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March 2009

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From:
"Michael H. Siegel" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Teaching Breakfast List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:22:37 -0400
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Thank you, Jim, for sending this.
 
Michael

________________________________

From: Teaching Breakfast List on behalf of Jim Greenberg
Sent: Mon 3/30/2009 1:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reminder of Next Teaching Breakfast (and a Different Way to Think About Professional Development)



TBers,

A reminder that the next Teaching Breakfast Group meeting with be April 2 at
8 am in Fitzelle 110.  Steve Perry will be joining us for a discussion about
NESSE and student engagement.  Please join us (and invite a friend).

Jim Greenberg


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.


The posting below looks at three key principles behind a new look at faculty
professional development.  It is #42 in the monthly series called Carnegie
Foundation Perspectives. It is by Pat Hutchings, vice president of the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  Among her many
responsibilities is her deep involvement in Strengthening Pre-collegiate
Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a joint initiative of Carnegie and
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to address basic skills education
in 11 California community colleges. This work involves campuses in
sustained, reflective, evidence-based ways to improve the teaching and
learning of underprepared students. A number of the SPECC reports, essays,
tools, and products from this three-year project are available at:
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/specc/ The Foundation invites
your response at: [log in to unmask] © 2008 The
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 51 Vista Lane,
Stanford, CA 94305 Reprinted with permission.



         Tomorrow's Academic Careers


  A Different Way to Think About Professional Development

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 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.

Most important, certainly, is information at the classroom level, generated
through the regular routines of teaching and learning: student performance
on exams, projects, papers, problem sets, office consultations, and grades.
This kind of information is at the heart of powerful feedback loops. But an
important lesson of SPECC's work is the power of viewing classroom data
through the lens of larger institutional trends and patterns. Most campuses
have a good deal of such information: data about student demographics,
enrollment, retention, and the like. What's needed are occasions to raise
questions that fall into what might be described as the "missing middle"-the
gap between information from individual classrooms and institutional data in
the form of big-picture, aggregate trends and patterns. The power of
focusing between and connecting these two is nicely illustrated by a story
from Los Medanos College where the Developmental Education Committee
realized that their efforts to reshape curriculum and pedagogy needed to be
informed by evidence faculty members did not have, including-and
especially-patterns of student course taking and success beyond the level of
individual courses. The Committee approached the Office of Institutional
Research, and the two groups worked together to develop a data-gathering
plan that would address the questions faculty wanted to understand more
fully. The result was a report tracking students from pre-collegiate courses
in English and math into the first level of transfer English and math
courses. This was not the kind of information Institutional Research staff
members were in the habit of preparing; nor was it a perspective that
faculty were accustomed to seeing. But it turned out to provide a powerful
rationale for redoubling efforts that keep students moving through the
developmental sequence without stopping out.

Fortunately, the three principles proposed here are becoming increasingly
commonplace; some readers will recognize them from Carnegie's work on the
scholarship of teaching and learning. But it's worth remembering that this
different way of thinking about professional development really is
different-maybe even radical-predicated as it is on an understanding of
teaching not as a matter of individual expertise employed in the privacy of
one's own classroom but as a set of practices that have and need a social
and organizational context. Seen through this lens, "professional
development" should not be a separate or special occasion but an integral
feature of the way educators do their work everyday. What matters in such
work is who talks with whom, how often, with what information in the
picture, and around what shared questions, processes, and goals. These turn
out to be hard things to change, which is why having new models-like the
ones developed on the SPECC campuses-is so important.

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