We’re quickly approaching spring, a time of year where two distinct feelings tend to emerge in schools and districts around the country.
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The first is the realization that you’re in a sprint to the finish line called “The Last Day of School,” and it’s all you can do to buckle up and hang on. Simultaneously, there’s the knowledge that even with the fast-paced schedule, the demands and the expectations of the year will continue.
As school leaders work through what to prioritize over the next few months amid competing priorities, be sure to take the time to meet with your teachers and team members to get a pulse on their professional learning goals. Having quality conversations around professional growth gives you the opportunity to energize teachers for the remainder of the year—and can also provide critical clues about teacher well-being and retention.
Having quality conversations around professional learning gives you the opportunity to energize teachers for the remainder of the year—and can also provide critical clues about teacher well-being and retention.
Prior to checking in with your teachers and staff, it’ll help to do a bit of pre-work. Here are a few ways to prepare for that conversation:
Now that the pre-work is out of the way, here are four best practices and questions to consider as you’re preparing to have conversations with your teachers and staff about their professional learning goals:
This is an obvious question—and an important one. It’s easy to get excited about professional development at the beginning of a school year, when there’s plenty of time and no shortage of ideas. As the year progresses, those same goals move to the bottom of the to-do list.
It’s easy to get excited about professional development at the beginning of a school year, when there’s plenty of time and no shortage of ideas. As the year progresses, those same goals move to the bottom of the to-do list.
Like any good plan, professional learning needs strong implementation and accountability to truly be successful. For school leaders, it’s an opportunity to help teachers refocus on why these particular goals were important to them, how they address student needs, and how they’ve been able to implement what they’ve learned. Here are a few other questions to deepen the conversation:
With these questions, you—and your teachers—might realize their professional development goals are actually about so much more than what they might have considered at the outset. For example, a teacher’s goal might have been to learn how to use a digital tool with more proficiency, but through the process discovered that it also helped students take more ownership of their own learning. Uncovering and elevating these insights can help teachers truly connect their professional learning to the success of their students.
In talking with your teachers, you might discover that there’s a specific professional learning area or set of skills they want to focus on through the end of the year. This is a great opportunity to provide a bit of coaching. What do they hope to achieve with these efforts, and how will they know they’re successful? And, perhaps the most important question: can you do anything to ensure that success?
One simple way to help more educators reach those reinforced learning goals is to encourage them to find a “professional development” buddy. This could mean finding a teacher with similar professional goals, or simply someone they can use as a resource to help them grow as an educator—a teacher they might have met at a conference, or someone they follow on social media.
And, remember to take a moment to ask your teachers about their accountability plan. If it’s a series of webinars they’d like to watch, do they have a schedule for completion? If it’s a new strategy in the classroom, might it make sense to have one of their colleagues observe them and give feedback?
A professional learning check-in also allows you a moment to understand how your teachers are really doing. Even though the sun might be shining a bit more than it did in the months prior, spring comes with its own slump. It’s also the time when educators begin deciding whether or not they’re going to return to school next fall.
Even though the sun might be shining a bit more than it did in the months prior, spring comes with its own slump. It’s also the time when teachers begin deciding whether or not they’re going to return to school next fall.
When your team is unhappy or frustrated, it will take more than a conversation about teacher goals to make them feel heard and seen. Use this time to check in on the well-being of your teachers and staff by asking some simple, open-ended questions that allow them to share as much or little as they feel comfortable with:
These questions set the stage for “stay conversations,” where you can gain valuable input from teachers and staff members you want to retain. In stay interviews, top-performing teachers and high-potential staff members are asked what factors would trigger a departure from the school, or why they might consider leaving their position. It’s never too late to have these conversations and to act on their feedback. Best practice is to ask, rather than not asking at all.
As your teachers are taking the steps to wrap up one portion of their professional learning journeys, it’s never too early to start talking about goals for next year—especially if this year’s work has laid a solid foundation for future efforts that advance school improvement or increase student achievement.
Here’s where it’s critical to encourage your teachers to think about what their own professional vision looks like—and help them anchor their future professional learning plan to that vision.
Here are additional questions to ignite this conversation:
These questions make it easier for educators to see their professional learning plans and goals as a true journey, and can help them better craft the different components and steps that need to happen in their long-range plans.
Conversations about what your teachers are learning, how their teaching practices have changed, and where they might still need support are always right on time. They're an essential part of your educational leadership.
Based on Teaching for Lifelong Learning: How to Prepare Students for a Changing World.
In today’s uncertain and changing world, teachers need to continually ask themselves five questions that help them to decide on what’s important to teach and how to teach in order to prepare students for future success. They are useful questions to ask for both in person and online teaching situations.
What can I do to:
What can I do to develop a positive climate, culture, and environment for learning?
Four key aspects of a positive learning climate, culture, and environment are that:
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A significant sign of a positive learning culture and environment is that students have a “growth mindset,” and are curious about and interested in learning. According to psychologist Carol Dweck (), people with a growth mindset see themselves as learners who are motivated to learn and thrive on new challenges. They believe that their intelligence and skills are flexible, and they can improve on what they are able to do and understand by being persistent in the face of difficulties, practicing in ways that make improvements to their learning, and finding others to provide help when needed. They see themselves as “unfinished,” growing, and improving as they move along life’s journey.
Teachers can develop a positive learning culture and environment by:
What can I do to focus student learning around relevant, meaningful, important, and significant content and vital skills?
Often teachers try to cover too much material with too little meaning for students. Through the analysis of standards, texts, and other sources, it should be possible to narrow down and identify key underlying, foundational concepts, ideas, understandings, and essential, compelling questions that will provide a central focus for what is to be learned at all levels, K–12. This will help to make learning more meaningful to students, as well as to focus and deepen learning.
Teachers also need to decide on critical skills that will become the focus of learning and improvement. To help make this decision, I have identified five skill sets that I believe should be the major skills focus in order to prepare students for the future (Seif, ):
Teachers should regularly revisit whether their content focus is on relevant, important, meaningful content and whether vital skills are the focus of learning.
What can I do to help students apply and deepen learning and become independent learners?
When students apply and deepen learning, they are able to independently examine and analyze thoughtful challenges, problem solve, complete research projects from start to finish, debate issues, and pursue their interests. They can improve their learning on their own and to seek aid and support when needed. They build on and take their concepts, knowledge, and skills to new and deeper levels of understanding, thoughtfulness, complexity, and creativity.
Teachers need to revisit how they can help students apply their learning, work independently, and deepen learning through such activities as independent projects, authentic tasks, and persuasive essay assignments.
What can I do to broaden and enrich student experiences, interests, and talents?
Given the bewildering array of options and choices confronting individuals in today’s and tomorrow’s world, students need to broaden and enrich their experiences in order to have an understanding of the wider world and the choices, options, and variety that exist there, and to expand and discover their interests, talents, strengths, and goals.
Helpful experiences might include field trips to museums, zoos, supermarkets, and factories; opportunities to select books to read or projects to do based on their personal interests; having options such as learning to play a musical instrument, joining an orchestra, playing chess, singing in a choir; involvement in an academic competition; joining an interest club; traveling to other parts of the United States or to a foreign country (or virtual travel); interviewing people outside the school or members of the local community; doing community service; apprenticing for a local employer, and so on.
One way to provide these types of experiences is to develop many classroom activities that allow for student choices and options during the learning process. Education author Mike Anderson () says that student choice is more relevant and important than ever because of the following reason:
“As students come to us with increasingly complex needs and abilities, they need diverse and personally relevant opportunities to learn and practice skills and content. When students leave school, they will enter a world where self-motivation, creativity, autonomy, and perseverance are all critically important, and these are characteristics that are hard to practice in an environment centered on standardization and compliance. When students have more choice about their learning, they can both find ways of learning that match their personal needs and engage with work more powerfully, building skills and work habits that will serve them well as lifelong learners. (p. 3).”
What can I do to help students meet high-quality standards and share their learning and work with others?
Opportunities for feedback, improvement and personal growth cannot be overemphasized in a program that prepares students for their future. Formative assessments provide students with helpful feedback and give students the opportunity to improve their work. They also provide feedback and guidance so that teachers know what students have learned well and poorly, and they then can better decide on the next teaching steps.
Some instructional activities are especially useful as formative assessments. Open-ended writing assignments can first be written in draft form so that students can be given helpful feedback to improve their writing skills. Performance tasks not only can provide opportunities for significant learning and practice of many vital skills, but also can enable teachers to give students helpful feedback and coaching as they work on their projects, in order to improve research, writing, and thinking skills.
Student portfolios or interactive notebooks are also a way for students to demonstrate that they show progress over time and meet high standards. Portfolios, which collect student work over time, can help to assess a student’s overall growth and achievement. Interactive notebooks–used to take notes, record, collect, and organize information in traditional formats and also to process information and reflect on learning–can also be used to demonstrate improved learning and achievement over time.
Finally, opportunities for students to share and present their work through projects, tasks, essays, and the like, should be a regular part of the school experience.
Teachers should periodically revisit how they build in opportunities for improvement of student work and learning, and how students are given opportunities to share and present their work.
Conclusion
Asking these five questions on a regular basis can provide a focused way to improve teaching and learning and better prepare students to live in a changing, uncertain world of the future. As these questions are considered and examined, many resources can be helpful in providing answers. Continually revisiting and examining these five questions will help every teacher improve teaching practice, promote student success, and better prepare students for the difficulties and challenges that lie ahead.
One helpful approach is to think about how to structure teaching and learning within a four-phased instructional framework, examined in greater detail in a previous blog on this site and also further explored in my book Teaching for Lifelong Learning (). The book also provides more detailed insights into how to develop understandings, teach the five skill sets, use formative assessment strategies, incorporate the four-phase model of instruction, deepen learning, build in change, and much more.
References:
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