Fostering Thinking Teachers in the Time of COVID
In a previous post, I drew upon Caswell, Esmonde & Takeuchi’s article “Towards Culturally Relevant and Responsive Teaching of Mathematics” (2011) to discuss the difficulty of fostering a space for critical reflection & inquiry in the time of COVID and argued for a shift in the structure and focus of PD to a kind of “emergent PD” that is responsive, embedded and allows teachers to explore and reflect on the contradictions that emerge between pedagogy and practice in classroom settings.
My thought was that if we carve out and hold a space for an emergent and embedded PD, perhaps teachers responses to PD will transform, and so will the system, despite the stress and exhaustion and inequities that have resulted from teaching in the time of COVID.
The notion of an emergent PD, though, is fairly abstract, and although I put forward some guiding principles (see below), I didn’t explore how they might translate to practice.
Emergent PD: A Conceptual Cheat Sheet
Less is more.
Dialogical & focused on site-specific application of theory
Space, time and permission to name and reflect on contradictions that emerge with the application of theory to their site/classroom (collaborative inquiry)
Trust & a metacognitive focus — fostering teachers’ “instructional moves,” rather than providing directives or content-based instruction
As as our board plunges into long-overdue work of destreaming and Indigenous and Afrocentric course planning and design, I would like to provide a more concrete exploration of how an emergent PD might be embedded into the destreaming context.
The pace at which boards across Ontario have simultaneously picked up on the urgency of destreaming and accelerated action has left many educators with little time for thinking about how to design effective destreamed courses and, how to support colleagues (who are not a part of working groups) to understand and engage in the work meaningfully.
The work has the potential of being more than transitional, it has the possibility to be transformational.
But it also has the potential of failing miserably, despite the knowledge, dedication and drive of the educators in the room. We must plan for teachers who are not sitting around the table — those who may be overwhelmed and reluctant, and who may not have a community of support to draw upon (as well as for systemic constraints — class sizes, colonial structures, mindsets, curriculum deficits).
The real work of destreaming writing teams is therefore not about developing content, it is about finding a way to change teacher habits and beliefs to transform instructional practice.
We must somehow embed the conditions for teachers to engage in ongoing metacognition, to reflect on instructional moves, through design and delivery instead of providing a course pack with content replacing content.
As we gather for the second of 6 release days to plan a grade 10 Black history course, I think about the different ways we might embed the metacognitive into course design & PD rollout.
One way to do so would be to include OISE’s Centre for Urban Schooling’s Equity Continuum into course packages & ask that teachers gage their readiness to teach and learn in a destreamed classroom.
Or to draw on Tyler Rablin’s Skills Continuum template and use it as a way for both students & teachers to engage in simultaneous active reflection on their phases of learning/unlearning connecting them to the process of co-learning and fostering their metacognition concurrently.
But both of these approaches do not implicitly prompt a dialogical or collaborative approach to exploring emergent issues in the classroom.
And what we really need to cultivate are the conditions for a “thinking teacher” (Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Liljedahl) so teachers engage with other educators to reflect on instructional moves and continue to grow and learn through practice.
This requires moving beyond a simple self-assessment tool like a continuum.
Cultivating a thinking teacher requires conditions similar to fostering a thinking classroom and can be done through effective PD.
To cultivate a thinking teacher, PD must:
- Make teachers think
- Defront the lesson by allowing teachers to take the lead
- Create a place for collaborative work (across classrooms, departments, schools and school boards)
- Use strategies to engage students in ongoing reflection (answering only “keep-thinking” questions)
- Strategize about the when, where & how PD is delivered
- Cultivate a learning community that becomes independent from the PD instructor/material or “[f]oster autonomy by mobilizing the knowledge [of others]” (Liljedahl)
But how to do this? Dan Meyer’s “teacher tune-ups” might just offer up an ideal tool for “thinking teacher” PD. Teacher tune-ups are youtube videos where Meyer shows excerpts from lessons, discusses what went well and then what didn’t go well and asks viewers to engage in a discussion about which instructional moves they would have used if they were in his shoes.
Through this video, Meyer cultivates “thinking teachers.”
He poses a question that makes teachers think (what should I have done here?).
He defronts the classroom and puts viewers in the driver’s seat.
He creates spaces for collaboration across classrooms, departments, boards by asking teachers to engage in responding in the comment section and fosters autonomy by mobilizing their knowledge.
The video is dialogical (teachers can comment & collaborate in the comment section) & focuses on emergent site-specific issues (an unplanned moment in his classroom).
It also fosters teachers’ “instructional moves,” rather than providing directives or content-based instruction.
The format also gives teachers permission to name and reflect on issues and contradictions that have emerged in their classrooms and engage in discussion about the application of a practice/thinking routine/pedagogy to a class. And depending on the strategy for rollout, this kind of PD has the potential to cultivate a learning community separate from the initial PD instructor/material by inviting viewers to create their own videos focused on improving instructional moves. In other words, it keeps teachers thinking.
The video is also short and the format could be easily embedded into deestreaming course design and also rollout.
So is it possible to foster meaningful metacognition among teachers who are teaching destreamed courses — thinking about the teaching — without adding more to their plates? Is it possible to situate teachers as learners through emergent PD? Maybe.
Dan Meyer’s teacher tune-ups might just be the place to start.
In Toward an Emergent PD: Professional Development in the Time of COVID, I outlined the challenges for engaging teachers in meaningful PD in the time of COVID and encouraged an approach that is less time-consuming, more responsive to site-specific issues and contradictions, dialogical in nature, collaborative and focused on the metacognitive to foster the instructional moves. Using technology and following the model of a “teacher tune-up” might be the answer to supporting meaningful engagement and fostering a transformational practice.
