Powerful Teacher Networks Offer Students the Best Classroom Practices
A secondary Science teacher shares how connecting with teaching colleagues beyond her classroom has pushed her thinking and her practice.
by Sarah Lundy
I interviewed my colleague, Anna Van Dordrecht, on powerful professional learning for K-12 educators. Anna is a secondary Science teacher in Sonoma County and a Teacher-on-Loan for the Sonoma County Office of Education. Anna’s high school classroom often doubles as a test lab for the roll out of Next Generation Science Standards. Anna (and her very patient students!) host a revolving door of curious K-12 educators who want to experience inquiry-based teaching and learning in action and understand what’s possible in Science education when the NGSS “rubber meets the road”. Here’s what Anna had to say:
Sarah: Why is re-imagining professional development for K-12 teachers a compelling need?
Anna: A lot of professional development falls into one of two categories; either it’s so big-picture that you attend and think, “Well, that’s nice for you in your ivory tower, but how does this actually relate to me at the classroom level?” Or it’s so specific that yes, you have something you can take back to the classroom and try the next day, but it doesn’t lead to sustainable change because it’s just one strategy.
I think that the golden ticket is something in between. Professional development should be incremental enough that you can imagine how it fits into your context. At the same time, professional development shouldn’t just hand you one thing that you’re going to use; it should also inspire you to create new things that work for your own students so the work and ideas can can be carried forward.
Sarah: I’m really struck by the idea that the purpose of professional development should be to inspire teachers’ thinking in contrast to handing teachers resources or handing teachers answers. Instead, you’re describing professional development as new thinking that can be sustained over time and interwoven in many different aspects of curriculum or instruction.
Anna: Exactly, because if professional development is simply resources handed to teachers by someone else, it’s probably cookie cutter and won’t necessarily fit your style and the needs of your students, and so it’s never as successful when you take it back to the classroom. Also, it doesn’t encourage teachers to really think “what works about this for me?” and “how can I build on this further?” — reflecting on becoming a better teacher. Instead, teachers just have one new tool to use and then they put it away and go back to the things they were doing before the professional development.
Sarah: Can you share one or two examples that come to mind that exemplify a meaningful professional development for you?
Anna: Yes, when I think about some of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had, they were all offering me opportunities to build a network of education colleagues outside of my classroom. In high school a lot of times you know the teachers in your department, but you’re in an isolated classroom and you don’t share a lot with other people outside of that group. Through professional development experiences that bring teachers together, I’ve built relationships with teachers in different subject areas, at different grade levels and at different sites. This has allowed me to learn a lot more about what’s out there, both in terms of pedagogy and structure at the site and district level. These experiences have made it possible for me to imagine what could be different for my own students and school site and determine what changes need to be made. This type of professional development has totally shifted what I can offer students, because I’ve had the space to imagine things that I didn’t know were possible before being exposed to an extensive network of colleagues.
Sarah: You’re describing professional development as an opportunity to offer teachers the space to think very creatively and critically about their specific context and to share practices in a cross-pollination that makes it far more likely for students to have the benefit of ideas that have been tried and tested and proven successful in multiple classrooms.
