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The past few months have been dominated by busy, busy writing agendas, and my inbox has been filling up with articles and resources for bookmarking. I haven't really had the time to dig in to these materials yet, but I'm excited about the examples they offer to share with my preservice teachers.
READING
Yesterday as Steph and I were planning for our 'supervision through student-centered coaching' study, we found ourselves digging into the challenge of teaching academic language demands. Our goal was to generate a series of probing questions that would help students uncover the language function and associated demands relative to their lesson focus. While I thoroughly enjoyed Heineke & McTighe's Understanding by Design in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom, we found this resource to be far more useful for our own planning as opposed to our students' planning. To put it plainly--there's just too much 'going on' for the planning templates to be useful for our preservice teachers. In other words, it is beyond their zone of proximal development. So we needed to build some more reachable scaffolds that would help to push them along without overwhelming them from the start.
 Literature on teacher PD continually emphasizes dimensions of adult learning theory to position educators as professionals driving their own learning. Collaborative coaching models that seek to build partnerships between coaches and teachers thrive on mutual ownership and expertise to guide the coaching process. At the same time, we spend a lot of time addressing coaching discourse: both what coaches say and how they say it. In analyzing language, we look closely at use of reflective dialogue and questioning strategies as often derived from Cognitive Coaching. Within our coaching program, we put these ideas to practice through a number of video analysis activities that focus on balance of talk time and noting and naming coaches moves through language. In these cases, we bring in the 7 Norms of Collaboration to identify examples of paraphrasing, asking clarifying and probing questions, putting ideas on the table, validating teacher expertise, etc.
Yet, underlying these instructional approaches is a focus on coach behavior as it contributes to the collaborative experience. I recently found myself wondering if spending so much time on coach contributions is inherently limiting our understanding of teacher contributions and undermining the partnership framing to begin with. When we started our work with Teachology, we didn't have anything as explicit as the Teacher Educator Technology Competencies to work from. We did have ISTE's Educator Standards as inspiration, and we also worked from our own School of Education Standards (though technology was only briefly referenced within two sub-standards). However, the TETCs provide the exact type of framework we needed to guide our project. Alas, we must settle for applying the competencies retroactively :(
I only came across these competencies last week when working on a writing project featuring Teachology's peer-mentorship model of professional learning. Analyzing our work in light of the TETCs was still illuminating as it helped me to identify the dimensions of educator capacities most explicitly targeted within our workshop activities. The most relevant TETCs identified include:
Great appreciation for the development of this document and the clarity in articulating design goals for educator professional learning-- a resource I will definitely return to in the future! All this time I have been doing it wrong. So wrong. Wasting so many hours typing feedback on lesson plans that is sometimes read and applied and other times never acknowledged. Last year, I decided to address this issue by foregoing written comments to hold writing conferences instead. I thought that if I could talk directly with my students about a limited number of questions/concerns in the form of a writing conference, perhaps it would better support their understandings and ability to use that feedback to actually revise their lessons. Overall, this was a great improvement on use of time and student outcomes. Yet, I still talked myself into circles when working with a few students. No matter how many subtle or explicit attempts I made to explain a high-priority issue that needed to be addressed...my students remained baffled.
Important assumptions to consider when thinking about classroom instruction and how we unconsciously bias certain forms of participation and engagement over others…
What is needed for education is a model of professional action that is able to acknowledge the noncausal nature of educational interaction and the fact that the means and ends of education are internally rather than externally related” (Biesta, p 36). It will surprise no educator (or logically thinking person) to consider that education ought not be aligned to models of factory or medicine. Teachers are neither transforming raw material into products or curing disease through a clearly designed method. The variables attached to every educational situation are instead moral-laden and begin with the importance of context.
Somehow while I feel like I always inherently knew this, it wasn’t until reading Good Education in an Age of Measurement by Gert Biesta that I realized what the very nature of educational research implies. He makes the point that even though research can tell us what works, it is not possible (in our field) to determine what will work every time. Results are not generalizable even from student to student in the same classroom–something that every teacher obviously learns through their own interactions. This understanding is fundamentally at odds with any blanket decision to apply a strategy or pedagogical approach that requires teachers to assume that if something worked once, it will work always (as opposed to the opposing view that just because something worked once does not mean it can ever be repeated because the variables of the context cannot be controlled for). These are people we are talking about after all–not organized systems that can be studied but unpredictable entities influenced by “fuzzy stuff” such as motivation, emotional state, prior knowledge and experience, attitude, and beliefs… And thus, the very act of engaging in this research can create the illusion that what is “discovered” must be applied. At the heart of this application, however, lies one of the most important attributes of the teacher: professional judgment. As our states and districts continue to limit the degree to which teachers are able to draw upon professional judgment in navigating which research to test out when and how to adapt it for their unique situation, we are placing all of our faith on a causal understanding of what teaching is and how it should be studied–a frightening trend that I am just learning how to articulate. “…such emancipation will begin when the student decides it will begin, and it will belong only for the student, not for the school. It will not begin because of a policy or practice, but in spite of a policy or practice. A policy or practice can only set the orbit of learning for a student, while intellectual emancipation happens when a student sets out on an orbit that is wholly his or her own…” (Bingham & Biesta, 2011, p. 24).
From Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question of whether or not the Gradual Release of Responsibility instructional model is an authentic model for classroom learning, or if by its very nature it imposes inequality and limitations upon the educational process.
As is typical, I think my current reactions come back to the question of balance–everything in moderation. I wonder also if GRR might be a model better utilized for procedural or technical tasks, ones with distinct pathways to success that would only be unnecessarily convoluted by spending precious time in exploration. On the other hand, I wonder if thinking about educational inquiries with multiple pathways towards success, completion, enlightenment, critical thinking, etc. would be better enhanced through models that thrive on student choice and direction… More questions to ponder in navigating the tightrope between academia and the “real world.” I think that it is possible to construct spaces for participatory cultures to exist within a formal classroom and really to be a driving force for how learning is “done.” I also believe that these learning spaces are in line with the types of learning objectives and standards laid out by the Common Core, which leads me to my contested assertion that standards (possibly within their own vacuum) can actually co-exist with creative, collaborative, and exploratory learning. However, I see this contingent on two big IF’s–
IF… schools/districts/states allow for teacher agency and autonomy in designing learning experiences in their classrooms. When curriculum is instead sold as pre-packaged products devoid of context (and mostly meaning) there is little chance of constructing the room (both physically and in terms of scheduling) for these types of learning environments to flourish. Many of the characteristics that typically define “formal” learning must be reconfigured in this type of learning environment (physical space, teacher role, technology access, etc), yet I believe these are within easy reach for a willing teacher to embrace. However, a school setting that imposes the formality of norms (through curriculum, behavior management, censorship, etc) may be an insurmountable challenge. IF… learning experiences are intentionally designed. I really love the integration of Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), because I think backwards design is even more important when constructing digital learning experiences, even moreso in participatory cultures. I think it can be easy to get caught up in the technology itself, without carefully attending to the process of learning (the scaffolding of skills it might require and how to rethink what these skills look like in a digital context–even again after students bring their own understanding to the community, expanding on the original goals, complexities, or potential outcomes the teacher may not have invisioned). I see the culture itself as not only allowing for but embracing “play” and flux–a clear vision is important, but unlike traditional settings/assignments, I think there is a greater need for the vision itself to be negotiated and refined through the community. Allowing for flux also takes into account many of the logistical concerns of implementing these experiences in real classrooms (access, tools, timelines, etc). Reviewing the list of experiences Jenkins describes of “What Could Be Done” across the different core skills, it is clear that none were accomplished by serendipitous accident. Many will require not only a teacher’s knowledge of content but also a reconceptualization of what teaching means in a participatory culture. Furthermore, teachers will likely need to collaborate with resident tech experts or instructional technology coaches to support their learning of the tools themselves. After all, it might be hard to envision how to design experiences around “judgment” if the teacher can just barely use the technology at a functional level. Which only further supports the need for developing these core skills in the teachers themselves. Sure we can say that the learning and teaching is distributed–which it is– but most teachers will only feel comfortable moving into this space with at least some degree of competence themselves. We might support them to see their role as facilitator or co-learner as opposed to expert, but going forward with no knowledge might make intentional design not just a harder sell but practically impossible. But what does this mean in an era where “Failure is Not an Option?” I was also thinking about failure in terms of teaching being perceived as “failing” if certain assessment goals are not met on standardized tests. In questioning my first response, I came to a larger question: Can people enact (not just embrace) progressive reforms while operating within a regressive state? The essence of participatory culture asks teachers to rethink their traditional teaching roles and relationships to students, understanding of content delivery and construction of meaning, and learn to play and take risks with new forms of digital tools– risks that might be readily accepted as new challenges and paths to learning but only under circumstances that allow for and support risk-taking. A national climate that instead imposes daunting standards and standardized testing as the measure of teaching ability and professional competency, as well as determining pay and even employment is NOT a climate in which teachers would be as likely to willingly embrace a whole new approach to teaching and learning–rather a more likely outcome might be to sacrifice progress to at least maintain credibility. Can you have authentic progress if your goal is to measure each mis-step as a failure and means for exposure? I’m wondering if this is more problematic than I may have originally thought… |
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