EDU6600- End of Course Reflection

Communication & Collaboration

End of Course Reflection

At the beginning of EDU6600 Communication & Collaboration I was unsure there was a way to provide a professional development that was not incredibly boring.  As an adult learner I have had a number of poor experiences with professional development where they are teaching you about a specific teaching strategy that seems as if it would be effective for students but explaining it in a very traditional sit and get fashion.  I was confused because most professional development opportunities I attended were presented in a "do as I say not as I do" way.  I came into this class with the challenge of providing professional development to my colleagues this school year.  With that challenge we decided as a group we needed to go away from the "do as I say not as I do" way professional development had been presented to use thus far.

After doing the reading for this class I felt far more confident in my ability to provide a professional development that was going to be worthwhile for my colleagues.  There were a few parts of this class in particular that made a difference when I was planning my professional development session.  The first was when we talked about adult learning and how that differed from student learning.  In that reading I was not surprised by what I read but I was surprised that professional development presenters were not following the simple steps Zepeda lays out.  On page 67 she says the learning should promote:

• fluency and flexibile transfer to immediate and long-term situations;
• value and worth in the application of knowledge;
• transfer of skills;
• the power of ideas in the work to be accomplished;
• practical applications;
• clear priorities;
• multiple opportunities for continuous feedback;
• opportunities for reflection, self-assessment, and opportunities to appy and reapply prior knowledge to new situations; and,
• personalization for the learner (Zepeda, 2012, p. 67).

I paid close attention to this list when I was creating my mini session for my professional development and final project.  I focused my professional development around culturally responsive teaching strategies per the Renton High School School Improvement Plan, specifically reflection strategies to increase growth mindset and to open a line of communication between student and teacher around achievement.  Staff left with five concrete methods for student reflection, they were also given time to adapt one of the strategies to their own classroom creating a personalized student reflection strategy.

In this class, I paid specific attention to Teacher Leadership Standard 4: Engage in analysis of teaching and collaborative practices. It states that teachers communicates regularly and effectively with colleagues, parents, and students through a variety of mediums. Collaborates with other professionals to bridge gaps between schools and community and between departments/disciplines within schools. As I planned my professional development and considered the plan for the rest of the school year, I made it a point to include conversations with colleagues, administration and students. All are vital to running a productive professional development. As we continue planning for the rest of the year, we will be counting on feedback from staff on what they would like to see next, students on if they can see a difference in the instruction in their classrooms, and administration to see what they would like to see staff implementing. According to Hattie, "teachers, schools, and systems need to be consistently aware, and have dependable evidence of the effects that all are having on their students -- and from this evidence make the decisions about how they teach and what they teach" (Hattie, 2012, pp. 169-170). It is critical to remember that students are the center of everything we do. As a professional development presenter, I need to remember that the teachers are my students and that they will then be taking strategies to their classroom and their students.

As I think about what comes next in our professional development plan, I know that feedback from students and staff are going to be a necessity. I also know that we are going to be aiming to answer the questions Blair brings up in Chapter 23 of Teacher Leadership The "New" Foundations of Teacher Leadership. Of the five questions Blair mentions, "How can we create school environments where each student is known and treated as an individual" (Blair, 2016, p. 200)? is the goal of our professional development. We are trying to create a school atmosphere where students feel like they belong and like they are a contributing member of the community.

Artifacts

Final Project

Professional Development PowerPoint

Sources

• Blair, E. (2016). Teacher leadership: the "new" foundations of teacher education: a reader. New York: Peter Lang.
• Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: maximizing impact on learning. London: Routledge.
• Zepeda, S. J. (2012). Professional development: what works. New York: Routledge.

EDU6600- Models of Collaboration

What you do see in your school currently in terms of "models of collaboration" if any?
In my school currently, the model of collaboration used in departments is Professional Learning Communities (PLC's). Each department is able to divide into the PLC's they determine will be most helpful for the department members. In the math department we are divided into PLC's based on what math content we teach. Since we are split by content, each teacher has three PLC's they are a part of. With three different PLC's it is very difficult for teachers to have enough time to meet with their PLC's on a regular basis. The district has moved to a late start Friday model to give us more time to meet during school hours but it is not enough. We are still needing to meet after school and unfortunately our meetings are mostly about what we are going to teach next. We are taking time to collaborate on what we are going to teach, but not how we are going teach it. We also do not take time to figure out how it went once we did teach it. We do not take the time to look at our assessments since people have different grading speeds. So, while our PLC's are functioning for collaboration about what we are going to teach, we have a long way to go before we are successfully using our PLC's to monitor student growth.

Within our school, my principal uses shared decision making. If a decision needs to be made, she will bring it to the department heads first, and then if needed the department heads will take the issue to our departments. This method of collaboration has helped with buy in from our staff. When our principal took over five years ago, she made some changes without getting staff input first. This led to a very poor climate survey at the end of the school year. From then on she has used shared decision making to make decisions for our school.

Lesson Study: How could you see this model implemented in your school?
As I think about the PLC's in the math department, I think about what we could use to help improve the efficacy of them.  As I read about the lesson study process,

• "Study curriculum and formulate goals;
• Plan;
• Conduct research; and,
• Reflect" (Zepeda, 2012, p.226).

I thought about how this could apply in my department as a part of our already functioning PLC's.  We are already doing the planning.  Our PLC's as I said above are focused on the planning portion.  The "what" we are going to teach.  However, we would need to "identify a specific learning problem and how this learning problem affects the learning goals of the students" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 227).  Right now, we are planning for what we are going to teach but this would add a goal to what we are teaching aside from getting through the content by the end of the year.  The part of this model that would be difficult for us to implement would be the research conducting portion.  "These lessons involve a team of teachers observing and collecting data as one teacher teaches the lesson" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 227).  We do not have planning periods that align with teachers teaching the same subject.  Since this is the case we would need to arrange subs in order to actually do the research portion of the Lesson Study.

As I learn about more collaboration methods, I am working with my department to make sure we are effectively collaborating with each other.

EDU6600: Adult Learning

My current experience with adult learning in my work site, varies between professional development opportunities.  There are professional development opportunities that,"make learning both an active and interactive process," (Zepeda, 2012, p. 48) but not all professional development opportunities fall into that category.  There are many activities that have a speaker up front and staff sitting and listening.  There is little to no interaction, or activity during the professional development.  There is also no differentiation at our administrator led professional development activities.  There is some differentiation throughout the school year from professional development activity to the next, however, not in an individual administrator led professional development opportunity.  "To support teachers as learners, the principal needs to ensure that there are professional development opportunities that are developmentally appropriate and differentiated based on the very characteristics of the teachers at the site" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 49).  Our required professional development days do not cater to the varying levels of staff at our school.  They are blanket activities for the entire staff.  With this method of professional development, there are always staff members who feel that the training did not apply to them, they got nothing out of it, and/or it was simply a waste of time.  I agree with Zepeda that, "Professional development needs to be situated within the school year as a proactive proccess, not as a "fix-it" intervention merely to remediated perceived weaknesses in teacher performance" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 51).  Many times my principal will use professional development as a reactive intervention instead of a proactive process.

I do not believe my thinking has changed in regards to adult learning.  As an adult learner, just like many in class pointed out, it is easy to identify learning opportunities where learning truly happened and learning opportunities where the learning fell short.  I think the reading around adult learning confirmed what I believed about myself as an adult learner and what a professional development activity should look like to gain the most buy in and most success in implementation from a staff.  I am going to be using what I have learned in this next week as I work with a team to provide a differentiated professional development for my staff around culturally responsive teaching strategies.

As I briefly mentioned above, learning about adult learning could not have come at a better time for me.  A group of teachers and myself will be running the staff professional development coming up at the end of this week.  As I think about how I am going to present my portion of the professional development, I am thinking about the information I have learned regarding how adults learn.  I also think about the different professional development activities that provided the most impact on my learning.  Working with my team, I have relayed the ideas from Professional Development that Works.  We are going to be providing four mini sessions for staff to choose from providing staff with choice in regards to what they are learning about.  We are also going to run our mini sessions like a miniature version of our own classrooms.  Staff will be interacting with each other and the new strategies they are learning.  I am looking forward to implementing my new/updated learning around adult learning.  We are also going to be offering ourselves as resources for staff as they are trying out the new strategies.  Like Zepeda said when talking about ways to engage adult learners, we will be using, "small-group activities through which learners have the opportunity to reflect, analyze, and practice what they have learned" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 48).

EDU 6600 Communication and Collaboration Pre-Assessment

Approaches to Teacher Leadership

Hilty talks about three different approaches to teacher leadership; teacher research, models of distributed leadership, and self managed teams.  Currently my school is using elements of each of these.  We have not settled on a specific style for our building.  There are times where teachers are sent to research specific things within the teaching profession.  Like Hilty mentions, there is little follow through on implementation when this is the style.  There are many times we are in Professional Development around some aspect of teacher research and then we all go back to our classrooms and do exactly what we were doing before.  The teachers doing the research have great intentions, grand ideas of implementation, and high goals for what their research is going to look like in the classrooms across the school.  Yet, the implementation does not happen.  There is a disconnect in my school between doing the research and actually getting the results put to use in classrooms.

The second approach Hilty talks about is models of distributed leadership.  This is the model my current principal favors.  There are very few decisions she makes on her own.  She has put together numerous committees that departments are expected to supply members for.  This model can be successful when you have large enough departments.  My principal has put together more than nine committees but we only have nine members in our department.  This means there are people who are multiple committees.  As one of the department heads, if a committee spot is not filled, the responsibility gets put on my co-department chair and I.  While I think there are many models that fall into this category, there are specific environments where they can be successful.

Thirdly, Hilty talks about self managed teams.  My school calls these Professional Learning Communities (PLC's).  This is the work we are currently doing best.  My department has been working together to create realistic and attainable goals.  We have been focusing on students ability to reason mathematically and they have shown tremendous improvement in that area of mathematics.  We work each year to refine our ability to work together and we make sure we are meeting the needs of our students.  This feels like our most successful area because we get to choose how the department is growing.  I am also aware that since I am part of the leadership of the PLC I am biased about the success of it.  While I still believe we have been very successful as a PLC, I am too invested to make a true judgement outside of the our data.

After processing the different approaches to teacher leadership presented by Hilty, I had the correct mindset to look at Building Hope, Giving Affirmation.  This article focuses on social justice in the classroom.  This has been a key topic in our math department over the past couple of years.  The questions that were presented made me think about my school and whether or not we have a social justice lens.  While I think we are working on gaining a social justice lens, we are not there yet.  We have teachers at different places on the continuum of cultural responsiveness.  One of the biggest flaws in our professional development around social justice and culturally responsive teaching is students are not involved.  Teachers are spear heading this movement.  If we truly want to bring social justice into our classrooms and become culturally responsive teachers we need to bring students into the conversations.  The students are the ones who know what they need.  If we want the students to respond to us, we need to respond to them.  As a school we have a long way to come before we are able to say that our teacher leadership style is truly supporting all of our students and their needs.

EDU6613 Standards Based Assessment: End of Course Reflection

When I began this quarter, I thought this class was going to be about standards based grading.  I thought it was going to be a review of what I already knew to be positive for students.  What I did not expect was to get to think deeply about a unit and see how the standards I think I am teaching actually align with the formative assessments I am planning.  I also did not think I would get to think through all of the formative assessments for a unit.  During this quarter, I created a Learning Progression of a Calculus unit.  I was able to think through the progression of the standards for limits and continuity, put them in order, and decide on the formative assessments that go with each learning target.  I also created a Formative Assessment Rubric.  This rubric took one learning target and its formative assessment.  I then broke it down into the different levels of achievement and possible differentiation techniques depending on student level.  While thinking through the formative assessment rubric, I also created a document of Student Misconceptions.  This document forced to me to think about student misconceptions before they happen.  While I know this is what is best for students, in my time crunched teacher life, I do not take enough time to think about misconceptions before they happen.  In the future I would like to create a student misconception list for each unit I teach.  I think this would be helpful for new teachers coming into a subject but also for daily use.  This work spoke to Standard 11: Utilize formative and summative assessment in a standards based environment.  Like I said at the beginning, coming into this class, I thought this standard was talking about only standards based grading.  Through the activities that are linked above, I have learned why it is necessary to assign standards to everything we do.

The other large piece of this class was our Assessment into Action Project.  For this project, I chose to focus on providing effective feedback to my students.  In the first five years of my teaching I did not focus on the type of feedback I was providing for my students.  I thought the way I had received feedback growing up would be sufficient.  I would write notes throughout the assessment and provide a score at the top of the work at the end.  Through this class and our book Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam, I learned that, "the effect of giving both scores and comments was the same as the effect of giving scores alone" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 109).  All the work I was putting in to give students "effective" feedback was not helpful.  In my Assessment into Action Project I looked specifically on how to give students feedback that did not include a score.  This aligns with Wiliam when he says, "The quality of the work of the students who had been given comments had improved substantially compared to their work in the first period, but those given grades and praise had made no more progress than those given absolutely no feedback on their work" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 110).  This class reading drove my research for my project.

Based off of my Assessment into Action Project, I have a few new goals for the school year.  First being to give less scores and more task-involving feedback, second being to modify my rubrics to give students more useful feedback, and thirdly to help students learn how to give each other effective feedback.  When thinking about my first goal, giving less scores, I will be using Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam, The Conscientious Consumer: reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning by Richard Higgins, Peter Hartley, and Alan Skelton and Response To Assessment Feedback: The Effects Of Grades, Praise, And Source Of Information by Anastasiya A. Lipnevich and Jeffrey K. Smith.  As I come into this school, my three goals will be at the front of my mind.  To help meet my first goal, I need to continually remind myself that, “[f]ormative feedback comments can only be effective if students read and make use of them” (Higgins, Hartley, & Skelton, 2002). I will be focusing on how to provide feedback that students will actually use. I will also be working on the quality of my feedback because, “[a]mong those students who believed they received their detailed feedback from the instructor, those who were given a grade showed substantially lower scores than those who were not” (Lipnevich & Smith, 2008). As I process my second goal, modifying rubrics, I will be looking to Your Rubric Is a Hot Mess; Here's How to Fix It by Jennifer Gonzalez. She talked about modifying rubrics to being a single-point rubric. The standard you are assessing is the middle column, then the left column is what students need to work on, and the right column is what students are already doing well. When Gonzales was talking about the way she modified her rubrics, I felt that it was a simple shift I could make to help students grow.

“Instead of detailing all the different ways an assignment deviates from the target, the single-point rubric simply describes the target, using a single column of traits. It’s what you’d find at level 3 on a 4-point scale, the “proficient” column, except now it’s all by itself. On either side of that column, there’s space for the teacher to write feedback about the specific things this student did that either fell short of the target (the left side) or surpassed it (the right)” (Gonzalez, 2014).

Before I was creating the rubrics Gonzales is talking about.  For my second goal, I am going to work on modifying my rubrics to follow this template.  Finally as I think about my third goal that came out of this class, peer feedback, I will be using Descriptive Feedback and Some Strategies by Pat Sachse-Brown and Joanne Aldridge.  This resource provided simple ways to help students give each other feedback on their work.  The strategy I am going to try this year is, “Select two highlighters: one colour to highlight “what is working” (green) and one colour to highlight “what needs improving” (pink) and highlight each student’s work in relation to the criteria” (Sachse-Brown & Aldridge, 2004).

References

- Gonzalez, J. 2014. Your Rubric Is a Hot Mess; Here's How to Fix It. Retrieved August 06, 2017, from http://www.brilliant-insane.com/2014/10/single-point-rubric.html

- Higgins, R., Hartley, P., & Skelton, A. (2002). The Conscientious Consumer: Reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning. Studies in Higher Education,27(1), 53-64. doi:10.1080/03075070120099368

- Lipnevich, A. A., & Smith, J. K. (2008). Response To Assessment Feedback: The Effects Of Grades, Praise, And Source Of Information. ETS Research Report Series,2008(1), I-57. doi:10.1002/j.2333-8504.2008.tb02116.x

- Sachse-Brown, P., & Aldridge, J. (2004). Descriptive Feedback and Some Strategies. Retrieved August 6, 2017, from http://standardstoolkit.k12.hi.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CCR.Protocol_1.Descriptive_Feedback_Strategies.pdf

EDU6526 Survey of Instructional Strategies End of Course Reflection

This course forced me to think about the different instructional strategies I use in my classroom every day.  It also made me think about the instructional strategies my colleagues use in their classrooms every day.  Throughout this course, I learned about different instructional strategies, tried them in my classroom and received feedback on my implementation of the instructional strategy.  We used two different books during this course, Visible Learning by Hattie and Classroom Instruction that Works by Hubbell, Pitler, Dean, and Stone.  Both texts were able to break down a lesson from beginning to end and point out the key aspects of each part of the lesson.  While I gained a lot of knowledge around instructional strategies from the reading, the two aspects of this class that were the most helpful were the bimonthly feedback on my classroom instruction, and the professional development I put together for my department.

Every two weeks, I was expected to video a specific instructional strategy in my classroom.  Based off of the reading for the week, I would incorporate a teaching strategy and then upload the video for my classmates to watch.  I would then receive feedback on my teaching from my classmates.  This was incredibly helpful for me.  The school I work at has a high turnover rate making it hard for my Assistant Principal to visit my classroom and provide feedback on a regular basis.  A large percentage of our staff is on the comprehensive evaluation system taking up a lot of the focus of our Admin team.  Being able to video myself teaching not only gave me something to watch and improve on, it also gave others a window into my classroom from afar.  I have included one of the videos I uploaded to receive feedback on. This video focused on cooperative learning in the classroom.  With creating videos to receive feedback from my classmates, the idea for my department professional development began to form.

With the growth I was experiencing from receiving regular feedback on my teaching, I wanted to come up with a way to help teachers in my department grow as well.  For my professional development I focused on our Professional Learning Communities [PLC] and how we can provide feedback to each other around our teaching.  I decided to design my professional development around the idea of drop-in observations.  This project is particularly meaningful to me because I am going to be able to implement the idea of PLC drop-in observations starting in the fall.  I provided three different templates for my department to look at, and three different goal ideas for PLC's.  The idea behind my professional development is for teachers to come up with goals in their PLC's and then get into each others classrooms and watch each other teach with their specific PLC goal in mind.  Here is my professional development PowerPoint on PLC's (PLC's).

Overall, this course has made me think about the instructional strategies I am using in my classroom and if they are truly benefiting all of my students.  It has made me look at the planning I am doing for my lessons and ask new questions before I start my day such as, am I going to be able to reach all of my students with this strategy, is there another way I could present this to give students more access points, is this strategy going to meet the needs of my students who are struggling and my students who are excelling, etc.  I still have a lot to learn when it comes to making sure the instructional strategies are working for the majority of my students but I will continue to try new strategies to hopefully help more students feel successful in mathematics.