Entry #45: A quick lesson in
building a learning community
Monday morning (8/14) I start my new job. I'm anxious to meet the rest of
our team of facilitators and the twelve principals in our Cluster. I have
a number of general questions and concerns about my role, but I can't really
zero in and focus until I get a clearer picture about my responsibilities
and the people involved.
Last week, I was co-facilitating a coaches' training at the Chauncey conference
center in Princeton. I spent what seemed like a lifetime in what was really
only four intense days of reflective work. One principal remarked that she
couldn't believe the things she was sharing in a group she had just met
the day before!
Participants wanted to know what we had done. They asked how we had learned
to make people comfortable and trusting so quickly.
While it is always nice to get compliments about the way you set an agenda
or coach a session, I had to keep returning our focus to the power of the
work itself. My partner Pete Bermudez (from FL) and I had met once before.
We spoke on the phone briefly two days before arriving in Princeton, and
we exchanged a couple of emails, but even with this very limited contact,
we clicked smoothly. Why?
The assumption of basic respect, the honoring of all the voices and experiences
at the table, the commitment to grow the work of teacher collaboration and
reflection is what combined to "raise the level of all boats"
-- as my partner Pete put it.
It was a team effort. As a group we had become a learning community and
it showed!
The value of vertical conversations
There were quite a few teachers like myself, who had recently left the classroom,
and we all bonded quickly, sharing our concerns about our need to stay connected
to the kids in order to maintain our edge, as well as our credibility. There
were also principals, district office people and outside researchers in
all of our groups.
A conscious decision was made to separate colleagues and administrators
from the same buildings, and to mix the participants across "job titles."
In our planning we wondered if the vertical mixes would work. We worried
that if we couldn't talk across titles and levels that our work would be
crippled.
Our design built in times for opportunities to talk as teachers and times
to talk as administrators. Because we honored both needs, the need to separate
became much less important for all involved.
Our training was divided into four days with a guiding focus for each day.
Day One was devoted to "Community Building." Day Two was built
around "Supporting Each Other's Work." On the third day our focus
was "Looking at Student Work" and finally, on the fourth day,
we looked at "Taking It All Back Home."
On the first day, we began with a few team-building activities, but we were
conscious about debriefing each experience in order to shed light on the
lessons and strategies we were modeling. We weren't interested in warm fuzzies
without content.
Pete and I used transparent
facilitation to fine-tune our work along the way. We explained to the
group that instead of having private sidebars, we would share our thinking
with them.
We then spent time developing group norms of behavior. Participants were
asked to think about how and when they did their best learning. They were
asked to share those conditions which they felt promoted deep learning and
sharing. Finally, we listed the norms and agreed on a common code of conduct
for our sessions together.
Whose learning community is it?
On the heels of our norm setting we did a "Chalk Talk" with "Professional
Learning Community" as our prompt in the center. Everyone wrote their
comments and questions about professional learning communities.
Common threads of respect and trust ran through almost every comment.
It was only after we finished that I realized that we had cut kids and parents
out of "our" community by attaching the word "professional"
to our prompt. When I have done this activity in the past it was always
with "learning community" as the focus.
I was very disturbed by what I saw as a continuation of our tendency to
view parents as an afterthought.
When I voiced my concern, there was some talk about our needing to get our
own house in order first, before we took on "too much." In the
wee hours of the next morning, I wrestled with this notion of getting "our
own house in order" when it struck me that it wasn't even "our
house"!
The next exercise did place the kids at the center of our learning, but
their parents' voice was missing. I need to think more about what this means.
For now, I am troubled by questions like, can we truly educate "other
peoples' children" without involving them in the conversation, and
will we ever be "ready enough" to invite them to the table? Do
we just want a rubber stamp of approval or do we value a collaborative and,
hence, authentic process?
In order to place students in the center of our work together, we decided
to complete a student profile activity. The exercise provides you with eight
descriptions, or profiles of students. After reading, we chose our dominant
student profile and wrote about what life was like for us as students. We
then thought about the student we had worked with, who had pushed our thinking
and learning the most. We looked over the student descriptions again and
chose one which best suited our student.
As we posted our names and profile numbers we found that by and large, most
teachers had fallen into two or three student categories. Not surprisingly,
most of the teachers were had been pretty successful students. We were also
a predominantly female group.
In contrast, the students were overwhelmingly male and they tended to fall
into student categories, which we had not personally experienced. If we
had had more time, we could have mined this initial data for many insights
into the disconnect in student/teacher relationships.
However, because time was our enemy, we settled for an indepth discussion
of the what we need to offer to students matching the 8th profile, the reluctant
learners, the kids who have never quite fit into this thing we call school.
Everyone mentioned the power of this activity in our first day's reflection
sheets, but most wished we had had more time to discuss each student profile.
We noted that our participants should try using this activity back home,
where they might have the luxury of choosing one profile/category per month,
in order to better move all of our kids into the limelight of focused adult
attention.
After lunch, we shifted gears vis a vis learning styles, by asking the participants
to make a three-d visual of a key value they wanted to see represented in
our ad hoc learning community.
For about forty minutes, teachers and administrators joined forces to build
a model of our community.
It was fascinating to see new group leaders emerge. Folks who might not
like speaking in large groups, were now, very comfortable working with art
materials and thinking "outside of the box."
The power of shared experiences
After sharing our artistic contributions, we began to look toward the next
day's focus on "Supporting Each Other's Growth". We asked everyone
to think hard about a dilemma that was troubling them at school or on the
job.
Folks were advised to share something that would be affected by a change
in their own practice or thinking. In other words, asking how you might
reach your students through better questioning techniques, was preferable
and worlds apart, from asking how you might get those "other"
teachers to improve their teaching. We weren't interested in running a repair
shop for ourselves or for our colleagues. We were invested in sharing reflective
practices and protocols which would help us go deeper into our own thinking
and work.
Finally, we distributed the next day's homework and asked everyone to complete
written reflections to help us refine the next day's agenda.
We had really packed it in on the first day, a day that ran from 8:30 until
5, but it was energizing!
As our groups broke for the day, people returned to tables full of folks
from their own schools and cities. The dining area was literally buzzing
with people comparing notes and questions about the power of their shared
experiences.
Throughout the four days our learning and trust grew. I am looking forward
to my ongoing connection with these teachers. This entry is only a snippet
of our work together, but that new job I mentioned earlier, is waiting and
I need to get ready...
[Editor's note: Deb will continue her diary during the coming school
year. We're looking forward to sharing the adventures of a brand-new staff
developer who's committed to making her work collaborative and substantive.
Deb will also serve as co-moderator of the
new MiddleWeb listserve, which will begin early this fall.]
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