By G. FAITH LITTLE
Professional development at the end of the school year. What does it look like? Like backwards planning for units in the classroom, we start with the end in mind when it comes to designing our annual In Practice: Teaching and Learning conference. We ask ourselves how we can best meet the needs of teachers late in the school year and how teachers will be feeling when they arrive on the morning of Chancellors Day. With the end in mind, we set our goals. Sessions are designed for teachers to:
Focusing on practice — where practice makes, not perfection, but more practice — we examine what practice looks like. Then we get busy creating each workshop! Critical reflection: We get teachers talking by creating a space for them to reflect on their experiences over the year, share promising practices, and be critically reflective about their challenges. We use multiple modalities for teacher expression — curriculum inventory, graphing and mapping, music, poetry and prose, recipes, and reflection unbound. Peer-to-peer discourse: We get teachers trying by engaging them with what they already know and do. We create a space for teachers to think about their world from new perspectives, and we do this with high interaction and engagement, rather than passive listening. This year, we explored the Danielson framework with the goal of achieving a deeper understanding of the framework, and drafting a personal action plan. Teachers are able to choose which Danielson component they want to investigate. Inspiration: We get teachers together by designing an experience that actively engages participants in a relevant topic, provides clarifying information about the topic, and creates space for them to share prior knowledge and experiences as they consider new practices. Teachers enjoy an experience of one of our signature workshop series during this session: Critical Incidents in the Classroom, Need to Know for Early-Career Teachers, Keep the Kids Talking, Literacy Unbound, Teaching 21st Century Skills, and Writing for Publication. Strategic thinking: We get teachers thinking by using sensory and design thinking strategies and incorporating academic research into the development of practice. Teachers connect personally as they build bridges to bring this work into their own classrooms. Teachers choose one of three sessions: design thinking, responding to research or sensory thinking. Teachers who arrived at In Practice in the morning, some worn out from a rough school year and others thinking about summer plans, ended the final session with one word to describe their day, calling them out from around the room:
As we closed out our day, we remembered, together, that there is no such thing as perfect. Instead, we are and will always be: in practice.
In January, we invited teachers across the city to the third annual Big Learning Challenge: a conference that focuses on the power of project-based learning. Participants previewed innovative workshops, practiced new instructional strategies, and made connections with other teachers by creating original projects, reflecting on their project-making process, and applying it to their own classrooms.
Each year, teachers glow at the end of the day as they present their work, having engaged with the topic, developed a project vitally connected to their content area, and created everything from scratch. This is fantastic! “Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.”
Who wouldn’t have a great time spending a day in their content area of choice, making cool stuff? The Big Learning Challenge design invites teachers further into the field of play, where they consider how the project-making process can become a reality in their classroom. At every stage, from planning to presentation, teachers pause for written reflection:
After experiencing projects aligned to guiding questions and classroom connections, teachers gathered together to share their projects during the final session's gallery walk. Teachers walked away with not only a satisfying experience, but also self-identified next steps to implementing project-based learning in their classrooms.
Modeling in Mathematics
Moving Images
Narrative storytelling
Scientific experiments
Visual and creative arts
Modeling in Mathematics
PROJECT
GUIDING QUESTION(S)
CONNECTIONS TO THE CLASSROOM Teachers will be able to take this to their classroom in two ways. First, teachers can find inspiration from the open-ended nature of the project, and take into their classroom the PBL-style activities that ask students to be part of creating. Asking students to be creators can be an important way of including them in the learning process, whether that’s with a project about seeds, or something else. Second, teachers can find inspiration in the project’s mathematical ideas discussed in relation to seeds. What they might take to their classroom are some interesting ways to enliven the teaching and learning of specific topics – such as ratios and proportions, symmetries, counting, relations, etc.
Moving Images
PROJECT
GUIDING QUESTION(S)
CONNECTIONS TO THE CLASSROOM A stop motion film can be used as a visual report in any subject. For example, students might create a stop motion clip to do the following:
Narrative storytelling
PROJECT
GUIDING QUESTION(S)
CONNECTIONS TO THE CLASSROOM The process of creating a Choose Your Own Adventure text (PPT, writing, visual) pushes students to consider “what happens if…” and enriches their experience of learning across content areas. The creation of the text deepens learning, and the sharing of the final projects across the classroom allows other students to benefit from the knowledge and inspiration of their fellow classmates.
Scientific experiments
PROJECT
GUIDING QUESTION(S)
CONNECTIONS TO THE CLASSROOM This integrated project involves reading, writing, speaking and listening, Science content, and engineering standards. Once the hydroponic systems are set up, Math standards can be incorporated by measuring plants and graphing trends over time. Though background building and creating the hydroponic systems is a bit time consuming, once this stage is completed, the project only requires approximately 15 minutes per day.
Visual and creative arts
PROJECT
GUIDING QUESTION(S)
CONNECTIONS TO THE CLASSROOM Visual expression of poetry can be used in the classroom to offer a way for students to share what they know and can do. The process of creating a visual representation taps into several 21st century skills and connects with standards in a variety of classroom content areas.
TEACHERS AS ARTISTS Teachers from New York City and beyond started their Election Day with CPET Director Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang, who challenged them to consider life from the perspective of the Aspen tree, an organism connected to its community through a shared root system, growing on a strong foundation, seeking nourishment from the environment to stand tall season after season. Teachers moved into critical reflections sessions and then on to workshop sessions that most interested them – that spoke to their way of teaching or looked promising in inspiring the art they were creating, from lesson plans to analyzing student work to discovering ways to support themselves and others experiencing trauma. We saw teachers create mobiles, balancing objects that represented elements of their heavy loads. Teachers collected student engagement techniques through a fast-paced bingo game designed to connect teachers as they worked. Facilitators provided resources for teachers to explore creative, collaborative, critical, and global mindsets, followed by space in which they dug a little deeper and found ways to integrate their learning in the classroom. BEYOND PLANNED OUTCOMES Throughout Inspire, educators participated in content discussion groups, engaged in critical reflection, collaborated with colleagues, interrogated relevant research, and previewed innovative workshops. They arrived willing to take chances, and with a commitment to enhancing their practice for themselves & their students. As they reflected at the end of the day, teachers shared these ideas: Self-care is important for both teachers and students. Take care of yourself. Students experience trauma – that affects their behavior. Students are NOT their behavior. Behavior is communication. Education changes, and so must we. Try new stuff in the classroom! Take chances. Perhaps their words respond to a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Teachers are finding ways to remain artists, and that is inspiring. WHAT'S NEXT?
We're looking forward to our next Chancellor's Day event, which will focus on the power of project-based learning. The Big Learning Challenge will allow educators to design 21st century projects around a common theme, that they can then take back to their classrooms. Can't make it for Chancellor's Day? Check out all our upcoming PD sessions to see which is right for you. Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang, CPET's Initiative Director, urged participants at Thursday's In Practice conference to be atypical teachers - willing to shift their mindsets and flip the script that they set for themselves and their students. Over the course of the day, this year's cohort of educators moved through four sets of workshops, focused on critical reflection, project-based learning, the Danielson framework, and strategic thinking. In the afternoon, they found support in sessions like Overcoming Overwhelm, examined student engagement with our Literacy Unbound team, and explored the idea of publication as project with our Student Press Initiative experts. Each of the 25 unique sessions provided time and space for participants to reflect, collaborate, and bridge theory and practice. Thank you to all the educators from across New York City who came to In Practice willing to be open, reflective, and collaborative. We look forward to working with you again at your schools or at a future event!
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