CraftED welcomes guest blogger Jen Isbell.  Jen is a New Tech Network Certified Teacher and Trainer and founding staff member at Central Coast New Tech High School.  She is a Project Based Learning geek and believes education is the core of progress and happiness in our world.  She is passionate about creating meaningful, real world scenarios that challenge herself and her students to practice using the 21st century skills needed to thrive in today’s world.  In this post Jen shares with us the story of her school’s attempt at reimagining PD.

 

As teacher designers in our project-based world, we know that in order to create a meaningful and deep learning experience we need to begin with the end in mind.  Well, if we backwards map from our ideal student doesn’t so much of that involve starting with the ideal teacher who will be the one in direct contact with that student?

 

The Story of Central Coast New Tech

Our journey of creating a public school with passionate and dedicated teachers and students that our community would be proud of started about five years ago and our team worked to clearly define the answer to this initial question: What do we want our students to know and be able to do by the time they graduate from Central Coast New Tech High School?  From that driving question we created and have continued to refine why we do what we do, how we do it, and the culture that supports our shared vision.  We have now achieved a major milestone by graduating our first class of students and have transitioned to a new director and welcomed many new, talented facilitators to be part of our New Tech family.  Our mix of fostering a positive, trusting and respectful school culture with technology-rich and relevant project-based instructional strategies has been proven to produce happy, healthy, and engaged students and staff members which can be seen in the results of numerous formal and informal data points from NTN.  

Inspiration for the PD Revolution

We are now beginning the next phase of our school development journey by asking ourselves a different driving question, how does my role as an individual impact the academic and cultural success of our school? The Learning Team at CCNTH, which is comprised of a small group of teacher leaders that work with our director to strategically align professional development and supports for the whole school, was deeply inspired by Tom Vander Ark’s keynote speech this past summer at the New Tech Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida.  We took his message about the power of personalized and project-based learning experiences to heart and began a series of deep conversations about the future of our school and the implications of designing structures that would support deeper learning for not just our students, but our staff.  Afterall, we are learners, too!  We are the models of what it means to be lifelong learners so shouldn’t we apply the strategies we are using for our students with ourselves…maybe even first?        

Implementing Revolutionary Adult Learning

The Learning Team then began to design a staff project around this driving question, called Showing Up: A self study of active engagement & personalized professional development at CCNTH thus embedding our project based learning structures within our own professional development.  We rolled this project out in the beginning of the year and just completed our mid-project reflections.  After hearing the staff’s feedback and thoughts, it has been so exciting to see teachers taking ownership over their own learning!  Some CCNTH teachers are completing the NTN Certified Teacher Badge Pathway, while others are furthering their learning through educational book studies.  Teachers are moving in the same direction but at differentiated levels and content areas.  We believe we can personalize professional development by using the Showing Up project as a structure and guidelines to make sure we are achieving the results we desire; continuous positive growth and improvement of our practice.

Here are some things we know that is guiding our personalized PD project:  

  • In order to design and facilitate deep learning in our classrooms, we as teacher learners need to experience deeper learning strategies with our own learning
  • Adult learners also need to be challenged and motivated to master core content, critically think and problem solve, collaborate, and drive our own learning.
  • Personalized Professional Development is one entire indicator of the Future Ready Framework.  

 

Living the Model: Reflective Comrades

 

Some of the things we still need to know:

  • Who should oversee and manage this process?
  • How will teachers be held accountable?
  • Will our district adopt structures that will support and reward Personalized Professional Development through systems that use Open Digital Badges (micro credentials) like Digital Promise (bloomboard)?
  • What are the ideal and necessary mindsets teachers today need to adopt?
  • Should we experiment with new learning approaches with adult learners before we use them in our classrooms with our students?  

 

By collaborating and giving each other the safe space to discuss our experiences as adult learners, we open ourselves up to authentic reflection and move ourselves towards defining what meaningful adult learning can look like in our school.  This is one idea for how to re-imagine teacher PD, do you have others? Do you have any tips or advice for next steps to help CCNTH move forward in our #PDRevolution?  Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.  Want more?  Come join me and Jenny Pieratt from CraftEd Curriculum at the Deeper Learning Conference in March to learn more about our journey in redefining what teacher PD could look like in our world today.