Anyone
who has tried to inspire change in an educational organization knows
how hard this can be. An easy way to introduce change is through
teacher development, but is it sustainable? How do you ensure that the
learning translates into the classroom? Unfortunately, there are lots
of non-examples where a tremendous amount of money has been spent on
teacher professional development and yet there hasn’t been lasting
change. This is why we have changed the model in Los Altos School
District and developed iLearn. iLearn is unique because it helps to
build teacher capacity at all nine of our schools while also recognizing
teacher leaders who act on the knowledge by not only making a
difference in their classroom but by also having a positive impact on
colleagues.
The
idea started out fairly simple - invest in a group of teacher leaders
and empower them to help build capacity and inspire colleagues. To accomplish this, we created a
week-long professional development training for teachers on rethinking
their instructional practices while integrating technology. In order to
participate in this summer training as a “Lead Learner” we asked
teachers to commit to the following: one week of training in the
summer, three follow-up meetings during the school year, a commitment to
share knowledge with colleagues at their site and a creation of an
eportfolio that documents their experience over the course of a school
year. And in return we offered teachers $1,000 stipend for attending
the training, $500 to spend on classroom resources and the ability to
earn up to an additional $2,000 at the end of the following school year
dependent on the impact they had at their school site. The response
from teachers was overwhelming. While we originally only planned on
selecting two teachers from each site, we ended up selecting three Lead
Learners from some of our larger sites and had a waiting list of
teachers who wanted to be involved. Then in June 2012 we held our first
iLearn Summer Academy.
iLearn
Summer Academy was an intense learning experience that was planned and
facilitated by four LASD teachers who had demonstrated their ability to
rethink instructional practices with great success. The first two days
were incredible as our group of Lead Learners were excited about all
they were learning. And then at the end of day two we hit a wall.
There were a range of emotions - frustration, exhaustion, and feelings
of being overwhelmed. We expected this and supported teachers through
this critical stage of the learning process. For many the realization
as to just how much work was involved in rethinking instructional
practices set in. We pushed through and the week ended on a high, with
great reflection and lofty goals for what they would accomplish with
their students and their colleagues come fall.
Fast
forward to January. We are now half-way through the school year and
just recently held our second meeting with our Lead Learners. The goal
of these meetings is to provide a structured opportunity for teacher
leaders who have shared common learning experiences and created common
goals to get together and reflect. Our Lead Learners reflect on the
goals they set as site teams and goals sets as individuals. More
importantly they share their successes and frustrations of being a
leader at their site. The accomplishments inspired by this group of
teacher leaders in our district is amazing.
Through
their leadership, our teacher leaders have inspired all teachers to
create class websites, worked with teachers on utilizing iPads as
creation devices in k-3 classrooms, encouraged teachers to use edmodo as
a collaboration tool and so much more. These accomplishments are
happening because we have inspired our teacher leaders to be creative in
how they support colleagues. Our Lead Learners have instituted
supports such as “Appy Hour” a time after school once a month where
teachers get together to talk about technology integration, and a
“Genuis Bar” set up in the staff room before the school day begins where
teachers can get one on one support with technology. These are just a
few examples of how teacher leaders are supporting their colleagues
across our district.
One
of the really exciting aspects of our iLearn professional development
is the ability to recognize our teacher leaders for their outstanding
work at the end of the school year in the form of a stipend. The
stipends will vary from teacher to teacher dependent on the impact they
have had on their staff. Because this is a new approach for us, it is
uncomfortable for some teachers. There is no set list of items that
must be completed to earn the money. Establishing a list of tasks that
must be completed guarantees that everyone will accomplish what is on
the list, but likely that is all that would get accomplished. Without
distributing such a list, we have left it up to our Lead Learners as to
how to best share knowledge and inspire colleagues. The ideas and
action generated by the group are much more exciting than any list we
could have generated centrally. Come the end of this school year, we
will ask each of our Lead Learners to reflect on their experience as a
teacher leader and evaluate their work using a rubric with indicators in
the following areas: mindset, leadership, technology integration,
professional contribution and collaboration. The Lead Learners
reflection combined with their eportfolio where they documented their
experience under the headings; iLearn, iTeach, iInspire will be used to
determine the amount of their stipend. It will be exciting to
financially reward and recognize those leaders who have truly done an
amazing job.
iLearn
and our Lead Learners are helping to change the culture of our district
to one of a true learning organization where all members of the
organization are held accountable for learning. We are fortunate to have the support and trust of our parent community which allows us to develop initiatives such as iLearn. Thank you Los Altos Education Foundation for making this possible. We are currently
working on securing funding for our next round of iLearn and will
hopefully launch iLearn Summer Academy 2013 this June.
By: Alyssa Gallagher, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction
No comments:
Post a Comment