Transcription
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Having high-quality professional learning that is job-embedded is essential to continuing to grow as educators. Being job-embedded means that it is something you experience on a regular basis.
Whether that is through a PLC team that meets once a week, you're getting together with people who are potentially in content-alike areas or teaching a similar group of students. You're learning together, and you're growing as educators.
I think the most important components of the new definition are professional learning opportunities that are job-embedded and collaborative. I think too often teachers, even in bigger schools, feel like they're working in isolation.
So when teachers have the opportunity to collaborate with each other around a new strategy or around implementing content in a new way, they can brainstorm together. They can troubleshoot together.
As teachers, we have many, many obstacles to overcome. We have lots of different learners and a whole host of challenges. When we work together around these challenges, it impacts student learning, where we can engage students more deeply in higher-level content.
I think that professional learning that is collaborative, job-embedded, and classroom-driven is so much more meaningful for students because they actually see the results of it.
So if you go to a workshop where you're listening to someone talk but you don't have the opportunity to apply it, then the students don't see the results. Maybe you change your thinking a little bit, but you don't change much in your classroom.
With the new definition of ESSA, it's really having an impact not only on the teacher but also on the students.
When I first started teaching, it was very much about just sit and get, one time that was supposed to create every takeaway for what I needed to do in the classroom.
As my career has progressed, professional learning has been about being job-embedded and being very collaborative. So it's been about creating peer-to-peer learning experiences so that we're learning from each other and we're actually talking about the experiences that are happening in the classroom.
Collaboration is critical for professional learning because, in a sense, you're creating your own circle of critical friends. There's a place where you can implement new strategies, observe one another working, and have your own feedback process with each other.
It also gives you the opportunity to look at student data and how that is going to inform your teaching moving from one class period to the next.
It also gives the opportunity to know that when a student walks into teacher A or teacher B's classroom, they're getting the same quality instruction because you've all met together and agreed on what it would look like and how it would be implemented in the classroom.
It doesn't matter which classroom a student walks into from teacher to teacher; they're going to get the same quality instruction, the same approach, and they're going to get that quality feedback from the teacher to improve that student every time they start a new task.
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