Professional Development for Educators: blog

Strategic Conversations with Teachers: It’s Not About You

Posted on February 13, 2012 by admin

Life is funny. I have spent the last month talking to administrators and instructional leaders about the importance of strategic conversations with teachers. I have urged them to commit to speaking the truth and to remaining engaged even when it is difficult. And, I have been adamant that they try to work with every person on their staff and not give up on anyone.

Easier said than done. As I have found out this month in my own work on school boards and some of the schools I serve, practicing what I preach is pretty hard. It is a lot easier to avoid strategic conversations and work around some people than it is dealing with them. It is a lot easier to outmaneuver some people than it is to hold them accountable for doing the right thing. It is a lot easier to give up on them and get rid of them than it is to work with them and help them get better at what they do. Speaking the truth is hard. Remaining engaged and persisting with difficult colleagues is even harder.

So why do it? Why not just get rid of difficult people or find a way to work around them? Isn’t the work we do too important to be derailed by an individual? One monkey shouldn’t stop the whole show, right?

Well, yes and no. Our work is too important to be derailed by one individual, but our work can only find success when every individual becomes engaged in the ideals and the vision that drives what we do. And, I firmly believe that getting rid of the individuals who for the moment seem to be in our way undermines our work. It sends a message that the work is more important than the people involved in it, when the people – the children and the adults – are our work. They are at the very heart of what we do and why we do it.

That is a very lofty ideal that often feels unrealistic in the face of the very harsh reality of some people and the baggage they bring into schools. It is hard not to get frustrated with colleagues who are more concerned about their own agendas than they are about helping the students or who refuse to change or try something new even when they recognize that doing so is in the best interest of the kids. And, when things get really frustrating, it’s hard not to take it personally.

I was talking to one of my favorite principals the other day and we were discussing the frustrations of doing this work. I was venting about how hard it was and how frustrated I was with several individuals who I thought were getting in the way of the work and I was starting to take their resistance personally. His advice to me was this: “It’s not about you. And, it is your job to keep anyone else from making it about them either.”

And he’s right. This work is not about you or any one individual. It’s about the collective good. It’s about all of us. And, the way that we get the work done is to maintain a laser-like focus on the ideals that drive the work rather than the people who try to impede it.

Given the importance of this work, we cannot afford to avoid the difficult conversations. We cannot avoid speaking the truth and remaining engaged even when it hurts. We cannot avoid the discomfort and frustration of continuing to work with our colleagues when life would be much easier for us if we just worked around them. Because this work is not about you or your personal comfort. It’s about something much more important and it is worth a few moments of frustration and discomfort to see it through.

PD Case Study: Marta

Posted on February 13, 2012 by admin

Marta is an AP Calculus teacher who attended one of my Rigor Workshops over the summer. She wanted to learn strategies for increasing the level of rigor of her course and how to deal with students who struggled with the rigor of AP level work. Throughout the morning, Marta seemed to enjoy learning how to build student’s capacity for rigorous thinking. She took copious notes, asked several questions, and commented on her way to lunch how much she was enjoying the day. In the afternoon however, she grew increasingly agitated as I suggested strategies for supporting students who struggled with rigorous coursework. By the time I began sharing strategies for managing reteaching and retesting, Marta was bright red. Finally, when she couldn’t take it any more, she raised her hand.

“I am so tired of hearing how we have to coddle these students. There is no way I am giving a retake. When are we going to start expecting them to study and work hard and do well the first time??? If they can’t do that, maybe they don’t belong in AP.”

I was surprised by the vehemence of her remarks. My first impulse was to launch into a sermon about how important supporting students was even in AP, but before I stepped up on my soapbox, I paused. It seemed that there was something else going on. So instead of preaching, I asked softly, “You seem really upset.”

She nodded. “I am. I am so tired of being asked to give the students two and three and four chances. When are we going to ask them to do the work the first time?”

“Why does that bother you?”

“Because it makes students lazy. They know that they don’t have to study or work hard because we are going to give them chance after chance after chance after chance.”

“You sound really angry about that,” I observed.

“I am. I am so sick and tired of being told that I have to keep giving chances to kids. When I was in school, I had to get it right the first time. I had to work hard and turn in my work on time. I didn’t have any second chances or retakes or opportunities to re-submit work. I had to get it in on time.”

“Is that what makes you so angry about offering retakes?”

Marta thought for a second. “I guess it’s the sense of entitlement. These kids treat my class with disrespect. They act like they deserve a second chance when they haven’t done anything to earn it.”

Ahhh. I thought to myself. Now we’re getting to the real issue. I was quiet for a moment. The other workshop participants waited expectantly. Many of them nodded in agreement.

“What is the point of retakes?” I asked the room.

“To give students another chance to learn and show that they have learned the material,” a few people recited from the handouts.

“Yes, that’s what’s written on the handouts,” I began. “But why is that important?”

“So that you can make sure that kids have learned the material?” one participant offered.

“So that you can give help to the kids who are struggling?” offered another.

“But how does that address Marta’s concern?” I asked. The room got silent as the participants waited for me to answer my own question. I waited a few seconds and then answered, “Retakes hold students accountable for learning. If a student blows off a quiz for instance, making him take the retake sends the message that he is accountable for learning the material. It forces him to go back, relearn what he didn’t learn and demonstrate that he has learned it. It doesn’t let him off the hook. Just the opposite. It puts his feet to the fire.”

I continued. “Marta, your issue isn’t retakes, or the other support strategies I have shared today. You resent the sense of entitlement your students seem to have towards you and your class. That’s a separate issue.”

She thought for a moment. “I think you’re right,” she said quietly.

“So let’s deal with that,” I said, and we did. It wasn’t part of our agenda but so many people shared Marta’s concern that we spent part of the workshop talking about the root of students’ sense of entitlement and strategies for helping them develop better work, study, and learning habits. We talked about how teachers could leverage certain support strategies and rigorous instructional strategies to wean students off their need for supports. And, we talked about how by offering a truly rigorous learning experience, we could ultimately help our students develop the habits of mind that make them not only good learners, but hard workers, critical thinkers, conscientious students, and well-rounded people.

Marta stayed after the workshop to talk to me. “I guess I am taking things too personally.”

“I get it,” I smiled. “It’s tough when you’re working so hard and students’ don’t seem to appreciate it.”

Marta nodded. “But I really do care about my students,” she insisted.

“Of course you do. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be so passionate about this.” I shut off the LCD projector. “The thing is, you can’t punish students when they frustrate you.”

“I know. I just didn’t realize until today that that’s what I was doing.”

We chatted for a few more minutes and she left. I’ve thought about Marta a lot over the past few months as I’ve worked with similar teachers. We all experience her frustration at some time or another. I experience it myself when I am working with teachers who resist or resent my help. But, no matter how frustrated we get, it’s important to keep our focus on our role – we’re there to help. We cannot determine whether we will help students based on their attitudes; we must use our support strategies to help them develop better attitudes along the way.

Posted in Classroom Strategies | 3 Comments

The Top Five Professional Development Lies

Posted on January 10, 2012 by admin

The New Year is typically the time we resolve to be better, fitter, slimmer, andmore organized. We vow to overcome the mistakes of our past and start fresh. So we march into school in January full of new resolve.

And by February, we’re already back to our old habits.

The same thing happens every time we read a new book or attend a new workshop. We come back energized, vowing to make changes to our tea

ching and leadership practices, only to fizzle out shortly thereafter.

So to help you stay on track this year, we’re exposing the top five lies professional development tells you:

Lie # 5: You just need to work harder. Many professional development workshops and books convey the message that if you just worked at it a little harder, you’d be a master teacher. They assume that the reason you are not as successful in the classroom as you’d like is that you aren’t working hard enough. If only you would put in more time, work nights and weekends, sacrifice your entire summer, and basically give up life as you know it, you too can be a master teacher! More likely, all that “hard work” will only lead to frustration and burn out. The problem isn’t that you aren’t working hard enough, the problem is that you are working too hard at the wrong things. We waste valuable time investing in fads, programs, and strategies that do not give us any return in terms of student achievement. Hard work alone won’t make you a master teacher any more than practicing scales for hours each day will make you a concert pianist. Sure, it takes hard work to be a master teacher but I suspect you are working pretty hard right now and you are just plain exhausted. Working harder isn’t the answer. Working on the right things is.

Lie # 4: This will be easy. Beware of easy. Good teaching looks easy but rarely is — at least not at first. It takes hard work in order to seamlessly integrate the principles of effective instruction into your practice so that they become your natural response to students. Over time, it will get easier, but initially, it will take a lot of concentration, reflection, adjustment, and refinement. Mastery takes time. It doesn’t happen over night and there are no quick fixes. You cannot just read a book or attend a workshop and suddenly become a master teacher. It will not be easy or comfortable or quick. Becoming a master teacher requires consistent, focused, intentional effort over time.

Lie # 3: Do this and you will be a master teacher. No one strategy will make you a master teacher. Becoming a master teacher is a process that takes time. You must rigorously apply the principles of effective instruction to your practice until they become your natural response to students. That’s it. No quick fixes. No magical moves. Becoming a master teacher takes deliberate practice and reflection over time. It’s a process. So, rather than focus on trying to become a master teacher over night, give into the process. Understand that all teachers progress from novice, to apprentice, to practitioner, to master teacher. Focus on moving to the next level rather than trying to instantly become a master teacher.

Lie # 2: This one strategy will immediately raise test scores. Test scores and student achievement for that matter are a result of a combination of factors including teaching quality, student background knowledge and motivation, the quality of the curriculum, and the influence of outside factors. Sure there are things that you can do to significantly raise test scores but thinking that there is one magic bullet will set you up for failure. Remember, test scores represent student learning and the best way to increase student learning is good teaching. Good teaching cannot be reduced to one strategy or approach. It is the result of rigorously applying a set of principles to your practice over time. The better you are at applying the principles, the more students learn. The more students learn, the better they perform on tests. There is no magic bullet.

And the top professional development lie is…

Lie # 1: All you have to do is… If good teaching could be reduced to a single strategy or approach, there would be more master teachers. Good teaching is nuanced. It’s hard. A strategy that works beautifully for one teacher will fail miserably with another. Becoming a master teacher is not simply a response to good training. We don’t have an epiphany and instantly become master teachers. Good teaching is a result of systematically taking all that we know about teaching, organizing it into a few governing principles , and rigorously apply these principles to our teaching until they become our spontaneous response to students in the classroom. That’s all you have to do.

Posted in Classroom Strategies | Tagged Better PD, Classroom Strategies, Educational Leadership, Professional Development | Leave a comment

Case Study: Vertical Teaming

Posted on January 10, 2012 by admin

We recently worked with school district to conduct vertical team training. Initially, they wanted me to help the middle and high school teachers in the core subject areas to do a better job of aligning their instruction. We started the day with an activity we call “Five in/ Five out,” where we ask teachers to work with their grade-alike colleagues to identify five skills they absolutely need students to come in with and five skills they guarantee students will leave with. When the grade-alike groups finished working, we posted their five in/five outs on the wall to look for alignment. What we found was shocking.

All of the grade levels wanted the same basic five ins – reading skills, study skills, discipline, writing skills, good work habits. There five outs had to do with the curriculum but their five ins were entirely about soft skills.

“Wow. Look at that,” we pointed out the discrepancy.

A few teachers became immediately defensive. “Our kids don’t come to us with the background knowledge and study skill they need to be successful,” they explained.

“Where were they supposed to learn how to study?” we asked. The high school teachers pointed to the middle school teachers. The middle school teachers blamed the elementary teachers.

“If no one owns the teaching of these soft skills, it’s no wonder your students don’t have them,” we mused.

From there, we lead teachers into a really interesting discussion about why students weren’t coming in with the soft skills they needed and how they could help them acquire them. We quickly realized that while the workshop was supposed to help teams better vertically align the curriculum, we wouldn’t get anywhere unless we first dealt with soft skills.

So we did. We shifted gears and started with identifying the key soft skills students would need to be successful. We looked at both non-cognitive skills (such study skills, social skills, and the ability to set long-term goals), thinking skills (such as comparison contrast and error analysis), and thinking processes (such as decision making and problem solving). First, we made sure that everyone understood what these skills really entailed, then we asked vertical teams to work together to determine when they would help students acquire each of these skills. Would students learn study skills in seventh grade or was that too late? Perhaps students should learn error analysis in grade nine to prepare them for the problem solving tasks they would have to complete in grade 10. We even went a little further, pushing teams to identify when students would be introduced to the skill, when they would reinforce the skills, and finally, when they would extend the skill. At the end of the day, all the teams walked away with a list of over 25 soft skills and a plan for when they would introduce, reinforce, and extend those skills over time.

Too often, we spend time in vertical team meetings trying so hard to get the curriculum perfectly aligned that we miss the critical soft skills that help students access the curriculum in the first place. Instead, take time to look at the soft skills so many students are missing and look at ways to help students acquire these. Doing so will help your students reach curricular goals much easier.