Go As A River: Developing Professional Learners in a #PYP School

Professional Development is the life-blood of what I do.

Being held accountable for improving the standard of learning is a weighty task, one that I take very seriously. It consumes a lot of energy in my role as a PYP Coordinator. Every Wednesday morning has been carved out for me to facilitate training and engage in a PLC (Professional Learning Communities). As you can see by this graphic, ensuring that our professional development time is well-spent is an important matter to be considered.

I’ve been in the field of education for 2 decades and I have definitely seen how it has evolved. In the book, Professional Learning in Action by Victoria J. Risko, MaryEllen Vogt, it was interesting that they noted research done by Kragler, Martin, and Sylvester that described the stages of professional learning over the years:

• the in-service era (1950-1960s)
• the staff-development era (1970-1980s)
• the professional development era (1990-2000s)
• the professional learning era (the mid-2000s to present)

Our current era, suggests that teachers must become leaders in their own learning, no longer passive receptacles but self-motivated and responsible. As educators, we are to engage in problem-solving, which is guided by our social constructivists’ principles. When we are intentionally directing our own learning, we are more purposeful in our decision-making in order to advance our knowledge and expertise.

In Zen, there is an expression: Go as a River.

Zen philosophy always likes to represent a complex idea in simple terms, but this saying suggests that we have the capacity to receive, embrace and transform concepts, emotions, and difficult situations, in order to create peace, freedom, and community.  The Nobel Laureate, Thích Nhất Hạnh, reminds us that we cannot reach the ocean like a drop of water, we must surrender our isolation and learn how to come together through compassion and a willingness to accept each other unique qualities in order for us to have the energy to do the work we dedicate ourselves to, which in his world, is mindfulness.

There is strength in community.

As a Primary Years Programme Curriculum Coordinator, the heart of my work is collaboration. I not only model it through my efforts with members of the leadership team but with other stakeholders. And, moreover, I strive to cultivate greater collaboration amongst my staff.

The types of collaboration I see teachers engage in happens on multiple levels

1. In the classroom: with the teachers who support learners, and the learners themselves.
2. In grade levels: with the team of teachers for that grade level.
3. In the division: with the various teachers and students at the different grade levels
4. In the school: with other divisions’ students and/or teachers, the school leadership or the parent organization.
5. In the community: with groups that are affiliated with the school or other organizations that they volunteer or work with. But in a sense, they are an ambassador of the school.
6. In networks: with individuals or groups that share common values or interests.

So I have taken this notion, to Go As a River, as the rational and objective of our Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) this year. In my mind, coming together to learn with one another is an intimate and vulnerable act, since it requires honesty, openness, and transparency.  There are so many models of PLCs, mostly data-driven, however, I wanted a different approach. I wanted to bake a process into our PLCs that did the following:

• developed the skills of collaboration within our division and our teams.
• allowed for teacher agency.
• taught teachers how to be researchers and guided them through a process of putting educational theory into professional practice.
• cultivated supportive teams that helped individual teachers through the struggle in order to build teachers’ self-efficacy, something that has a high impact on student learning, according to John Hattie.
• built the capacity to debate and discuss issues without personalizing it, so that people can have the experience of having productive and meaningful conflict.

In this way, teachers are pushed out of their comfort zone in a healthy and safe way, and everyone in our program benefits from our risk-taking efforts, especially our learners, who need us to be responsive. I also felt that it would be important to incorporate  the “5 energies of high-performing teams” that you can see in this graphic:

Clearly, I have high hopes for our teams. Simon Sinek, a man whose work inspires me to stretch boundaries, reminds me in this TED talk, that developing the trust and will to cooperate is not something you can simply instruct team to do, (“Get along, people!) but it is a feeling that is cultivated through the climate you create to provide a sense of safety.

As someone who gets to “set the tone” of not only how we collaborate but who we become as professional learners, it would be easy to turn to the many books written about how to construct Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), and just copy and paste those systems. But the heart of these systems was designed for standardized test scores and relied on student data in order to inform practices of school improvement. I struggled with this for several reasons, chief among them is that I don’t want our students to fit into a “standard”, I want them to be looked at as unique and special. I didn’t want them to reduce to numbers. If we only use data as the foundation of what we do, then we would miss out on opportunities for genuine teacher inquiries. Speaking of which, I examined the structure of teacher action research and thought perhaps that applying this practice into professional inquiries would be the route to go. However, I found that this was a goal-orientated structure that didn’t actually “teach” teachers how to collaborate, and may not appeal to all teachers since it typically culminates into a research paper. I felt that this put pressure on teams, and why would I want to stress out teams for the glory of publication? The last professional learning structure I examined was the Lesson Study I felt that this was a great tool to incorporate into our PLCs but wasn’t the PLC itself. Thus, I wanted to take what was great about all of these systems and create something that is unique, something that represents, perhaps even mirror, what we might expect in our Primary Years Programme (PYP) classroom.

Speak the Same Language (Intellectual Energy)

In a previous post, What Can Pedagogical Leaders Do to Grease the Wheels of Innovation in Their Schools? I’ve talked about the importance of ensuring that teams have a shared instructional language. Our principal, Matt Ihle, says it best: “Building understanding is the purpose of communication”–and thus by coming into an agreement of what PLC means to us, is the foundation for the work we will do this year. 

So, the first order of business was not to come up with “norms” but to come up with a shared working definition of what it means to be “professional learners in our community”. We have to make sure that when I say we are having a PLC meeting, staff know exactly what that means because we have co-constructed a description that is full of vision and purpose.

Be over Do (Social Energy)

Often times we create these agendas and rush into the “doing” of the work before us, squandering really important time to develop teams. I can’t begin to tell you how many schools I’ve either worked at or visited that have leaders who feel that all they need to do is to throw adults into the room, give them a 1/2 hour to establish “norms” and collaboration happens. No! And No!

Conflict happens and what we do with conflict determines the capacity to do good work in our schools and creates the climate in our schools. How we move through conflict has everything to do with trust. In the book, Speed of Trust, Stephen Convey explains that “Speed happens when people truly trust each other.”--one of the reasons why teams are more productive and efficient is due to working through conflict faster.  Think about this quote:

“In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”
― Stephen M.R. Covey, The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

You know that is true–communication and trust go hand in hand. You can probably think back to a time when someone said something to you that triggered in you some negative emotion and it made it hard to be around that person. However, you may have a friend or colleague who can say something critical and you can reflect on it without being offended by it. Why is that? The reason is that this friend or colleague shares your values. As a result of that, you choose to see how you are connected rather than distinct. Finding common ground is easy when you share common ideals.

So, again, we didn’t talk about “norms”, instead we talked about values. In our first meeting, we ranked and shared personal values with our co-teachers, and in the next meeting, we unpacked and discussed our professional values. It was incredible to see the shift and hear the conversations. People really got to know one another and have discussions that were meaningful, even if they weren’t directly about the PYP Enhancements and student learning. They had permission to be who they are, and what became the “norm” was acceptance and appreciation.

Tribes Vs Teams (Spiritual Energy)

Tribes represent a culture with shared interests and values. Leadership roles are distributed and dynamic. Individuals work toward a common goal, for the sake of their community. This is exactly what I wished for as the engine behind our PLC. These meetings should the development of a coalition that is dedicated to a purpose, so I wanted to turn teams into tribes.

So teachers took a Google survey to put their interests and questions around student learning. I looked for keywords and patterns in order to form the basis of the tribes, then sorted them into their inquiry groups.

1. Encouraging Curiosity and Inquiry
2. Translanguaging
3. Student Agency
4. Play-based Learning
5. Student Motivation
6. Differentiation and Universal Design for Learning
7. Language and Literacy

When the tribes were inaugurated, I gave them a guide for this “vision quest” and referenced the work from the Center for Courage and Renewal as the premise for our rules of engagement and the Circle of Trust Touchstones became the “norms” of our tribes.

Tribes came together to discuss why this topic matters to them and unpack their philosophies and beliefs that will guide their practice. During another meeting, they crafted a mission statement for the work they will do throughout the school year. In their meetings, they would choose their roles, which were flexible, and purely determined by the group.  In this way, they could see the significance of their collaboration and develop a strong support system among them. Mid-year, we would examine and reflect on these mission statements, in order to determine the next steps. And, although some tribes were larger than others, every group has found their way to work through their challenges.

As a part of their PLCs, we had some meetings dedicated to going back to their grade level teams to share what they have been learning about and what their experience has been like doing the Lesson study and peer observations. We used the framework of the constructivist listening tool to provide for deep listening as people had time to share without interruption or judgment.

Acknowledging the Learning Pit (Psychological Energy)

I feel very strongly that if we are to take the profession of education seriously, then we will always be in a state of cognitive dissonance, as we grasp and reach for the “best practice” for the students that we teach. In my post, Why There is No Escape From the Learning Pit, , I explain this conundrum:

“It’s sort of ironic–me, the teacher, who is supposedly the expert, is often shoulder-deep with the students, trying to figure out the course and direction of the inquiry, instead of being assured and confident about the path we are going. It seems that bewilderment, frustration, and struggle have become the perks of being in a state of wonder and anticipation.” 

I think there is a real danger in not acknowledging the struggles we face when we start walking the talk, putting principles into practice. I wanted our teams to be prepared for it and accept it. Remember that Go As a River means that we the capacity to receive, embrace and transform concepts, emotions, and difficult situations, in order to create peace, freedom, and community.  

The Learning Pit is inevitable, in which we debate and grapple with who we are to who we wish to become as teachers. Furthermore, I explained that it was my job to get them out of their teacher’s comfort zone and that the structure of our PLCs was intended to push them into the pit, but it would also be designed to pull them out. Setting up this expectation was important because I wanted to normalize discomfort but also emphasize that it is safe to do it.

The Cycle of Professional Learning (Physical Energy)

Years ago, I read the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and the one big idea that I took away from it was that mastery comes from commitment. So I wanted to ensure that staff had the opportunity to test out and practice ideas, all the while, developing “staying power” when they face challenges with implementation. Thus are PLCs would be cyclical so people could problem solve and celebrate accomplishments. So our PLC meetings would include discussions around the following:

Research: Ask questions and seeking professional literature and learning resources that shed light on the most effective practices. 

Implementation: Discuss the challenges and successes of implementing new ideas and practices. 

Lesson Study: Develop lessons and integrate ideas into your learning community. 

Peer Observation: Watch a lesson related to the research topic. Engage in discussion and self-reflection afterward.

Data evaluation: Discuss the results of either formative, summative or anecdotal evidence of learning. 

Self-reflection: Consider your practice and develop your next steps on your learning journey.

Review and Debate: Examine ideas that have arisen as a result of your reading, feedback from your peer observation and implementation of new practices.

These ingredients would the agenda items for our meetings and represent the types of things we would do within our Action Learning Cycle.

Explore and Plan

First, each teacher inquiry needs to start by sharing the personal research around our areas of interest. We set up a SeeSaw PLC group so that people could post the things that were inspiring them. There’s a proverb: “to know and not do, is to not know”; so I wanted to ensure that teachers developed the capacity to read articles or watch videos with the impetus of testing ideas out in their classroom. To take curiosity and put into action, that would be the heart of the work we would do as life-long learners. Here is an anecdote from our PLC that facilitated this practice:

Pre-planning of a lesson: Translating Research Into Action

The research article I’d like to share:

A summary of the article:

The teaching actions are reflected in this article that I don’t do, but I want to try is….

Nothing fancy here, but it’s the lubricant of change and was the prerequisite for the lesson study. Again, I didn’t design anything complicated for that either. I wanted a simple format that would have the basic ideas for the peer observations:

The Plan: Framing the Peer Observation

What questions will drive the lesson? 
What planned actions will take place in the lesson? (Use the chart to simplify the “looks fors” for your peer) 

 

What the teacher(s) do(es)?	What do the students do?

As a result of applying my new professional learning into the lesson, I expect (my hypothesis about the unplanned actions) the students to…..

 

Act

This is the implementation phase when a teacher conducts a lesson that integrates their learning from their research and has a peer observe their attempt. The peer observation not only shares practice but it also holds teachers accountable to initiate their growth. Peers come together to share their notes and provide feedback.

And although implementation seems like an obvious action, going back into the research is also an action too. Research includes looking at student data, which can be formal or informal, and also examining more articles and videos–whatever resource they want to use to further their practice.

Bends in the River

As much planning as I put into cultivating the collaborative and trusting climate of our tribes, I have to also be willing to throw things out, as I reflect on what is happening in classrooms and in discussions. I must allow for things to happen organically. Sometimes it means allowing tribes to hold tension, giving them the opportunity to grapple with issues around what is the “best” approach. However, I think this is the kind of spirit that is imbued in the concept of “Go As A River”, as we transform conflict (whether it is trivial or substantial) and trudge out of the Learning Pit, becoming better for it, together.