Backstory Part 1 - Facing Hard Truths
June 2018
During the 2014-2015 school year, we took a break from the traditional delivery of professional learning. As an Instructional Coach and a Technology Coach, we were frustrated. We had about 20% of the staff voluntarily attending Professional Development sessions, and even fewer putting what they were learning into practice in the classroom. We were doing our best to model strategies and make PD engaging...we even provided one-on-one support and goal-setting. We worked through a coaching cycle with teachers...and the results that we saw were a startling 5-10% implementation in classrooms. In addition, we spent all of our time intervening with struggling teachers, but providing no support or enrichment for our rockstar teachers.
We wanted to grow teachers. Of all levels. But we were not.
One of our assistant principals encouraged us to rethink PD. Take a break for the year, and rethink it. The 2014-2015 school year provided us with an opportunity to go on a journey of professional learning discovery. We researched. We studied PD sessions. We analyzed PL models. We asked tough questions. We worked with teachers to gain feedback on what they wanted.
And we discovered three huge ideas -
- There is a big difference between Professional Development and Professional Learning. How did we not know this before! We were striving for PL. We needed to change what we were doing as coaches - big time. In the classroom, if something wasn’t working, I did not get frustrated with students. I changed the way I did things in the classroom. I approached it differently. We needed to approach PL differently.
- The PL model we were thinking of, this vision of PL we had, did not exist...yet. We found a lot of theory on what Professional Learning should be and that it “needed to change.” However, there were no tangible ideas on what that looked like or how to make it happen on such a large scale. Our PL scope needed to cover a whole-staff, year-long, integrated-topics approach.
- No matter what we did, teachers continued to view instruction and technology as separate entities - because we presented them in separate sessions. Why? Because it was always done this way. What a terrible excuse! Of course they saw them as separate. We saw them as integrated. However, because we were presenting them separately, we were creating a disconnection. We needed to rethink our approach.
In January 2015, we went to a Learning Forward Kansas conference in Wichita. And it was while listening to a presentation from Andover, that it hit us. This. This was the direction we were looking for. Their ideas inspired us and set the gears in motion. Literally.
- Ginny