Teacher Leader Academy reflections

Starting a new year is a natural time for reflection. What worked in the previous year, what you want to change or do differently, what you want to start. Much of my 2019 (and quite a bit of 2018, too) was spent pursuing my M.Ed degree through NDSU and the BPS Teacher Leader Academy (TLA). I, along with 17 other fantastic teacher leaders, spent five semesters learning, working on practicum experiences, attending (and presenting at!) conferences, and action researching (is that a real phrase?) our chosen topics.

            There are so many exciting opportunities that I could share with people interested in participating in the next BPS Teacher Leader Academy (and I do!) but, for me, my learning in Educational Leadership was supported and most successful by our continuous implementation of one phrase: Bird by Bird.

            It may seem like a small phrase but it hugely impacted my success and confidence in myself during the Teacher Leader Academy and beyond. During our first few meeting times, we read parts of Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life 

The section titled “Bird by Bird” became somewhat of a mantra for our TLA cohort. Basically, Lamott details a story of her younger brother neglecting to complete a report on birds during his summer vacation. The night before the report was due, the brother panicked because his report was unfinished and the task looked beyond impossible. Their father sat down with the brother and took out the encyclopedias and shared with the brother that they would get this report finished “bird by bird” - basically taking things one step at a time, especially when we feel overwhelmed, which was a common concern at the early stages of our TLA cohort. 

As a (self-appointed) Type A teacher, I have often felt overwhelmed by constant to-do lists and wondering how I am going to get it all done. Those feelings were amplified when I was contemplating starting a Master’s degree and I knew I would feel overwhelmed with balancing work and life and graduate school (vulnerability was also a topic we discussed often...so important!). 

I was so fortunate that our TLA cohort started (and continued throughout) with reminders to take it all “bird by bird”. Yes, we can write an action research report. Yes, we can complete 110 hours of practicum experiences, Yes, we can present at a TLA conference. Yes, we can do it all when we take it one step at a time. This simple phrase (and all of the meaning behind it) is something (just one thing out of MANY positive experiences in the Teacher Leader Academy!) that I will be able to take with me as I move forward in my journey as a Teacher Leader.  - Sarah Morrow (Sunrise Elementary)

            It has been just over a month since we wrapped up the first BPS Teacher Leadership Academy and I find myself reflecting back to those 5 semesters often.  Something I go back to is receiving feedback.  Feedback can be intimidating and when we were first faced with doing peer reviews we froze up.  As teachers we naturally give feedback to our students daily without thinking twice. When asked to give our paper to someone else for peer review we were all a bit nervous and you could hear “I’m sorry”, “It’s a really rough draft.”, “Don’t judge.”, and other very nervous conversations.  Why were we so nervous to receive feedback from our peers? Why is it so hard to be vulnerable and show your hard work?  As we worked through the multiple peer reviews of our leadership book it hit all of us like a ton of bricks, we began to thrive on the idea of receiving feedback from each other.  

            In our fourth semester we were fortunate to have a speaker come into our class and talk about feed forward and giving/receiving cranks.  A crank is a way to expand possibilities and have an outlook of “How can we make it even better?” This is a way to feed FORWARD.  Something our speaker spoke about was how when the animators of Pixar films do their daily rundown of their work they reflect as a group.  When a member gives feedback they cannot simply just say the problem and leave it at that.  When giving feedback, they also need to propose an alternative solution for the team to consider.  Guess what, Pixar film makers aren’t the only ones that use this. TEACHERS do this EVERY day! We don’t realize how often we give feedback and how often we receive feedback. We naturally give cranks every single day and encourage our students to keep moving forward.  But when we take time to ask for feedback we get uncomfortable. Why is that? Maybe if we look at it from cranking each other up, we might begin to look for opportunities to receive feedback from each other more often!  - Melissa Haas (Liberty Elementary)

Q1: How do you take things “bird by bird” (achieve balance by taking things one step at a time)?

Q2: What is the hardest part of receiving feedback?

Q3: How can we incorporate feed forward into our daily/weekly/monthly work time?

Fostering Collective Teacher Efficacy through Collaborative Inquiry

I am continually inspired by teachers. Again and again, I sit beside teachers who come together to grapple with the hard questions of teaching and learning. Sure, experts have answers, but these teachers dive into the messy and complex work of situating these answers within the walls of their classroom and in response to the students in front of them. These are teachers who believe that by grappling together around these challenges they can help all students learn and thrive. We call this shared belief collective teacher efficacy, and it has the greatest effect on student achievement. To foster this belief, we must give teachers the green light to pursue their questions through collaborative inquiry.

Here’s what I love about each part of this equation:

• Action Research – Our students and classrooms are often our best teachers. 
• PLCs – The smartest person in the room is the room. 
• Backwards Design – Start with the end in mind. 

When you put these three things together, you have a powerful process and an empowering journey for professional learning. What I love most about collaborative inquiry is it puts teachers in the driver’s seat of their learning, or more so, a team of drivers gets together to choose how to navigate this arduous journey together. 

Below are key components of the collaborative inquiry process. With each, I’ve described what makes it especially powerful and how I’ve seen it with BPS teachers:

Framing the problem – During this initial phase, teachers dig into the gap between desired reality and current reality. They look for possible reasons this gap might exist, examine the possibilities within their control, and determine which to address for greatest impact. What I love is the grace of this process – hypothesizing which problem to address and how to address it. This requires us to closely examine what’s within our control and have the courage to try tackling it. 

A group of middle school ELA teachers began talking about students’ use of comprehension strategies. The more they dug into this, they realized the gap: Currently, students use comprehension strategies effectively in the ELA classroom, but they weren’t transferring these strategies to other classes. One option was to support other content teachers to use these strategies in their own classes to reinforce connections, but the more they talked, the more they realized this wasn’t the best possibility. They determined that the real question was how their instruction could foster ownership and transfer of these strategies.

Collecting and Analyzing Evidence – As with backwards design, this process gets teachers talking about what success would look like and what evidence will help us know we’re making headway. Too often, collecting evidence is viewed as a cumbersome process that turns students into numbers when really it should be an opportunity to more deeply understand our students and learn from them - their strengths and needs. The beauty is in the diversity of student work.

Another PLC was examining how to help students get better at determining key details and main idea. Each teacher was going to ask students the same question that week: What is the main idea? They each looked at their week ahead and planned for when they would use this question – with a documentary, class notes, a primary source, a political cartoon. They then planned how to ask it: a ticket out, at the end of class notes, think-pair-share, a quiz question. When they reconvened a week later, they were able to talk about the strengths, needs, and next steps of their students. And because this autonomy existed, they were able to learn from each other and muddle their way to clarity on what they really meant by “determining main idea”. 

Documenting, Celebrating, and Share – Ultimately, this process is about learning from our students and our classroom. Did my students improve? Do I know why they improved? This second question is the question that we often don’t spend enough time on. If we know why students improved, not only can we replicate this in the future, but we can also share our learning with our colleagues. 

Last year, a World Language PLC dug into improving students’ ability to infer at word, sentence, and passage level. They felt strongly that they first needed to address students’ willingness to take risks with the new language. If you’ve ever tried to learn a new language, you know exactly how right their hypothesis was! As they started their work together this year, they were able to quickly recall the most impactful strategies from last year in increasing risk-taking: increase collaboration, provide sentence frames and word walls, model risk-taking, lessen the consequences for risk-taking, and foster a classroom climate that celebrates risk-taking. 

The beauty of this collaborative inquiry process is how it invokes both vulnerability and empowerment. It fosters a culture of vulnerability and growth mindset, and it empowers teachers to be problem solvers of their own classrooms. The journey may be arduous, but this shared belief, this collective efficacy, makes it beautiful and worthwhile. 

Twitter Chat questions:

1. Describe where you’ve seen or experienced collective efficacy (CE), the shared belief that together we can cause great things for all.
2. Collaborative inquiry (CI) combines Action Research, PLC, and Backwards Design. Which of these components is hardest to engage in, and why?
3. Which of these components most invigorates you, and why?
4. What’s the professional question that’s been keeping you up at night? And who can you pursue it with?