Collaboration & Analysis- Standard 4

Collaboration & Analysis

Standard 4:
Teacher leaders engage in analysis of teaching and collaborative practices.

Standard Aligned Courses:
EDU6528: Accomplished Teaching
EDU6526: Instructional Strategies
EDU6600: Communication & Collaboration

Reflection:

The three classes aligned with standard 4 have made a large impact on my teaching since joining this program.  This school year alone, I have led more than one professional development opportunity for either my PLC or the entire Renton High School staff.  These three classes have taught me how to provide training for staff that is interesting and a worthwhile use of their time.  Below you will see my reflections and learning from each class.

EDU6528:

At the beginning of EDU6528- Accomplished Teaching, I had one goal.  My goal was to become a better leader within my department and my school.  However, I did not know exactly what that meant at the time.  Throughout this class, I revised and broke down my goal into smaller more focused goals that could improve my leadership skills as a teacher.  I had the following goals moving forward in the school year: improve my ability to pose purposeful questions, get into the classrooms of my colleagues once a week, and find meaningful professional development around mathematics.

For my first goal, posing purposeful questions, I looked at what the Danielson Framework requires, as well as what research said about questioning in the classroom.  According to the article, Student, teacher, and instructional characteristics related to students’ gains in flexibility, there are six levels of questioning.  You can see the six levels in the following table.

(Star, et al., 2015)

At the time, I was asking questions that fell mostly into level two and level three.  I am still working on my ability to vary the levels of questions I use within my class periods.  I am aware that, “Orchestrating an effective classroom discussion, however, is not as simple as just asking questions.  It requires a teacher to be purposeful in the types of questions that are asked so that the key ideas are made visible and fully explored.” (Chedister & Shumway, 2016) Although, I am aware that this is the case, carving out the time to pre-think questions can be difficult within the schedule of a teacher.  As I continue to reflect on this class and what I have learned, I am going to continue pushing myself to think about my questioning techniques and the levels of questions I am asking students to think about and answer on a daily basis.  Since getting into classrooms is a goal I have for myself and for my department, this protocol will ensure we are not going in with an evaluative stance.  It will keep conversations neutral and about what we saw. Classroom Observation Analysis

My second goal involves visiting my colleague’s classrooms during my planning period.  As a department head, I think it is important to know what is happening in the other classrooms in my department.  I want to specifically make a point to visit the classrooms of my newer teachers more often.  I was a new teacher not long ago, and know “it as a process to assist a new teacher to become a member of a professional community in which members participate as equals in professional dialogue aimed at their individual and collective self-development.” (Kemmis, Heikkinen, Fransson, Aspfors, & Edwards-Groves, 2014) I don’t feel that I received the support necessary to really thrive my first couple years of teaching.  I want to make sure my newer teachers feel supported.  Although I want to focus on my newer teachers, I plan to take time one day a week to visit the classrooms in my department.  I want to see what the other teachers are doing in their classrooms.  I have found watching other teachers to be a beneficial practice for my own teaching.  I am able to get ideas of what I can do in my own classroom, give feedback to the teacher I was watching, and check in to see what is happening in other classrooms.

My third goal is to find professional development that will be meaningful and worthwhile for my colleagues and myself.  Through this course, I have realized how helpful it is to have a community sounding board.  A place where you can bounce ideas off of other educators and receive feedback.  Right now, professional development is seen as something we have to do instead of something we want to do.  I want to find ways to make professional development something people want to participate in.  “Schools and districts should be encouraged to rigorously evaluate professional development approaches themselves and, when possible, to report the findings publicly to build up the knowledge base on the topic.” (Gersten, Taylor, Keys, Rolfhus, & Newman-Gonchar, 2014) I think it is important that we look at the professional development options that are being offered and see if they are benefiting us.  Teachers are pressed for time.  If we are required to attend trainings that we don’t feel are relevant we won’t take as much away.  From this class, I have come up with a few professional development ideas I would like to try with my department.  I want to bring questioning into our professional learning community times.  If we are working on questioning techniques and question levels as a team we are going to be able to find new ways to get students thinking about the math.  I also want to get my department into each other’s classrooms.  Above I talked about my personal goal of visiting more classrooms, but I also want the other members of my department visiting each other’s classrooms.  Visiting classrooms will not only give the visitor ideas to try in their own practice, it will also give another dimension to our professional learning communities.  We will be able to transition from talking solely about curriculum to student engagement, teacher presentation of the material, and other aspects of our classrooms.  

EDU6526:
In EDU6526, 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.  (PLC PowerPoint)  This project was particularly meaningful to me because I was 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.

EDU6600:
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).

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). Along with four other colleagues we put on a professional development around culturally responsive teaching strategies. The strategy I focused on was effective student feedback. After the (RHS Professional Development PowerPoint) professional development we put on, the feedback was there was not enough time.  Staff felt that it was valuable and applicable information and they would have liked to have been able to spend more time in each session.  Our focus was around, "How can we create school environments where each student is known and treated as an individual" (Blair, 2016, p. 200)? You can read more about the results and set up in my Communication & Collaboration Final Paper.

Sources:

• Blair, E. (2016). Teacher leadership: the "new" foundations of teacher education: a reader. New York: Peter Lang.
• Chedister, M., & Shumway, J. (2016, Spring). The Role of Questioning to Develop Conceptual Understanding. Volume 68(Issue 2), 21-24. Retrieved November 27, 2016, from http://www.wismath.org/resources/Documents/WMT_Spring_2016-Complete-LR.pdf#page=24
• Gersten, R., Taylor, M., Keys, T. D., Rolfhus, E., & Newman-Gonchar, R. (2014, January). Summary of research on the effectiveness of math professional development approaches. Retrieved December 4, 2016, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED544681.pdf
• Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: maximizing impact on learning. London: Routledge.
• Kemmis, S., Heikkinen, H. L., Fransson, G., Aspfors, J., & Edwards-Groves, C. (2014). Mentoring of new teachers as a contested practice: Supervision, support and collaborative self-development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 43, 154-164. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2014.07.001
• Star, J. R., Newton, K., Pollack, C., Kokka, K., Rittle-Johnson, B., & Durkin, K. (2015, March 6). Student, teacher, and instructional characteristics related to students’ gains in flexibility. Contemporary Educational Psychology. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
• Zepeda, S. J. (2012). Professional development: what works. New York: Routledge.