What Teachers Learn by Taking Risks
The Sonoma County Office of Education’s Technology & Innovation Specialist explains.
by Sarah Lundy
I interviewed my colleague, Matt O’Donnell on powerful professional learning for K-12 educators. Matt O’Donnell is a Technology and Innovation Specialist for the Sonoma County Office of Education. Previously, Matt worked as a secondary social studies teacher for fifteen years. Here’s what Matt had to say:
SARAH: Why is re-imagining professional development for K-12 teachers a compelling need in our current education climate?
MATT: I think it’s really important, now more than ever, to change the way we do professional development and to shake up the way kids learn in schools. A teacher can’t keep up on everything. So they have to be able to allow students to try new things and to learn alongside them. Too often teachers don’t try new things because there’s this assumption that they have to be a master or an expert at something. Now, as the world is changing, there is so much fluidity. We have to change the way we do professional development to model for teachers that it’s o.k. to learn as you go, and that you don’t have to master everything.
We should help teachers find resources that their students can work with on their own. And we need to create a culture that allows and encourages teachers to learn alongside kids. If we’re not allowing them to do that, we’re holding our teachers back, and in turn, their students. If we continue to teach the same way, students are not going to be prepared at all for a world that is changing so quickly when they graduate.
SARAH: How might we start making this shift in the way we do professional development?
MATT: Traditionally, professional development for K-12 teachers has been very top-down. Typically, administrators would pick what the theme was for that year and it would apply to every teacher in the district. While this model may have benefitted some teachers, for most this doesn’t help them at all.
In order to change this approach, we need to support teachers as lifelong learners and help them access and curate the learning resources that are relevant to them. For example, on YouTube, there is every possible tutorial one could ever want and not just a tutorial on using a tech tool but a tutorial made by a teacher, most likely at one’s same grade level, demonstrating how to use a tool with students in their class. These are amazing resources and probably much better than the training a teacher would receive from their administration.
Embedded professional development is also important. We really need to have more side-by-side co-teaching, showing people what’s possible. This side-by-side model also creates opportunities for teachers to collaborate and build off of each other’s ideas. Sometimes a teacher sees something in a co-teaching model and is able to come up with something even better.
And we’ve made a huge shift to try to offer these types of learning experiences and practice what we preach at the Sonoma County Office of Education over the last few years.
SARAH: Can you share an example of a radically different professional development experience?
MATT: One of the great things about working here at Sonoma County Office of Education is that we get to chart our own course on what we believe is working in education.
One of the things I’ve been able to do here is to redesign computer labs to create flexible learning spaces. Labs are obsolete in 1:1 environments where the computers are in the classroom. A couple of years ago, I was working with a school that wanted to buy new desktop computers for their computer lab and mount these to the wall so that students have to leave the classroom to come learn about computers, rather than really using computers as an embedded learning tool.
So we changed the whole approach to that room and made it a collaborative learning space that would be open to all different kinds of learning not just a computer lab. We made an entire wall a whiteboard so kids could be standing up to work there. Another wall was “chrome” so they could use it as a Green Screen. We put the tables in different shapes and they were all on casters so they could be moved if the students were doing a video conference and project-based learning. So the room could be used for really different types of activities.
I’ve worked with another one of our districts to design different prototypes of what a 21st century classroom looks like. Two years ago, three teachers were given $5000 each to prototype a 21st C. classroom. They conducted empathy interviews with their students and found out the chairs that students were sitting in were not comfortable and that the room was all teacher-centered. It was a traditional classroom where the desks were all facing the teacher and it was set up for direct instruction. So they redesigned those classrooms. The feedback from the kids was incredible about how much more they liked going into their classroom. They could stand, they could sit comfortably, it didn’t feel like the factory learning that they had before.
Other teachers really liked this so, more teachers worked together this past summer to redesign their classrooms. It’s really snowballed. Pretty soon, you’re going to have almost every classroom in a district re-designed so it’s not students in rows taking notes with the teacher at the front. It’s going to be flexible learning spaces that are adaptable to problem-based learning.
This is the impact that can result from people buying-in and experiencing continued and embedded professional learning. This has been a three-year process but it’s making a huge difference for the students in the district and now there are teachers from a number of other districts coming to look at their schools. It’s beginning to have a county-wide influence. And it all started with just a couple of teachers who really wanted to do this. It’s not top-down, each classroom is different, there’s no prescribed 21st C. classroom, it’s based on empathy interviews with students in classrooms.
SARAH: The model you’re describing of teachers using the design thinking process to redesign 21st C. classrooms required a lot of reflection about practice. When these teachers were interviewing their students and imagining what a classroom redesign would look like, they were reflecting on the implications of the design for all of their instruction, wondering “what would group work look like? How do we approach reading time?” I imagine that when teachers from other districts coming to observe the redesigned spaces, they are probably also engaging in a reflective process & thinking deeply about how similar changes in their classrooms might impact how they offer students opportunities to learn.
MATT: I think that’s the most powerful part of this. For other teachers to see someone who took a risk, who said, “I was afraid to give up my seating chart, and I’m not sure how this is going to work” and “I still wanted to arrange the room so the students were all facing me but I still made the changes based on my students’ feedback and it’s had a really positive impact on their learning”. Teachers explaining the risks they’re taking to other teachers is one of the most powerful things that came out of this.
SARAH: In this example, teachers are hearing from one another and also hearing from their own students. This is what professional learning could be. Teachers and students really thinking together about how learning happens in their space and making sure that student thinking and experiences are at the center of those choices. This is a radically different professional development model than the traditional, “Let’s all get inside of this room together where an expert will throw something new at you for 6–8 hours.”
