Dozens of Ways to Grow
Choosing a professional development path that's best for you, getting started, and going for it
Snorkeling in the Bahamas. Training to use your district's new computer system. Learning to tap dance — for the first time. Attending a lecture about multiple intelligences. Reading Beowulf. Taking a curriculum development course. Writing in your journal. Conversing with a colleague. Working in your garden. What do all these activities have in common?
The quick answer: Every single one can serve as a professional development opportunity. Teachers use many skills and many facets of their personalities in their work, and positive growth in any interest or ability can serve the children they teach. Unfortunately, many teachers who have suffered through a mandated lecture or an irrelevant workshop are often put off by the mere mention of professional development. One way to see past that is to focus on its essence — ways to grow.
One key to our professional growth is that we ourselves can choose the ways in which we want to develop. We may seek opportunities to redress what we see as our limitations, to bolster our strengths, or to satisfy our curiosities. By making our own decisions, we are more likely to engage in activities that benefit our teaching, and thus, our students' learning. What are some of the choices that our colleagues have found beneficial?
Be Inspired
Who are better inspirations than other teachers? We are lucky that teachers who have gone before us, as well as some who still teach now, have recorded their struggles and successes. Choose a classic like Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Teacher (Simon & Schuster, 1963), or a classic-to-be like Eleanor Duckworth's The Having of Wonderful Ideas (Teachers College Press, 1987), or any of the moving reflections on her teaching by Vivian Gussin Paley.
Alternatively, drop by the video store, pick up some popcorn, and enjoy your very own film festival in praise of teachers. Some tried-and-true favorites: Goodbye Mr. Chips, Dead Poets Society, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and To Sir, With Love. For further sources of teacherly inspirations, from the fictional to the philosophical, look in Teacher Lore: Learning from Our Own Experience, edited by William H. Schubert and William C. Ayers (Longman, 1992). In addition, your colleagues — the teacher next door, down the hall, in another school, or, in this age of the Internet, in another country — are readily available as inspirational models and mentors.
Study Student Work
Teachers who have interrupted the basic rhythm of teaching — the assigning, collecting, assessing, and returning of student work — to look closely at individual stories, drawings, or explanations of mathematical processes report that doing so can be a gold mine. For instance, through the auspices of the Philadelphia Teachers' Learning Cooperative, public elementary school teachers in that city hold weekly meetings in each others' homes where they examine an individual child's work for two hours.
Educational researcher Helen Featherstone noted that these conversations shed tremendous light on an individual child's learning needs and, therefore, on a teacher's next best steps. They also, as one teacher suggested, "refresh the spirit."
A range of methods for structuring your own groups can be found in Assessing Student Learning: From Grading to Understanding, by David Allen (Teachers College Press, 1998).
Face a Challenge
Elaine, who had taught for 25 years, told me that her experience of learning to perform Shakespeare, though she had never acted before, allowed her to "walk in her students' shoes" - to develop increased empathy for others who are learning something new. When she returned to the classroom and integrated acting into her Shakespeare unit, she was able to be a cheerleader for the kids, urging them on: "If I can do this, so can you." Since our life experiences and educational histories are unique, facing a challenge differs dramatically from one person to the next. What's your challenge? Learning to sail, to sing, or to sew? Keep a journal recording your experience and its effects.
Redesign Units
We all have our favorite tried-and-true units that grab kids' attention, keep them engaged, and result in increased understanding. But what of those units we're not too sure about? Maybe we've tweaked that Civil War unit for several years, but it is still greeted by yawns and groans. Worse yet, the quiz grades are consistently low and the projects are always uninspired. What to do?
Redesign that unit! According to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, the authors of Understanding by Design Handbook (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1999), teachers should work "backward," beginning the design process by determining and prioritizing what we want our students to have understood by the unit's end. Once we have decided this, we determine what "evidence" is required for students to demonstrate their understanding. Then, and only then, do we plan the learning and instructional activities that will prepare students to produce the required "evidence" of understanding.
Travel
That travel broadens horizons is, of course, a cliché. But teachers' travel can broaden their students' horizons, too. After one fourth-grade teacher spent several weeks of her summer vacation traveling through China, she wove her Chinese experience throughout the year. Her students calculated with an abacus and painted characters with brush and ink.
This teacher's colleagues were so impressed with her innovations that the following year, each teacher on her grade team chose a country that fascinated him or her. Together, they created a weeklong "Culture Club" unit. Students were issued passports, "traveled" from "country" to "country" viewing the people, landscape, and art, listened to the music and learned a few words of the language, and sent home hand-illustrated postcards. Students were excited about having "visited" England, Hawaii, Ghana, and the Philippines, and learned about the characteristics of these varied cultures.
Reside Intensively
Many teachers testify to the powerful effects of intensive residency programs. They appreciate the opportunity to devote themselves to learning (whether about a discipline, a pedagogical method, or one's self), to live in a learning community, to meet colleagues from all over the country and even the globe, and to observe excellent teaching. To start you off, here are a few programs that teachers rave about:
The Institute for Writing and Thinking offers experiential writing workshops in weekend and weeklong formats. Among the many workshops, you might choose to reflect on your own teaching of writing with a small group of other teachers, or to explore ways to read through performance, engaging your feelings and body as well as your intellect. If you seek similar support and learning around math, investigate the two-week workshops available at Summermath for Teachers.
At the weeklong Harvard Project Zero institute, hear Howard Gardner's and David Perkins's most recent ideas, and meet in small groups with other teachers and researchers to plan on enriching your own classroom with Project Zero innovations. These include multiple intelligences theory, the teaching for understanding framework, and creating cultures of thinking.
The seed (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum puts teachers "at the center of the process of growth and development" so that they can put their students' growth and development at the center of the classroom. Participants in the weeklong seed Summer Leaders' Workshops in California, Minnesota and New Jersey go on to lead monthly seminars supporting diversity in school climate and curriculum.
These ideas for professional growth are but a small subset of the pool of vast possibilities out there. Now brainstorm a list of possibilities of your own, thinking about both what you want to learn and how you learn best. Having generated your own list, narrow it down to several options that resonate most strongly for you. Last but not least, choose one that you could realistically do this coming year. Then go for it!
Carol Philips, Ed.D, is an associate professor in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she is designing and directing a professional development program for teaching fellows.
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