Professionals Can't Develop Without a Growth Mindset

Many teachers seek opportunities to intellectually enrich themselves and to expand their pedagogy. Being a life-long learner is a integral component to being a good teacher. We invest our time, talent, energy, and money in our personal and professional growth. We are intrinsically rewarded for these investments, our colleagues are enriched by the atmosphere created when the learning is shared, and our students' learning is enhanced by our risk-taking and forward-thinking pedagogy.

In order to compel teachers to continue their learning, they are mandated to attend professional development or professional learning sessions. Yesterday was election day which means that in many places it was also a day designated as a teacher professional development day. The electoral and school calendars have another thing in common: election day and the end of the first marking period very closely coincide. Which means when teachers are under pressure to wrap up the marking period with whatever grading obligations that poses for them, they are also being told to stop what they are doing and spend a day learning.

So my question is: do teachers bring to these mandated sessions the same growth mindset they bring to the voluntary ones? And for those who do not invest voluntarily in their ongoing learning, how can the mandated sessions be valuable to them? How do we grow a school culture that values professional learning in all its forms?

This is not a rhetorical question. I would love to hear people's insights. There are easy answers like the PD has to be relevant to them. It has to be differentiated. It has to be authentic with opportunities for teachers to apply the learning to their curricula. So, consider a PD day that involves choice -- several workshops based on a survey of faculty needs and the teachers can choose which to attend. Add to that sessions that include time to work with colleagues to apply learning to current student work and upcoming units and a space dedicated to practicing new technology and collaborating with colleagues practicing and applying the same new tools. Lastly, a follow-up hour of professional learning time the same week is set aside for them to work in their curricular teams to continue applying the new learning to upcoming instruction and assessment. Do you get a relevant, differentiated, authentic professional learning experience? I think so.

If some of the teachers' feedback tells you otherwise, what would you do differently? And, how would you continue to encourage your colleagues who had a positive, productive learning experience (despite the distraction of the end of the marking period and their grading concerns) to keep learning and not be discouraged by the day's detractors and distractions?

Let me advocate for co-teaching

The principles of good teaching that informed my work as a high school social studies teacher for twenty three years are as applicable in the library as they were in the classroom. But, there is so much about being a librarian that is different than being a classroom teacher. Here is one of the biggest changes. I used to think that a class load of 125 students in a semester was a lot. Now I have 1300. That is a lot.

My advocacy meme... will it work?

So here is the challenge: I work with all of the students in the high school. I have a responsibility to those students and to the fidelity with which we implement our library media, inquiry-based, research curriculum. And to be successful, I have to work with students in the context of their classes with other teachers.

Without a specific course load of my own, my collaboration with my colleagues is essential to fulfilling my curricular mandates and achieving my curricular objectives. If I am successful, students will benefit in direct and indirect ways from the work I and their other teachers do together. First, students will experience an increase in teacher attention and feedback by virtue of my co-teaching. And, second, by supporting classroom teachers in the infusion of technology in their instruction and project-based learning, students will experience a more personalized implementation of the curricula. Adding a teacher to a classroom cuts the student-teacher ratio in half so more students will receive direct support for their inquiry work during class time.

Teacher-Librarian collaboration is also an essential way to help classroom teachers enhance their effectiveness. I can help with unit and project planning and resource collection. I can co-teach lessons on inquiry and research. I can support the classroom teacher's instruction during content examination, I can help create and analyze formative assessments, differentiate, re-teach where necessary, and re-evaluate students' progress. And I embrace what we can learn from the reflection and de-briefing after an extended collaboration to determine how to best meet the varied needs of the students as the year unfolds.

As a classroom teacher, I did not make use of the opportunities provided by collaboration with my library media specialist. As a librarian, I am committed to forging the relationships that will encourage my colleagues to open their classrooms and their time and their energy to collaborating with me. I am happy to hear how other librarians advocate for their library programs and encourage their colleagues to embrace the opportunities collaboration offers and how it empowers students.

BYOD and Personalizing Learning, Part 1

A goal for my school is to continue to increase personalized learning.

Similar to my previous school, in my new district a gap persists between the perception by teachers that learning is highly personalized and the much lower numbers of students who report that this is their experience. Personalized learning is undoubtedly eduspeak and it is quite possible that students and teachers do not share a common definition of the term which would explain the disparity. However, we must check our inclination to explain the disparity in this way or, worse, to dismiss the student perspective if for no other reason than it shows a lack of empathy for our students' perspectives which isn't very -- wait for it -- personalized. However, it is important to know: what do we (students, teachers, parents) mean when we say "personalized"? I am reminded of a twitter chat I facilitated that focused on regard for adolescent perspective. We had a really thoughtful discussion about how to make curriculum, resources, daily experiences, etc. reflective of and relevant to our students' points of view and life experiences. What I see now, looking back, is that we are presuming that we know what an adolescent perspective is and that we understand it.

When teachers report that almost all of their instruction and assessment is personalized, I think they mean several things have happened. They have differentiated for the range of skill development among their students by, for example, providing texts at a range of reading levels and assessments with expectation thresholds unique to students' developmental achievements. I also think they mean they have provided for student choice, for students to select their own topics of investigation and propose the means by which they will demonstrate their learning. Why then do only half of students report that their academic experiences are personalized?

If the text reading level has been adjusted to be accessible to each student, but the subject of the text holds little interest for the student is the resource personalized? Should students expect that all materials be high interest? If, for example, the purpose of the lesson is to examine, let's say, humor and the teacher is highly amused by the selected text but the students are not, is the lesson personalized? Is there a point where students have to submit to certain experiences, let's say studying Shakespeare, because it has been deemed important or good for them even if they might not consider it personally interesting?

This year, as part of our professional learning around the roll out of our BYOD initiative we are considering how we can leverage students' daily tech access to increase the personalization of instruction, resources, assessment and curriculum as a whole. This is the logical and achievable blending of two initiatives but we must continue to ask ourselves: how do we know whether or not what we are doing is actually reaching students on a personal or individual level?

Does personalized mean different for every individual based on each individual's unique interests, i.e. students diagramming sentences are each given unique sentences about their lives and interests. Or does personalized mean that a personal connection has been made by the student with the content the meaning of which endures and perhaps prompts the student to modify behavior, i.e. studying the water cycle when your community is experiencing a drought. And, there is also the difference between instruction that is personalized and a teacher-student relationship that authentic and insightful.

So now the question is how can BYOD help teachers with any of the metrics of personalization? To figure this out and implement it purposefully (applying a model like SAMR) we need to figure some things out:

• what technology do the students use most frequently?
• assuming that they use this tech frequently because they enjoy it, what do they enjoy about it? what are they getting from it?
• how much of your students' tech use is focused on consumption of media and how much is spent creating it?
• how do we get student consumers to consume what we want them to and become creators?
• how do we get the creators to create from the content our curricula require they consume?
• once we, the educators, start to influence if not control the consumption and creation is it no longer personalized?

Hmm. I think I have reached a moment for reflection. I am going to query and observe my new students in my new school with regard to the questions I posed. Stay tuned to see what I learn and how I begin to apply the SAMR model and try to increase personalization with that information in mind.