What makes for effective professional development?

Hello colleagues, Educational research suggests that effective professional learning: a) has a content focus, b) integrates active and collaborative learning, c) features effective instructional practices, d) offers opportunities for feedback and reflection, and e) is sustained over time (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017). 

You are invited to share your professional development experiences here in our community, and pose questions to colleagues as well as for our guest, Laura Smith-Hill, who on June 1 at 3:00 ET, will share how one program serving English learners in South Dakota is endeavoring to provide high-quality professional learning for teachers.

You can register for this LINCS event here.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition Group

Reference:

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., Gardner, M. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/122.311.

Comments

Hello colleagues, We had a wonderful session last week with Laura Smith-Hill, Education Program Coordinator for the Lutheran Social Services Center for New Americans in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which focused on job-embedded professional development.  Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us, Laura!

Laura emphasized throughout the session that it makes good sense for programs to recognize teachers for the talent, skill and creativity they have. Teachers can and should play a critical role in building leadership capacity within programs. 

 Laura shared the many ways her program is effectively supporting instructors in teacher-centered ways, including the following. 

Sharing Highlights from Professional Conferences

1. Before attending a conference, Laura provides each teacher with a note taking document to use during sessions. Later teachers share highlights from their notes through a Think-Pair-Share process during professional learning circles. (See sample note-taking tool below.)

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Tool for taking notes at a professional conference

2. Teachers also review recordings from conference sessions and discuss applications during their meetings.

3. Other times, selected teachers share "Success Spotlights" featuring how they have applied the research-based practices they have learned about. 

Teachers Serve as Subject-Matter Experts 

1. Instructors select an area of specialization, conduct classroom observations, facilitate discussions, give feedback and consult on curriculum enhancements. 

2. Teachers also conduct training for their colleagues in a range of areas including the STudent Achievement in Reading, Decoding, Trauma-Informed Instruction, Teaching Skills That Matter, and Adult Numeracy Instruction. 

3. Teachers collaborate on curriculum development and participate in program strategic planning. 

Laura posed the following questions to those in attendance. You are invited to offer your thoughts in response!

1. What promising practices for job-embedded PD have you experienced?

2. Instructors and programs face challenges to participate in job-embedded PD, what resources and solutions have you identified to support participation?

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition Group

 

Hi Susan. One of the most productive, insightful professional development sessions our ESOL program provided was an opportunity for us teachers to become L2 students for a few hours.  A fellow-teacher, Susan, who was fluent in Farsi, offered to give us four hours of instruction in it.  Eight of us (all experienced ESL teachers) met for two hours on consecutive days. During the lessons, she incorporated both teacher-fronted and pair exercises and used a variety of techniques, just as many of us do in our ESOL lessons.

We did not start with greetings and opening lines of a conversation, but instead, jumped right into learning some nouns, verbs and prepositions and a few basic sentence structures that could be practiced using in a variety of activities.

Although I was only teaching advanced-level academic ESL those days, these beginning-level Farsi language lesson transformed how I looked at my students in the higher levels. 

The insights this experience gave me as a teacher:

1) Students don’t necessarily get bored or restless as fast as we think. 

2) Pair work has even more benefits than I had thought.

3) The teacher can completely misunderstand what the students are thinking.

In sum, for many years I had been operating under several assumptions about what my students were experiencing, and these were influencing how I approached them and the lessons.  In many ways, I was adding unnecessary stress to myself (and probably to some students) because of these assumptions.  Without putting myself in the students’ shoes, I doubt that I would have had these insights and made the changes that have subsequently greatly improved my professional life.

If you are interested in more details about the experience and the three insights, see this article on my website:  Challenge Your Teaching Assumptions: Become an L2 Student for a Few Hours

David Kehe