End of Course Reflection for EDU 6600 Communication and Collaboration

End of Course Reflection

Course EDU 6600

Communication and Collaboration:  Colleagues, Administration, and Community

Before taking this course, I thought I had pretty good understanding of professional development.  I come from an innovative school district that believes professional development of its staff is important in order for our students to be successful.  We have early release Fridays set aside for professional development opportunities. Half of our early release Fridays are set aside for whole group or department time while the other half are set aside for self-directed time. We also have a few hours of district paid time to work on our TPEP (Teacher/Principal Evaluation Program) as part of our contracts.  Additionally, we give teachers the opportunity to join a book study or participate in the Powerful Learning Conference to take sessions of their choice for clock hours through the Center for Collaborative Support.  Yet, even though I have been exposed to a lot of professional development, I learned a variety of ways to present professional development opportunities to staff which made me think about professional development a bit differently.

We started off the course by learning how professional development has change in the world of education over the years.  The article “Exploring New Approaches to Teachers Leadership” discussed how the focus on leadership has changed from being on the principal or superintendent in the 1980’s to the teachers in the 2000’s.  The first model was where the leadership was done by more than one person on a key task or function. Model two was where leadership is an organization-wide resource of power and influence. The last model is hybrid of the other two models. The article concluded by saying that for any of these distributive leadership models to be effective they need to have support of the principal or superintendent and strong internal leadership.

Our next step before diving into models of professional development was to look at how adults learn differently than students.  This was interesting to me since I had not thought of this before.  In my school we have been learning good instructional practices in our professional trainings and as a result we have applied those learnings to our professional development sessions.  This not only helps staff experience how to use different strategies and techniques to help students learn, but also to learn more deeply just like their students will.  But, while reading the chapters in “Pillars of Andragogy” we did learn that there were differences between how adults and children learn. These included that adults have more emotional baggage, they are more motivated if they get to research or study with others with the same focus, women learn better by working with, stories of success can motivate them to try something outside of their comfort zone, and that mentoring is important.  So as we a leading and planning professional development opportunities we can address these in order to make these opportunities more meaningful and therefore valued.

Then we explored a variety of professional training methods that meet the needs of adults.  These included PLC’s (Professional Learning Communities), Book Studies, Critical Friends Groups, Lesson Study, and Learning Circles.  As we looked through these methods two challenges that really stood out for me were the getting buy-in from staff and the amount time it takes to complete the process once you have found a focus.  I think one of the best ways to get buy in from staff is to have people talk about their experiences with these methods.  By doing this you help other staff members understand “why” it is important to be engaged in the method and not get caught up with the “how”.   Additionally, as stated earlier you need to have your administration support and a specific focus to be able to do this since we all have limited amount of time that we can ask our staff to put in training.

Using all of this information that we have learned throughout this course we then wrote a created a plan for a professional training opportunity using one of the professional training methods we had studied.  Once I had decided upon my focus of Backward Design, I decided that lesson study would work best for my staff to study it.   As with any of the methods we had studied, I saw time, trust among staff, and buy-in as the most challenges.  But, I also saw that it would help teachers have a greater understanding of the curriculum they are teaching, provide stronger relationships between staff, and provide better available lesson plans.

As can be seen, even though I came into this course with quite a bit of experience as a participant and leader of professional learning opportunities, I believe that I have learned many things that will help me to be a more effective leader of professional trainings.  As I move forward with my position of a teacher leader, I also will use the advice I received from  my interview with my principal of “make meaningful, but small changes, something you know you will have success with in order to build up trust in order to help others grow” and “to step back and listening to what the staff believes” (McGrath). I also believe that through this course I have meet teaching leadership
standard 4 by engaging in analysis of teaching and collaborative practices and Standard 2,
Strand 3 of the MEd in Ed Leadership as I will be able to advocate, nueture and help
sustain coherent, intentional professional development at my school and district.

McGrath, A. (2018, October 21).  Principal Interview [Personal interview)

Pillars of andragogy. (2001). New directions for adult and continuing education, 89.

Smylie, M. A., Conley, S., & Marks, H. M. (n.d.). Exploring new approaches to teacher
    leadership for school improvement. In New Approaches to Teacher Leadership. (pp.
   162-  188).

Zepeda, S. (2008). Professional development: what works. New York: Eye on Education.