PRINCESS FRANCOIS

My most significant accomplishment during my internship was revamping professional development and common planning at my school. I wanted to work on something that would have the widest impact. I felt by engaging teachers in true learning then they would be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and passion to engage our students in learning.

 

My desire to revamp our professional development came from my own sentiments of not feeling challenged. Although I enjoyed attending whole school professional development at my school because I was able to interact with the entire staff once a month, I always walked out thinking, "What did I actually learn in these three hours?" Wanting to change professional development first stemmed from talking with an English teacher about our experience at one Chancellor's Day where we felt we truly got to hear ideas from colleagues of different disciplines. This pushed us to organize a "Best Practices PD" during lunch once a week for Spring 2014. Colleagues commented how they loved learning strategies that have actually been used by our colleagues with our own students or as I liked to say, "by teachers, for teachers."

 

This became a pilot to something greater. Summer 2014 became a pivotal point where I collaborated with my principal to create a professional development calendar for the 2014-2015 school year. We had a vision and we have gradually turned it into a reality. We backwards planned extensively, thinking about what is the end goal that we want all teachers to walk away and how we can scaffold it month by month through Professional Learning Communities so teachers can actually model strategies, practice it in a safe space among themselves, and discuss how to apply it all before implementing it in their own classrooms. We thought about how can we completely revamp common planning time so instead of it being unproductive, it is a structured time where teachers are pushed to collaborate with each other within departments and within grade teams. 

 

As I evolved as a student and intern in the Principal's Institute at Bankstreet, our professional development plan evolved. I was able to take theories and practices I learned from class and apply it directly to our continuously changing professional development plan.

 

As we continue to implement and improve our Professional Development, I reflect on our progress through the lens of an article I read in my Supervision class called "What Can We Do About Teacher Resistance?" by Jim Knight. The key to the success of this legacy project so far has been taking into account teacher relationships and the root causes of teacher resistance in our school. We made sure to encourage school-wide teacher practices that are research-based and easy to implement while providing ongoing support through lesson studies, instructional rounds, professsional learning communities, and observations. We made sure during our professional learning communities that teachers are doing the thinking--they are the ones experiencing the strategies first hand and engaging in dialogue about the effectiveness of the strategies.

 

Another important component is teachers are often the ones facilitating the monthly PLCs. As the article "What Teachers Want" by Cynthia Compton states, teachers are at different levels of development. It is important to engage teachers in different ways based on that. As a result, we have our expert and distinguished teachers often engaged through leading the development and sharing best practices. As a result, teachers of all levels continue to be challenged in different ways. This impact of building leadership capacity is alluded to in an article, "Professional Learning Communities: Professional Development Strategies that Improve Instruction" by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. It states, "PLCs can help to build collective, scale-level leadership capacity. According to Lambert (1998), increased leadership capacity means that the principal is one leader but that 'he or she does not fill all or even most of the leadership roles...' " This has created increased morale, change in teacher practices, and a greater enthusiasm for Professional Development.

 

Our Professional Development plan has become a living document that changes as our staff and myself develops professionally. As we execute this plan and continuously tweak it to reflect the needs of our staff and to reflect the ongoing development that my principal and I are experiencing through reading articles, attending school visits, I feel more inspired, more engaged, and more challenged.