Here is a link to a global professional/social networking site for educators: The Schools United. This site offers the opportunity for educators from countries throughout the world to discuss their ideas and their teaching practices, and clearly fits into the 21st century theme of global awareness and global connections.
The site seems, from my rather brief glance at it, to be geared toward primary and secondary school teachers. However, it got me thinking about the need(?) for a similar networking site here. Instead of replacing meetings, these social networking sites can enhance communication and collaboration by allowing users to constantly update - and be updated about - what is going on on campus. I wonder how many faculty members have used social networking sites.....
The Schools United is great because it offers entree into a global forum from the cheap comfort of one's office.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Ideas to consider in Planning Professional Development
Interesting ideas for thinking about professional development, from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching :
From Special Occasion to Regular Work
For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.
Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being "developed" is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens to you; even worse, there's a sense that something's broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC [Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges] sites have adopted the language of "faculty inquiry," pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students' learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.
First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be sustained over time. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus's goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. "We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior," one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project "has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time." Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.
A second principle is the importance of collaboration. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have—because institutions provide—so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, "Good things happen when teachers talk."
Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.
The third defining feature is a focus on evidence about student learning. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.
From Special Occasion to Regular Work
For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.
Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being "developed" is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens to you; even worse, there's a sense that something's broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC [Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges] sites have adopted the language of "faculty inquiry," pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students' learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.
First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be sustained over time. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus's goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. "We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior," one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project "has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time." Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.
A second principle is the importance of collaboration. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have—because institutions provide—so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, "Good things happen when teachers talk."
Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.
The third defining feature is a focus on evidence about student learning. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.
I feel somewhat validated
The following is an excerpt from David Loertcher's article "invention, transfer, efficiency, and innovation: 21st-century learning abilities can be taught", found in Teacher Librarian. 34.5 (June 2007). My comments are in italics at the end.
"Most learning experiences currently concentrate on efficiency: coming up with right answers using recognized techniques. . . [H]owever, these desirable learning characteristics--if really valued by society--must be assessed by using methods different from current standardized tests.
Action steps for the teacher-librarian when teaching alone or in collaboration with the classroom teacher follow:
At the beginning of a lesson, ask students to manipulate data on a topic to come up with an explanation, a formula, a way of seeing relationships--a preliminary invention of ideas. Do not criticize these efforts, even if they seem wrong. For example, if you know that students are going to face a wide spectrum of opinions on an issue, then provide them with a range of opinions in random order and ask groups or pairs of students to come up with a way to picture, group, or explain differences of opinion. Do not criticize charts or groupings; the students are inventing ways of thinking about data.
Teach the students how some experts deal with a range of opinions, by constructing an opinion line, such as that demonstrating for-and-against opinions or pro-and-con opinions. Have students retrieve articles on the subject and place the various opinions from the articles onto the opinion line; have them defend their placement.
Present students with a task that requires them to place articles on the opinion line as taught. They may argue among themselves about the position of a particular authority that seems to be taking a middle-of-the-road stance.
Assess their work as you normally would.
Finally, give the students a unique problem to solve where the technique taught might be one key in the solution to the problem. Assess their ability to encounter this novel problem in a new situation."
This is an English degree, only the "data" is words. If English studies - a core of Liberal Arts along with Philosophy, History, and other Humanities subjects - is already encouraging this type of intellectual pursuit and this type of intellectual pursuit is THE hot topic, why are the Humanities being underdiscussed, undervalued and underrecognized? People seem to discuss 21st century skills as something that needs to be incorporated into classrooms because it is not necessarily there.....but, in terms of critical thinking, it is.
"Most learning experiences currently concentrate on efficiency: coming up with right answers using recognized techniques. . . [H]owever, these desirable learning characteristics--if really valued by society--must be assessed by using methods different from current standardized tests.
Action steps for the teacher-librarian when teaching alone or in collaboration with the classroom teacher follow:
At the beginning of a lesson, ask students to manipulate data on a topic to come up with an explanation, a formula, a way of seeing relationships--a preliminary invention of ideas. Do not criticize these efforts, even if they seem wrong. For example, if you know that students are going to face a wide spectrum of opinions on an issue, then provide them with a range of opinions in random order and ask groups or pairs of students to come up with a way to picture, group, or explain differences of opinion. Do not criticize charts or groupings; the students are inventing ways of thinking about data.
Teach the students how some experts deal with a range of opinions, by constructing an opinion line, such as that demonstrating for-and-against opinions or pro-and-con opinions. Have students retrieve articles on the subject and place the various opinions from the articles onto the opinion line; have them defend their placement.
Present students with a task that requires them to place articles on the opinion line as taught. They may argue among themselves about the position of a particular authority that seems to be taking a middle-of-the-road stance.
Assess their work as you normally would.
Finally, give the students a unique problem to solve where the technique taught might be one key in the solution to the problem. Assess their ability to encounter this novel problem in a new situation."
This is an English degree, only the "data" is words. If English studies - a core of Liberal Arts along with Philosophy, History, and other Humanities subjects - is already encouraging this type of intellectual pursuit and this type of intellectual pursuit is THE hot topic, why are the Humanities being underdiscussed, undervalued and underrecognized? People seem to discuss 21st century skills as something that needs to be incorporated into classrooms because it is not necessarily there.....but, in terms of critical thinking, it is.
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