As teachers, we have all sat through boring meetings intended to help us develop professionally, but that somehow fail miserably.  So you'll understand my excitement over the following: 

The professional development sessions at my new school have been especially productive and in tune with the needs of teachers so far.  

I described some of these PD experiences to teachers on the TLN forum, and they were as enthusiastic as I am about them.  It is crazy that these types of activities are so unusual in schools, but it seems that they are.  

Here are a few activities that stood out to me: 

• On our 3-day orientation retreat for new teachers coming on staff (there are many of us, because the school is adding 7th grade this year), we watched videos of actual teachers teaching lessons. These were videos available to anyone on Youtube and education websites.  We rated them, critiqued them, talked about the strengths and weaknesses of each one.  We had a real dialogue about pedagogy.  It was so much more valuable than I even imagined it would be, and easy to do too.    

• After we talked and read about some teaching strategies we wanted to use, we tried them out.  We were given interesting, educationally relevant Tedtalks videos to watch in small groups. Then we had to come up with ways to teach the rest of the group something about the video using strategies we'd studied previously.  Finally, we critiqued each other's "lessons."

• My principal spent some time talking about how we should give and receive criticism.  I can't really remember what he said, but it stuck with me that he took the time to talk about how important it is. He did say that teachers have a tendency to take criticism very personally, and we want to get away from that, both in how we deliver it and receive it.

• Over the course of 3 days, there was time for each new teacher--there are quite a few of us because the school is adding a 7th grade next year--to meet one-on-one with the principal, director, and the department chair (separately).  These meetings were informal, professional get-to-know-you, conversations.  We basically took a walk, and talked about what brought us to teaching, what was on our minds about teaching lately, what we wanted in the next five or so years professionally, etc.  It was great to have that individual talking time, post-hiring process.  Most times, you talk a lot in the interviews.  But once you're hired, you're just thrown into the mix.  You often only speak to the principal when you need something.  Also, it was unusual to be asked by my supervisors where I see myself professionally in the future.  The implication was that they would be shaping PD in such a way as to help each of us toward attaining our professional goals.

• A week after the retreat, we had 3 paid days at school in early July for curriculum planning.  We looked at the mission of the school and were introduced to some guiding principles for structuring our curriculum.  We had time to meet with our departments and also teachers from other disciplines with whom we were encouraged to collaborate.  Then we were actually given "free" time to write an annual curriculum map.  We presented them to our grade teams (or what we had done) at the end of the three days, and discussed areas for integration.  I have never been asked to do this so far in advance.  We always come back to school a few days before students arrive to find out all the things we're supposed to be doing in our classrooms, and we're given no time to plan.  All that planning teachers have to do in the summer is generally off the books and off the radar of school leaders, which is a loss for the school in  many ways.  I've never had other teachers, besides my close colleague-friends, know what I'm teaching in my classroom and offer to help.  The art teacher, for example, had an idea for a project that she thought might work with a novel study. So we sat down and worked it out!  How nice that time is provided for us to collaborate.

 These things are not rocket science.  They're just sensible ways of working with a groups of teachers at this point in time.  

What do you think PD should look like in today's schools?

When I posed this question on the TLN forum, teachers emphasized individualization of PD experiences, where teachers would have the opportunity to create their own professional development goals and seek out resources.  Teacher-driven action research was also mentioned as an important form of PD. What should we add?  What issues stand in the way of 21st century PD becoming a reality in all schools?

[image credits:  blog.mindjet.com  &    http://www.thethirdteacher.com/home/home-third-teacher]

Having just completed my sixth year of teaching, I am noticing an interesting trend among my teacher friends who are at similar points in their careers.  It has to do with a shift in what we want from professional development experiences. One thing many of my teacher peers and I are looking for is valuable feedback on our teaching.   

As I trace my own development, I see distinct changes in what I felt I needed from other people to be successful.  I can look at it in these stages:

1. In my first and second years of teaching, I was looking for a blend of practical support and permission to experiment from mentors, supervisors, and more experienced colleagues.  I was looking for inspiration from traditional and untraditional sources for things to try immediately, like the next day, in my classroom.  I also sought out empathy and moral support from anyone who understood the serious ups and downs of beginning teaching.  

2. Once I began to know my way around my classroom and curriculum, I wanted to be left alone to work creatively and develop independently.  I read a lot about teaching on my own, and occasionally took courses of my own choosing.  Eventually, I wanted opportunities to share what was working in my classroom.  At the same time, I was extremely wary of anyone who wanted to tell me how to teach, especially by individuals who did not know my school context and had the potential to take a bulldozer approach, or who did not share my desire to educate my students to think critically.  I developed camaraderie with my colleagues.  We listened to one another, offered advice, and shared resources; at the same time, we held protective attitudes toward our own practices, not wanting anyone to come and tell us what and how to teach or bulldoze the progress we'd already made.  

3. Now, I'm reaching a new place.  I've had ample time to develop more or less independently.  Now I'd like to know what someone else thinks and sees in my teaching; I'm open to someone pointing out things that I might never notice on my own, or asking questions I might never ask myself.

If I could imagine the ideal person to give me feedback on my teaching, he or she would have these qualities:

• an experienced and effective teacher--preferably with at least ten years of experience 
• ideally an English teacher, so I can get discipline specific feedback
• able to give feedback with the understanding that I am a professional who takes pride in my work; that the choices I make in my teaching are informed decisions with rationales behind them; I want to be questioned, but in a way that values the experience and knowledge I've gained thus far
• values a student-centered approach to teaching; committed to helping me develop this
• asks good questions
• believes that there is not one right way to teach; not trying to clone him or herself; able to adapt his or her valuable experience to different classroom contexts

Off the top of my head, I can count five of my teacher peers who are moving from positions where they received little feedback and little support as teachers, to positions where their classroom practices will be monitored more closely and they will be given more feedback.  There seems to be a fair tradeoff--give up some freedom, get more support.  

At the school where I'll be working next year, a National Board Certified English teacher will observe me and the other humanities teachers in our classrooms and debrief with us individually every two weeks.  A few years ago, I might have run the other way.  I wanted freedom and placed little value on support. Now it sounds just right.  I feel confident enough in my identity, values and practices as a teacher, but also clear enough on my need to grow and improve, that I welcome someone else's perspective and advice on my practice toward a common goal of increasing and deepening student learning.  

[image credit: http://www.fergusonmoving.com/contact-us/submit-feedback/]

 Lately I have noticed that a great number of new schools opening in New York City are configured as "secondary schools," serving grades 6 through 12.  In fact, it is almost difficult these days to come across a brand new middle school.  As an educator trained in middle school education, certified to teach grades 5-9, and a proponent of the middle school movement--which advocates for schools to specialize in this particular age group, because of its unique needs--I am curious about the rationale for combining middle school with high school. I looked for information on this trend, but found surprisingly little.

Recently, I spoke to a principal who is starting a 6-12 school this year in Staten Island for new immigrants.  I asked her about her perspective on the benefits of a school serving grades 6-12. She said, quite reasonably, that the benefit is continuity. When you have a middle school that functions well, she said, one of the downsides is that you have to send your students on to a high school with a totally different program that usually doesn't build coherently on the work done at the middle school level. 

When I used to teach seventh and eighth grade in a middle school, I would become very attached to my students after the 2 years I'd spend as their ELA teacher.  I was always nervous about sending them off to their respective high schools, never knowing how they would fare.  I was especially nervous since most of them were ELL's, and the treatment of ELL's can be quite inconsistent from school to school. After that experience, I was excited about moving to the 6-12 school, where I've taught for the past three years.

I have had opportunity to reflect on some of the pros and cons of this configuration.  One challenge for my school was that it started with both a sixth and a ninth grade and added a grade at each level every year until it reached 6-12.  The middle school and high school were being developed simultaneously, and this rate of growth was challenging to keep up with, according to the founding principal.  Ideally, in a 6-12 school, the high school would be created as an extension of an already well-defined middle school. Years later, the middle and high school levels of my school have some distinct characteristics, but they and the students blur together at times, being housed all on the same floor, using the same uniform, sharing hallway space, deans, guidance counselors, cafeteria space, etc. 

One benefit of 6-12 schools mentioned in this Pittsburg Gazette article is that, "Educators said high school students can be tutors or role models for middle-grade students, but they stressed that boundaries must be observed... Administrators of 6-12 schools say the structure offers special opportunities for learning, provided officials remember to meet the discrete needs of two student groups -- pubescent, rambunctious middle-grade children and high school teens preparing for adulthood, college and careers."

I have seen high school students wield both positive and negative influences on my middle school students.  High schoolers are more mature and can handle a certain amount of freedom that most middle school students cannot.  High school teachers interact with their students differently than middle school teachers do, and sometimes this can be confusing for middle school students to observe.  A consistent message about what's appropriate school-wide is not always possible to communicate due to the differences in these two age groups.  But space makes it hard to establish a firm boundary between the two.  An eighth grade female student spoke to me once this year about how the presence of high school boys can be a distraction for middle school girls.  The dating expectations are not the same from middle school to high school, but some students do date across this line anyway.  

One the other hand, some of the best moments I've seen have been when high school students do serve as positive role models.  A school social worker has trained a group of tenth graders as mentors.  They begin mentoring students as sixth graders and continue to mentor them them through the eighth grade. This year, we had a group of college-bound high school seniors talk to our 8th graders about their high school experiences and offer advice.  We separated our students by gender, and high school girls spoke to middle school girls, while high school boys spoke to middle school boys.  It was fantastic.  Afterward, our eighth graders thanked us profusely for the opportunity.  

I see many positive opportunities that arise from the 6-12 configuration, but I remain committed to the needs of middle school students. To that end, I'd like to see more research and discourse on the best practices for this model, since it is becoming so prevalent.     

I'm curious if any readers have experience working or sending their children to a 6-12 school.  If so, please share!

[image credit: http://isles.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/iyi-060.jpg]

 After all that preparation, we finally took a leap of faith and went out into the neighborhood to conduct our original surveys on issues of interest the students had identified relating to Crown Heights.  These included businesses, education, racism, violence, opportunities, religion, the future of Crown Heights, languages, and more.  As I explained in my last post, there was much nervousness from students, and a little for myself, I admit.  A number of eighth graders claimed they were not going to survey anyone, for fear that they would be received poorly by strangers, and that conflict could arise from the interaction.  That was not how it turned out though.  It went GREAT.  Better than great, it was transformative.

After the first brave student timidly went up to a stranger asking for them to participate in their survey on an issue in Crown Heights, it was like open season, surveying people on the street.  Most participants happily spent a few minutes with our enthusiastic and polite students, wearing their school uniforms and holding clip boards and pencils.  A few strangers were hurrying somewhere and were apologetic when they declined to participate.  And just one or two people were a little gruff when they said no.  My students took it in stride and did not waste a moment moving onto the next person.  

Despite the initial nervousness, my biggest problem on the trip was getting students to realize that if they RAN up to a stranger, trying to beat out their classmates, the person might be a little taken aback!  Take your time!  Be aware of how you look from the outside!  Those were classic middle school teachable moments ;)

By far the most stunning experiences of the day were the real conversations my students got to have with adults from their community about their community.  For example, student got to ask members of their community whether Crown Heights could ever be a non violent neighborhood, and why, and what it would take to make that happen.  They got to ask adults if they believed there was still racism in the area, and if so, how did it manifest?  They heard many adults' perspectives on the purpose and value of an education.  

There was something so immediate, gratifying and hopeful about these interactions.  Kids got to be investigators, got their questions taken seriously, and listened intensely to their elders.  This in contrast to that classic role of teenagers being somewhat of a nuisance to adults on the streets, or alternatively, being pent up inside their homes, because of their or their parents' fears that the streets are too dangerous. 

I repeated this trip 3 times, with three different classes.  Each time as we made our way back to the school, kids skipped up to me and said, "This trip was the BEST!  Can we do it again?!"  Throughout the year students have randomly said, "Remember the Crown Heights trip? We should do more stuff like that."  

Afterwards, students tabulated the results of the surveys and had real original data to respond to in their articles.  Individually, for homework, students also conducted in depth interviews of adults in the community on their topics.  We held discussions in class, and finally students wrote their articles.

But the trip itself holds a special place in my memory that I can't shake. Ever since, I have been thinking about what made it so special.  It was one of those teaching experiences where time stops and everyone involved experiences a kind of flow of genuine curiosity and realization of our own efficacy as human beings and learners.  One thing I have come up with is that in this study, there was no glossing over of the harsh realities to which so many children in this neighborhood are exposed at too young an age.  

So often in school, kids are asked to put all of that aside to "learn."  I'm all for exposing students to new ideas and experiences, but what's to say that we can't guide our students to learn from familiar content as well? Isn't learning a universal process of observation, experience, reflection, asking questions, investigating, and creating? On the flip side, sometimes, in effort to connect to kids' lives, teachers may bombard their students with depressing texts that depict the realities of "the ghetto" in a way that does not bring new light to the situation. I've seen kids respond to these texts glumly and react out of boredom or frustration.   

In the Crown Heights study, [an adolescent version of the neighborhood study progressive elementary schools have been doing for decades, and which Bank Street College became famous for training teachers to implement--see Bank Street Founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell's book, Young Geographers for more on where this comes from and how to do it], we look at the realities of a neighborhood in an active way through an academic lens.   Kids investigate their own questions--which is also in contrast to the "Essential Questions" that teachers often devise for their classes.  

I must say, this study was one of the most challenging endeavors I have attempted in my teaching career so far, on both an organizational and emotional level.  But I will remember it a defining moment of my teaching career, on which I will continue to build in years to come.