opportunities to share their opinions. When group members were more quiet or before documenting any formal agreements, I made sure to warmly solicit their thoughts to see if they wanted to share before moving on. I also achieved this by asking a lot of open-ended questions that fostered an environment of discussion and showing active listening skills to affirm responses such as nodding my head and asking questions of clarification, as seen in Video Clip 2 when I ask Ms. L a question of clarification when she suggested a different meeting outcome. After soliciting feedback from the group on the COP, all members mentioned that they really appreciated the level of collaboration that was in our COP. Ms. C specifically said that she had never been in a space before where she had been given the opportunity to share her experiences to try to help other teachers. I intentionally created this collaborative atmosphere by providing consistent structures for the meetings, grounding us in our collaborative norms and modeling what it can look like to give and receive feedback.

Drawing upon Knowles’ (1984) 4 principles for adult learning, an area of growth in co-facilitating a COP is to be more problem-centered vs. content-oriented. More specifically, my ability to maintain the team’s work towards the meeting purpose. Meetings must be conducted within certain amounts of time and in an efficient manner and thus I must be mindful of the pacing of the meeting and making sure that we are working in alignment of the purpose of the meeting.

Although I think it is important to incorporate some content-learning around language objectives, sometimes it led our conversations to a very micro-level and we would get “lost in the details”. This can be seen in the meeting minutes for Meeting 2 when Ms. S shared an article on writing language objectives and Mrs. Z brought up an example of a content objective she was struggling with writing a language objective for and I had to redirect the discussion back to the meeting’s outcome and purpose. This made us sometimes deviate from our problem of practice, which was to give ELL students more support in understanding the use of math language to support their language development and to develop their conceptual understanding of math.

Lastly, another area of growth would be incorporating different data sources. After reviewing the initial implementation results, I only really took into account quantitative standardized testing results. Although we did see a lot of growth very quickly over the course of the COP, I think it would have benefited the group if we incorporated other data pieces such as qualitative data where members could speak to student’s efforts, mindsets and strategies used. There was a clear correlation between language objectives and higher ELL achievement on exit tickets, however it’s important to remember that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. By incorporating other pieces of data, we would get a better picture of the true status of our ELL achievement and potential barriers to academic success.

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Supporting Documents