Engaging vs. Involving
Standard 6:
Communicates and collaborates with a variety of stakeholders.
Standard Aligned Courses:
EDAD6589: Engaging Communities
EDU6600: Communication and Collaboration
Reflection:
Standard 6:
Communicates and collaborates with a variety of stakeholders.
Standard Aligned Courses:
EDAD6589: Engaging Communities
EDU6600: Communication and Collaboration
Reflection:
Prior to starting this program, I had little knowledge of the work it took to get the community engaged and involved in a school. Growing up my parents were teachers so they were constantly involved in my school and what I was doing. It was not until I worked at my current school that I began to realize that not all parents are as connected to school as my parents were. I also did not realize how similar all professional development activities were. Most professional development opportunities are run by administration and teachers are expected to sit and listen to the presentation. "Teacher leadership is a phenomenon in which teachers daily walk on a balance beam, balancing their desire to influence ad improve the school-wide organization with their calling to teach children and see them succeed" (Blair, 2016, p.107). Through this program, I have learned a significant amount regarding adult learning and how to design professional development so that teachers leave feeling that it applied to them and that it was useful.
EDAD6589:
This class opened my eyes to the difficult task of getting the community engaged in a school that has a bad rapport. My high school has the stigma of having the difficult students and the trouble makers. This makes getting the community engaged in what the school is doing extremely difficult. When talking with my principal, she shared the many efforts put forth to get the community into the school and interacting with both the staff and students. She has tried providing meals, child care, door prizes, and other incentives for the community to partake in the culture of the school. Hattie talks about "nine essential practices for improved [student] outcomes:
This course gave me the space to think about different ways to help get families and community members engaged in our school but kept hitting the road block of how to get them to actually participate. One idea I came up with from this class I would like to try in the future is planning a math curriculum night. For this night, students would be able to bring their parents to school and their parents would be able to engage in the math that their students are doing every day. One of the biggest things we hear from parents is that the math their students are doing is "nothing like what I did in school." As a math teacher, I know this is not true, their children are still doing the same math but the presentation looks different. I think this would help parents and community members get an idea of what is happening in the classrooms and give them a window into what their children are doing in math every day.
Artifacts from EDAD6589:
End of Course Reflection
Community Engagement Product
Case Study
EDU6600:
At the beginning of EDU 6600 my only experiences with adult learning in my work-site, were various 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 this 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. Staff sit and listen and leave feeling as if their time has been wasted. Over the course of the year, there is some differentiation depending on the group that is presenting but when the administration is presenting, there is no variation. "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 classes I have been a part of have 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 was able to use what I have learned this past October when I worked with a team to provide a differentiated professional development for my staff around culturally responsive teaching strategies. According to Wiliam, "increasing the educational achievement of students is a national economic priority, and the only way to do that is to improve teacher quality" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 27). The only way our teaching staff is going to improve is by learning new strategies to enhance their teaching. This is where the adult learning strategies I have learned will come in handy.
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 ran a staff professional development during the fall of this school year. As I prepared for what I was going to present and how I was going to present my portion of the professional development, I though about the information I had learned about adult learning. I also thought about the past professional development that impacted my learning and how to use strategies from those to put together a coherent and useful presentation. The goal is to answer the following question, "How do we shift the focus of face-to-face time, at faculty meetings and elsewhere, to opportunities of learning" (York-Barr, 2006, p.199)? Working with my team, I relayed the ideas from Professional Development What Works. We provided four mini sessions for staff to choose from. We chose to set it up in this way to provide staff with choices in regards to what they would be learning about. We also chose to run our mini sessions like a miniature version of our own classrooms. With this in mind, staff were expected to interact with each other and the strategy that was presented to them. It was fun for me to implement my new learning about how adults learn. Finally, we offered our services to staff as resources as they tried out and implemented the new strategies they learning in our sessions. 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).
Artifacts from EDU6600:
Final Project
EDAD6589:
This class opened my eyes to the difficult task of getting the community engaged in a school that has a bad rapport. My high school has the stigma of having the difficult students and the trouble makers. This makes getting the community engaged in what the school is doing extremely difficult. When talking with my principal, she shared the many efforts put forth to get the community into the school and interacting with both the staff and students. She has tried providing meals, child care, door prizes, and other incentives for the community to partake in the culture of the school. Hattie talks about "nine essential practices for improved [student] outcomes:
- high expectations for all students;
- strong personal connections between students and adults;
- greater student engagement and motivation;
- a rich and engaging formal and informal curriculum;
- effective teaching practices in all classrooms on a daily basis;
- effective use of data and feedback by students and staff to improve learning;
- early support with minimum disruption to student need;
- strong positive relationships with parents; and
- effective engagement with the broader community" (Hattie, 2012, p. 171).
Seeing as the last two bullets of Hattie's list involve both parents and the community, it stands that working hard to get the community involved in the school is important. The question I am still trying to answer is, how?
This course gave me the space to think about different ways to help get families and community members engaged in our school but kept hitting the road block of how to get them to actually participate. One idea I came up with from this class I would like to try in the future is planning a math curriculum night. For this night, students would be able to bring their parents to school and their parents would be able to engage in the math that their students are doing every day. One of the biggest things we hear from parents is that the math their students are doing is "nothing like what I did in school." As a math teacher, I know this is not true, their children are still doing the same math but the presentation looks different. I think this would help parents and community members get an idea of what is happening in the classrooms and give them a window into what their children are doing in math every day.
Artifacts from EDAD6589:
End of Course Reflection
Community Engagement Product
Case Study
EDU6600:
At the beginning of EDU 6600 my only experiences with adult learning in my work-site, were various 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 this 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. Staff sit and listen and leave feeling as if their time has been wasted. Over the course of the year, there is some differentiation depending on the group that is presenting but when the administration is presenting, there is no variation. "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 classes I have been a part of have 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 was able to use what I have learned this past October when I worked with a team to provide a differentiated professional development for my staff around culturally responsive teaching strategies. According to Wiliam, "increasing the educational achievement of students is a national economic priority, and the only way to do that is to improve teacher quality" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 27). The only way our teaching staff is going to improve is by learning new strategies to enhance their teaching. This is where the adult learning strategies I have learned will come in handy.
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 ran a staff professional development during the fall of this school year. As I prepared for what I was going to present and how I was going to present my portion of the professional development, I though about the information I had learned about adult learning. I also thought about the past professional development that impacted my learning and how to use strategies from those to put together a coherent and useful presentation. The goal is to answer the following question, "How do we shift the focus of face-to-face time, at faculty meetings and elsewhere, to opportunities of learning" (York-Barr, 2006, p.199)? Working with my team, I relayed the ideas from Professional Development What Works. We provided four mini sessions for staff to choose from. We chose to set it up in this way to provide staff with choices in regards to what they would be learning about. We also chose to run our mini sessions like a miniature version of our own classrooms. With this in mind, staff were expected to interact with each other and the strategy that was presented to them. It was fun for me to implement my new learning about how adults learn. Finally, we offered our services to staff as resources as they tried out and implemented the new strategies they learning in our sessions. 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).
Artifacts from EDU6600:
Final Project
Professional Development PowerPoint
Stanford Hollyhock Fellowship:
During my time in the Teacher Leadership program, I have also been participating in the Hollyhock Fellowship Program run by Stanford University. Through the Hollyhock program, I have had the opportunity to create professional development for staff that is meaningful and applicable to what they are teaching. I was given the tools to create professional development that catered to the adult learner through SPU, and was then able to set up the professional development in a way that provided staff with culturally responsive teaching strategies that I learned through Hollyhock. With the Hollyhock program, I gained important information about different teaching strategies that made putting together a staff training possible. What I learned in my classes at SPU made creating professional development for adult learners something that was feasible. Where, I would have had no idea of where to begin with putting together an all staff training before. The combination of the two programs, has helped me understand what students and staff need when learning. While they are not the exact same, student learning and adult learning carry many of the same characteristics. The culturally responsive teaching strategies we use with our students, are the same strategies that work well with adult learners.
Stanford Hollyhock Fellowship:
During my time in the Teacher Leadership program, I have also been participating in the Hollyhock Fellowship Program run by Stanford University. Through the Hollyhock program, I have had the opportunity to create professional development for staff that is meaningful and applicable to what they are teaching. I was given the tools to create professional development that catered to the adult learner through SPU, and was then able to set up the professional development in a way that provided staff with culturally responsive teaching strategies that I learned through Hollyhock. With the Hollyhock program, I gained important information about different teaching strategies that made putting together a staff training possible. What I learned in my classes at SPU made creating professional development for adult learners something that was feasible. Where, I would have had no idea of where to begin with putting together an all staff training before. The combination of the two programs, has helped me understand what students and staff need when learning. While they are not the exact same, student learning and adult learning carry many of the same characteristics. The culturally responsive teaching strategies we use with our students, are the same strategies that work well with adult learners.
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 & Students: Maximizing impact on learning. S.l.: Taylor & Francis.
- Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
- York-Barr, J. (2006). Reflective practice to improve schools: An action guide for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
- Zepeda, S. J. (2012). Professional development: what works. New York: Routledge.
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