Professional Development 1

Synthesis

One of the connections I saw between the two readings was that high-quality professional development should be a “sustained, intensive process” (WSQ 125). As the article stated, “the value of maintaining focus” cannot be understated (561). I think that’s really important, since I feel like most professional development is just a quick strategy or method that teachers are expected to implement. Even the professional development that allows for flexibility and individualization seems to be a quick “here you go, good luck!” approach, and I just don’t think that’s as effective as it should be.

Another important connection I noticed was the emphasis placed on professional development that gives “teachers a voice in both the content and the process of professional development” (WSQ 125). It’s like how in the program that the article describes, the teachers were “given permission to modify lessons and ask questions about the entire instructional model” (555). The teachers have control over what they implement and how they implement it; the professional development is a tool for them to use as a framework and a foundation, but they can tailor it to their own needs and contexts.

I also noted that there was a common theme of teachers’ need for “supportive follow-up” throughout the professional development process (WSQ 125). According to the article, teachers should be given “time to talk with their peers and develop their expertise in decision making” (561). I feel like this is very important and often overlooked. I have had administrators ask us to tell them how we’re implementing things we learned about in professional development, but there was no real feedback or dialogue about it after the workshops/presentations/etc.

Relevance

I think my biggest take-away from our conversations and from our readings is that you need to balance different types and aspects of professional development so as to best serve everyone’s needs over a long period of time. I would like to mention a couple of specific things I’m thinking about, though. For my professional development plan, I definitely want to include some sort of “peer support” in nearly every aspect of the professional development (WSQ 127). My co-workers expressed a great interest in types of professional development that allow for discussion, collaboration, etc. One element they didn’t mention is feedback, and I think that is also an important component of peer support. I would also love to do “threaded discussions and forums via email or an online platform,” although I feel like my particular school would be a little hesitant about doing that (127).

Questions

• If professional development is supposed to be sustained and focused over a long period of time, is that professional development or program improvement? I’ve got the distinction on the brain since we talked about it tonight.
• How could you incorporate online discussion into professional development with a group that is reluctant about technology? Or would you eschew that altogether?

Coaching 3

Sorry my post this week is kind of brief—homecoming week is so crazy, but it’s almost over!

Page 102 Questions

1. With what types of communication do you feel most confident? What do you see as your strengths in this type of communication? 
I feel like my strength would be critical communication. I think that, as a person and as a teacher, I tend to be fairly good at helping people evaluate ideas and situations. I think that I am usually fairly good at deducing the right kinds of questions to ask to help people discover and express what they think about things, and I hope that will transfer into a strength of mine as a literacy coach.

2. With which types of communication do you feel least confident? What do you see as your needs? How might you improve your confidence or skills so you feel more confident?
While I feel like I’m pretty good at helping people be evaluative, I don’t feel like I’m very good at taking it to the next step and being collaborative. I struggle to help people take their evaluations and turn them into new ideas without taking a more dominant role and inputting my own ideas when they say that they can’t think of much of anything (if they easily think of ideas, then that’s a different case). That’s definitely a weakness of mine, and I need to work on being more collaborative. I really want to learn how to help people think of new ideas without giving them those ideas myself.

Question for You

• What are some ways that you all promote collaboration with others? How can you help people come up with ideas without dominating the task?

Reflections About Strategy 1

• How ready am I for literacy coaching? I have a pretty good understanding of the curriculum and the alignment, especially since I spent a week this summer helping my district align their English curriculum and create lists of pertinent academic vocabulary in relation to literacy. I have a decent understanding of what literacy instruction looks like in my school, but I would benefit from seeing more of the SPED English classes. I am very familiar with the literacy resources at my school, since I teach literacy for life. I am also fairly familiar with the demographics in my school, in terms of race, language, socioeconomic status, and special needs. I have not worked much with my principal to lay the foundation for literacy coaching, but I would love to do that at some point. I do, however, know who the “experts” and other literacy leaders in my school and district are, and I’d love to work more closely with them. I’m fairly well-versed in literacy instruction, although my weakness is the foundational skills like decoding (which is still occasionally relevant for adolescents). I am slowly gaining knowledge and confidence in relation to adult learning and literacy coaching, but I have some definite room to grow there. I am a younger teacher, but I feel like my colleagues respect and trust me, so I think I am building up my credibility. I try to be a good listener, but it is something I am always working on, and I’m excited about how much we are learning about that in this course. And I have not had much time to see many curricular initiatives at my school, but I think I am already very reflective about them. All in all, I am surprised to see that maybe I am more prepared for literacy coaching than I first realized, even though I have plenty of work and practice to do.

• Is my school ready for literacy coaching? In terms of administrative support, we have a very strong emphasis on professional development, but many teachers seem resistant. I would love to see the school culture change and perhaps see some types of professional development being implemented that the reluctant teachers are more willing to get behind. Our principals are all very strong curricular leaders, and three of them have been academic principals at the school before, so they are very supportive of anything that improves the resources and standards at our school. There is decent professional communication among teachers, but I do think there is some room for improvement. We do have a defined literacy curriculum in our district that is meant to be aligned with CCSS and PASS, and it follows a progression from grade to grade. Unfortunately, the higher level grades focus more on English studies and less on actual literacy development, which I think is a bit of a weakness. We are, however, held accountable for implementing the curriculum appropriately. We are great about having a shared understanding of language and assessment, especially since we have monthly standardized benchmarks across each department (we are very data-driven), and we have district-wide academic vocabulary for every grade level. We do have some school-wide goals for improving students’ literacy development, at least in terms of helping struggling readers, but I would like to see some improvement there. Unfortunately, most teachers are very much closed to the idea of having others in their classrooms, and there has been some backlash about that as of late with principals making casual observations in everyone’s classes. Fortunately, schedules are fairly conducive for literacy coaching. We are all accustomed to frequent meetings before school, although a literacy coach would likely have to be allowed quite a bit of free time during the day for observations and meetings. Overall, I think my school could handle having a literacy coaching program, even though there are some areas that would need to be worked on while that was being implemented.

Meeting
When and how should we all get together about the survey results? I personally think Adobe Connect works fine, unless someone else has a better idea. I can’t do it tomorrow night since it’s our last night to finish up our homecoming float, but pretty much any afternoon or evening after that should work for me.  

(Delayed Post)

Hey, ladies! With homecoming this week, my post will unfortunately be slightly delayed. I should hopefully have it up by tomorrow night!

Coaching 2

Strategy 13: This section was really helpful for me. I had heard of SMART goals before, but I liked getting to see them within the context of the coaching cycle. I learned from the "strategy in action" section that it's important to have follow-up questions prepared when asking questions to guide the teacher toward goals. I was concerned about how to guide the pre-observation conference in terms of goal-setting, but the SMART goal format really helped me. Question - How can you best support a teacher who is unsure about how to achieve his/her goal?

Strategy 14: One thing I learned about modeling from this section was that it is important to explain to the students what's going on so that they know how to behave and know with whom they should interact. I would have been hesitant in terms of the students being disrespectful about the idea of their teacher learning from someone, but I liked the way the book framed it. I also liked the observation form in the section; I think it's important to help break the lesson down into sections and strategies so that the teacher can more easily make specific notes while observing the lesson.

Strategy 15: I learned that during the planning process, it is important to know what the purpose of the co-teaching session is, since some teachers want to use it to demonstrate a lesson for support and feedback, whereas other teachers will want more guidance. I also thought that it was very useful to see the specific details that need to be covered in the co-planning session. It's important to set a learning goal for students, as well as to discuss the academic vocabulary they will need to know. Question - Many aspects of co-teaching/teaching that were discussed in this section, such as modeling and explicitly discussing the learning goal, are practices that many teachers don't often utilize in their teaching. I think some teachers would be reluctant about them. How would you handle a situation in which a teacher claims that those things don't fit into their teaching style when you encourage them to include those strategies in the co-taught lesson?

Strategy 16: I would have originally thought that the purpose of co-teaching would be to "build teacher capacity by supporting the teacher in trying something he or she would not be willing to try independently" (160). However, I thought it was interesting that you could also choose to co-teach for the sake of giving students "evidence-based instruction," as well as to further gather data about the teaching and learning situation (160). I think that all of these are important, especially since I didn't originally think about all of those goals, and a co-teaching session could also have multiple purposes. I'm also glad that this section listed specific things to keep in mind with co-teaching, such as classroom arrangement, co-teaching styles, explicitly explaining the situation to students, etc. That list will be very useful. Question - What do you think would be an effective way to allow for taking "real-time" reflective notes without taking time and attention away from the actual lesson?

Strategy 17: I'm glad that this section provided specific language that coaches can use during the pre-observation conference and the post-observation conference. I need all of the support and examples I can get! I definitely will need to be conscious of using objective language rather than evaluative language; I have a feeling it's going to be a challenge to avoid telling them what I thought they did well, but I think I can handle avoiding critical evaluative language. Question - How do you think you could best approach the "possible actions" during the post-observation conference while maintaining a collaborative or facilitative structure and tone?

Coaching 1

(We were supposed to re-read WPQ 3 for this week, correct? Or is that a misprint in the syllabus?)

Among the readings, I thought there was quite a bit of emphasis on finding the "perfect balance between you [the coach] and your partner" (Elish-Piper and L'Allier 181). The L'Allier, Elish-Piper, and Bean article expands on this by describing teachers who feel like good literacy coaches "respected their abilities" and behaved "like a facilitator of their learning rather than a dictator" (548). One of the most important take-aways from the readings for me was that the coaching situation should be reflective for the teacher, in which teachers have "continual opportunities... to take ownership of their learning by reflecting on their students, their own learning goals, [etc.]" (Miller & Stewart 294). To foster reflection, coaches can choose facilitative questions that "shape understanding" or that "press for reflection" (Wepner, Strickland, and Quatroche 53). Another idea from the readings that I thought was really important is the emphasis that coaches should place on working directly with teachers. According to L'Allier, Elish-Piper, and Bean, working with teachers often is especially important because research has shown that student reading gains were higher in classrooms "supported by a literacy coach who engaged in the most interactions with teachers" (547).

Regarding the similarities and differences between team and individual coaching, I got the impression that team coaching gives teachers a less personalized experience. Teachers on a team work together with a "reflective thinking exercise to select an inquiry topic in literacy," so their topic of focus is relevant to the needs of their team as a whole, but not necessarily to each individual teacher (Miller & Stewart 292). I think that could be a disadvantage, so I appreciated the fact that the CCCM "model also includes time for individual coaching" (293). Team coaching and individual coaching can be similar, though. They both involve reflection and personalization, even if it's not on an individual level. They also include modeling, observation, and debriefing time, just with a different structure.

Questions:
- There's been a lot of emphasis in the readings on taking the facilitator stance, promoting teacher reflection rather than being dictatorial, etc. I think that's great! However, I am wondering, how should/can a coach handle a situation in which the teacher knows little about promoting literacy, such as in some high school content area classes?
- What do you think the difference between questions that "shape understanding" and questions that "press for reflection" is? I'm having trouble figuring out the difference. (See: pg. 53 of WPQ)
- There was repeated emphasis in the readings about the importance of developing good relationships with teachers, and one of the articles talked about ways to help foster that trust. However, I'm wondering, how do you think you would approach teachers who are reluctant to work with a literacy coach regardless of how much you work at building that relationship?

New Literacy Tools - Reflection

My strengths:

• I feel like I usually pick up on how to use new literacy tools fairly quickly, since I have a lot of experience with some of them.
• I really like incorporating multimedia into things, like one might do with a multi-genre research project, so tools like Blogger and Glogster suit my communication style.
• I have a particular interest in exploring new literacies as a teacher and as a learner.

New literacy tools as a learning aid: 

• New literacy tools help us communicate more effectively when we are not communicating in person. E-mails and phone calls would likely fall short in comparison.
• The tools also help us share not only our ideas, but relevant resources, videos, etc. This helps us not just talk with one another, but actually engage with one another.
• Tools that allow us to do things like annotate each others' videos aid us in our ability to support each other's learning.

Question: 

• What do you think your biggest struggle will be with using the new literacy tools this semester?