Professional Development with a Little Help from My Friends
Informal intervisitations are indeed invaluable
(Note: some of the work discussed below was supported by the Siegel Family Fellowship through STEMteachersNYC.)
During my first year teaching, the teacher-leaders in my school building participated in an intervisitation program. There were four schools involved: they were to agree on a shared problem of practice and learn by visiting each other over the course of the year. In advance of each visitation day, they agreed on a detailed agenda. The teachers whose classrooms were to be observed spent hours on their lesson plans, documenting learning objectives and their anticipated teacher-moves. The teachers doing the visiting prepared graphic organizers in order to take extensive notes on their experiences. Following each visitation day, everyone involved spent a couple of hours debriefing using a predetermined discussion protocol. I watched the process from afar. When I first heard about this program, I thought, “This is great! Teachers get to visit each other’s schools and learn from each other!” And then I thought, “Why is this limited to teacher-leaders? And why are they putting so much work into each visit? Can’t we just visit each other and learn from each other without making a whole thing out of it?”
I made a pact with myself then: at least one day per school year, I was going to sit in on classes at another school. I was not going to have an agenda. I was not going to look for something specific in the classes I visited. I was just going to go and have an experience. At the time, I was the only physics teacher in my school building, so I specifically wanted to see physics classes in other schools, but I wasn’t going to restrict myself to physics. I just wanted to broaden my exposure without being anchored to a specific professional goal.
In my first few years of teaching, I visited schools that were in session when my own school was closed, which meant I never needed to ask for permission. I saw a private school in New York City and a public school in New Jersey. I sat in on college classes. I decided where to go based purely on who I knew: I asked to visit friends I’d met in grad school and in professional development workshops. I visited my former chemistry teacher from when I was in high school. Everyone I asked was delighted to have me. (I’m always honored and happy when people ask to visit me.) This visitation habit of mine has been a critical component of my own learning over the years I’ve been teaching.
Over time, I realized how rare it is for teachers to just go visit each other’s schools with no agenda or formal professional development structure driving the experience. There are plenty of resources for intervisitation online, but they typically present a framework or protocol. Often one’s administrator is involved in the process. And with this structure comes judgment, whether real or imagined. When teachers feel judged, they are less willing to invite guests for a truly open, exploratory experience. My own intervisitations have always been under the radar, and I think they work best that way. For this reason, I will not personally identify anyone I visited in this blog post. (But to those I’ve visited: you know who you are, and I am deeply grateful to you for welcoming me into your spaces.)
This year, I upped my intervisitation game. The way my teaching schedule worked out, I ended up with the last couple of periods off once a week. I used this time to visit local schools. And I used my school holidays to visit faraway schools that were in session that week. Over the course of three months, I attended physics classes in 7 schools: a public school in East Harlem; a public school in West Harlem; a private school on the Upper West Side; a public school in Virginia; a private school in Washington, DC; a college on Long Island; and my own school on the Upper East Side. I learned nothing surprising, and yet all of it was memorable. I had chosen to shadow teachers I already knew and admired, so I expected to be impressed — but you never know quite how impressive your friend is until you see them guiding a room full of students. Here are my takeaways from watching these amazing physics teachers:
1. Facial expressions are key. Every classroom I visited was an inquiry-driven experience, with students making meaning for themselves in pairs or small groups. As the teacher circulates, there’s often a need to communicate something with a student across the room: sometimes praise, sometimes an additional instruction, and sometimes a reminder to get back on task. Every teacher I saw could communicate so much information with a raised eyebrow or twitch of the lip — a private moment that other students were unaware of because it happened quickly and silently. Years ago, I was encouraged to practice my teacher-grimace in front of the mirror. The teachers I observed could make that stern expression too, but they all had a glimmer of delight in their eyes even with the most punitive of stares: it was clear that students and teacher were all on the same team.
2. All teachers have tricks to share. There are many little things we all do in our classrooms, which we don’t realize have incredible value. From the teachers I visited, I picked up roller coaster breathing, would you rather, and no naked numbers. I learned new ways to ask proportion questions, to design projects that meaningfully build and assess student understanding, and to manage all the whiteboards and markers in a room. If I told my host that I planned to start doing one of these things in my own classroom, the response was often, “Huh, I never thought that much about this thing I was doing. I’m glad it’ll be helpful to you.” When teachers don’t see each other at work day-to-day, we don’t realize that we all have so much to learn from each other.
3. Learning is continuous and joyful. At one school, a student who wasn’t even taking physics came into the classroom after the period had ended to ask about the connection between centripetal force and angular momentum. At another school, a student asked about what it really means to have electric potential equal to 0 at infinity. At a third school, students asked about the limits to modeling a neuron as a capacitor. In every school I visited, students asked questions that showed deep thinking and made me probe my own understanding. In one school, the teacher I visited jokingly told the student I sat with that my job was to keep an eye on him. He was indeed a handful but also he knew it, and he allowed me to refocus him repeatedly in between poking fun at and literally poking the students around him. By the end of the class, he was able to explain why poking hurts more when you poke people faster, using the concept of impulse that had been the focus of the day’s class. I was sad to say goodbye to him at the end of the period.
4. Intervisitations help alleviate some teacher burnout. Teaching as a profession can be exhausting, and burnout is real. Visiting my teacher friends at other schools helps me calibrate my own morale. Watching other classes in session helps me see that I’m not alone. And being a fresh perspective in a friend’s room helps them see how amazing they are, which helps them feel less beaten down. It adds additional value when we’re visiting each other across school lines, because school administrations and student populations vary widely, and it’s refreshing to get a set of eyes from the outside world. It’s even better when it’s reciprocal: after I visited one of the schools, the principal encouraged the teacher I visited to come see me in my school and to count it as a half-day professional development experience. Experiences like this keep our heads and hearts in the game. And in extreme cases, when one’s school really is no longer a fit, intervisitations can inspire us to take a risk and apply to work elsewhere. It lowers the activation energy because we have a clearer vision of what other school communities can be like.
In my career before teaching, when I worked in finance, I regularly saw my colleagues at work: I saw them run meetings, produce spreadsheets, and mentor others. Long after I’d gotten up to speed on the job, I continued to watch and learn from colleagues on a daily basis. As a teacher, my schedule is not designed to encourage regular exposure to others’ pedagogy. And it would be challenging to change this for teachers: there are only so many hours in a day. But to the extent that my colleagues and friends are willing, I will continue to sit in on their classes. I want to keep growing as an educator, and intervisitations are an important part of my journey.
