Thursday, May 17, 2012

Professional Learning as Local & Embedded

NOTES FROM CLASS
A peak into what's happening these days at the RHSOE.

by Dr. Tali Zelkowicz (’00)
from the Spring 2012/5772 Issue of Tikshoret

Leading thinkers in their field, Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker, argue that...

...[t]he most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement is developing the ability of school personnel to function as professional learning communities.1
...And the rest is commentary. The seminar, now called “Professional Learning,” that we offer at the RHSOE aims to provide that commentary. If you are an alumna/us of the program who graduated before 2010, you would remember this course under a different guise: “Staff Development.”

It will surely come as no surprise to you that the name change was an intentional and reflective decision on the part of the RHSOE faculty.

Specifically, when I first began co-teaching the course with Michael four years ago in 2008, I learned from him and current scholarship that there was a real and significant paradigm shift taking place in the field of “Staff Development,” and it had been under way at least since the mid-1990s. Indeed, we might even say “Staff Development z״l,” because if you take seriously the paradigm shift, the focus is no longer on “staff” or “development.” Rather than an expert who seeks to develop those deemed to be less expert, the focus has shifted to building cultures. This is very different from being “developed.”

In short, the focus has shifted from the “restructuring” of the 1980s which left leaders hoping their culture would change, to a “reculturing,” from which leaders can then plan for any restructuring that they realize is necessary in order to be aligned with the core values and vision of their conscious culture. As such, this has been a true backward design shift. “Reculturing” that can lead to restructuring, rather than the reverse, lies at the heart of the work of Professional Learning Communities, or “PLCs,”2 and did not feature prominently in the old paradigm of Staff Development.3

More specifically, I suggest to students that PLCs seek to address and redress what have for decades been perhaps the two greatest kushiot to plague educators’ efforts at what was called staff development. These two are what I call the problems of “the Great Mechitzah” (the gap between how teachers are expected to teach versus how they are encouraged to learn), and of “Targum” (translating learning from external environments, outside both the local cultures of our educational institutions, but also knowledge from outside the field of education altogether).

So the course aims to help students to be able to create communities of colleagues who come together regularly and meaningfully, in a variety of ways, to invent and reinvent what constitutes excellent teaching and learning, all in the specific context of their local settings and institutional realities.

This emphasis on the “local” is a radical, challenging but promising shift. It means, for example, that any one-shot staff development workshops that take place off-site become suspect in the new paradigm, since they are not embedded in the teachers’ own institutional culture.

Put another way, “Professional Learning” makes educational supervision less about being a corporate manager whose main job is to ensure productivity and efficiency, and makes it more akin to the work of an anthropologist, whose tasks revolve around observation and the interpretation of culture. Indeed, the core tasks of clinical supervision (the model we use and teach in RHSOE) — observation, supervision, and evaluation — all become the core ingredients of this larger end, a PLC.

As such, during the semester long course each spring, I engage students in three core assessments. They need to:

  1. propose their own approach to classroom observation designed in response to seven diverse models presented in class
  2. guide a teacher at their internship site through a pre-ob, observation and post-ob, the three stages of clinical supervision cycle and then reflect personally and professionally on the process at each step
  3. develop and propose, in small teams, a vision for a professional Learning Community for any educational institution — Jewish school, camp, or other educational agency. Their presentation is given as a portfolio of carefully selected artifacts, which should each tell a different part of the “story” (culture) about their imagined PLC. Peer and outside judges will decide whether each proposal is to receive the hypothetical grant towards realizing their vision.

Through these tasks, along with core activities such as our collective study of samples of their students’ work using the various new protocols that have been developed around the country or practicing classroom observation using a range of qualitative and quantitative instruments, I invite students to investigate the core and overlapping components of professional learning which are aimed at creating PLCs: observation, supervision, and evaluation.

Although it is not easy, I know that the shift in this course has also begun to take place, with your help, in Jewish educational settings across the country. Cultural change is slow, but deep. I would love to hear how it is going and welcome ideas from you for how we might best prepare graduates for this amazing and complex work we do.

Tali is happy to share the full text of the Professional Learning syllabus with you. Just email her.

Notes

1. DuFour, Richard and Robert Eaker (1998) Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD.

2. The authors first mentioned in this article, DuFour and Eaker, helped develop a website called “All things PLC,” which can be found at: http://allthingsplc.info/ . It is interesting to imagine what dialogues could take place on a Jewish Educational version of such a website!

3. For a rich anthology of the new paradigm of “professional learning,” which covers a panoply of all of these themes, we turn to:

  • Easton, Lois Brown (2008) PowerfulDesigns for Professional Learning. Oxford, OH: NSDC.
  • We study an array of selected supervisory models in: Pajak, Edward (2000) Approaches to ClinicalSupervision: Alternatives for Improving Instruction. Norwood, MA.., 2nd edition.
  • I highly recommend you explore the short but comprehensive work on this topic by, Blythe, Tina and David Allen and Barbara Schieffelin Powell (1999) LookingTogether at Student Work. New York, New York: Teachers College Press. Ron Berger refers to those protocols and offers inspiring illustrations of their application in his chapter called “A School Culture of Excellence,” which we also read, and explore what an “ethic of Jewish excellence” might entail.
  • We learn to be descriptive and not judgmental in our classroom observations, learning how to decide when to draw on qualitative and quantitative instruments for collecting classroom data, using two chapters from the following class works:
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