"The Deia Sanders Show" - No Talking, Please.

Post on Job-Embedded Professional Development for Teachers

 [EDITOR'S NOTE: In reply to the March 16th post, "When Job-Embedded PD Failed...Sort Of," Deia Sanders has written the following truly insightful article. I hope you enjoy her candor, but I hope even more that you may learn from it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Deia Sanders!]

Our school has been fortunate enough (though not all would call it "fortunate") to pilot the new teacher evaluation system that the state of Mississippi will be adopting in 2014. It’s lengthy, nit-picky, and some might say nearly impossible. But for students it’s changing our classes to highly engaged, thought provoking, inter-related lessons like we had not seen previously.

image courtesy of family.wikinut.com

When I began teaching I had one purpose: to get my point across. I didn’t like noise, and I loved a quiet classroom where everyone was on task and listening to me.  The following year I began to loosen up a little and became comfortable with minimum talking and sometimes even let students compare answers.  It wasn’t until my third year of teaching that I realized I could ask a question and the students could discuss and come up with more answers than I had even thought of.   Before then,  I didn’t have the confidence as a classroom teacher to hand the learning over to the students.  I thought my job was to teach.  I didn’t know the students could learn more from each other than they ever did from me.  I had no idea what the next level of teaching looked like because no one had ever shown me… and for that matter, had no idea what level of teaching I was doing.  My students always grew, so we assumed there was a great deal of learning taking place, but  we never pinpointed why or how to get more out of them.

Now we have the teacher evaluation instrument that is no longer a list of boxes where you check yes or no.  It’s a deeply comprehensive evaluation that pinpoints where you are on the continuum of great teaching.  As a coach I’ve been able to use the evaluation instrument before the principal goes in for the official evaluation. I observe and nitpick as if it’s the “real deal.” Then we sit and discuss the evidence. There are multiple reasons for every ranking, and even better, I’m able to point them to what the next level of teaching says in the instrument and give them strategies for what that looks like in their classroom.  We are seeing this awareness move willing teachers fast.  It doesn’t have to take two to three years of “The Deia Sanders Show” to figure out that’s not how students learn best. We are able to move teachers forward faster, and in the end move our students!

We have seen quiet classrooms where learning was taking place become engaging vibrant classrooms where the student’s discussion and responses have shocked us.  Classes similar to  my first couple of years, where students were learning and growing, and considered successful, have now become classes with higher order thinking and learning beyond the limits of our state’s test.

 I am excited… let me say that again… I AM EXCITED about what teacher evaluation is bringing to our kids!   And  as for our teachers… they are actually excited, too! Everyone wants to be good at their job, and this is a way of showing them what good to great looks like. I tell them its ok to score a 0 or 1 the first time, this is brand new… just don’t ever let it happen again. Then give the tools, methods, and strategies to insure they don’t teach that way again.  It has become a method for guiding and individualizing our job-embedded professional development for teachers.

Deia Sanders is a particularly dedicated master teacher and instructional coach. She supports teachers and students at a rural, Title I school in Mississippi with over 90% of students living below the poverty line. 

Mrs. Sanders shares one experience that demonstrates a simple yet dramatic way that job-embedded professional development for teachers can be applied to the classroom.  

She is a mother of two girls--Nyla, 3, and Piper, 18 months.

When Job-Embedded PD Failed...Sort Of

A discussion about job-embedded professional development for teachers and a classroom evaluation experience that I’d rather forget

It’s Jared Heath here, and I can’t believe we haven’t talked about classroom evaluations yet. In a month that focuses on job-embedded professional development for teachers, classroom observations perhaps should have been the first thing to discuss.

Deia Sanders’s blog post this week made me think a lot about classroom evaluations. Classroom evaluations are incredibly helpful—even though I found my own evaluations less than comfortable (as you’re about to read), there was always something to take away.

These days a lot of staff development coaches and other leaders have electronic walkthrough tools like Observation 360. Some schools even use fancy cameras like thereNow to do remote evals with video examples.

Me, I didn’t have that. I had a senior staff member and a piece of paper.

My Classroom Evaluation Experience

With a frame as slight as Henry Fonda’s and a manner perhaps as unassuming as Michael Gough, my staff development director would sit in the back of the room. I don’t even need to close my eyes to see his round glasses standing out in contrast to the deep creases of his 80-year-old face. Mr. “Fonda-Gough” seemed like an intelligently pleasant grandfather. Not like my grandfather, who was a physicist for Boeing and tougher than John Wayne. No, this guy was probably the kind of grandpa that would put you on his knee and slip you candy when your mom isn’t looking.

I was terrified every time he walked through the door. My students knew it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like looking into the mirror, so to speak. In fact, I would have enjoyed a mirror or a video or something to show what my lesson actually looked like. Even though I knew exactly what it looked like. There are several words to call those observed teaching sessions, most of which are vulgar and none of which I am willing to repeat here.

That poor evaluation form was covered in comments. Mr. Fonda-Gough would bend sentences around corners and bury them in every space he could find. He had a gentleman’s handwriting, one that seemed heavily influenced, though not fully perfected, by his wife’s impeccable penmanship.

After the lesson, he would stand six inches away and squint through his glasses at me. I would always expect an aged voice full of whispers when he spoke, but apparently his voice never aged past his thirty-third birthday. Six inches away so that he could see and with a strong voice that rattled my lungs, he would deliver his assessment. Upon finishing, he would hand me the sheet full of gentleman handwriting, give me a well-practiced smile and “good job,” and leave. That’s when I could breathe again.

But Enough about Me…What About You?

Of course Mr. Fonda-Gough had the best of intentions, and he did the best that could with the tools that we had. But after reading Deia Sanders’s post, I couldn’t help but wish that I had had more actionable strategies. I’m not sure that we needed the fun technology—but maybe it would have been a blessing.

How do classroom evaluations go for you? Have you found a more successful method? What do you really want out of job-embedded professional development for teachers (whether you’re a teacher or an admin)?

Job-Embedded PD: To Sleep, or Not to Sleep...

Deia Sanders is a particularly dedicated master teacher and instructional coach. She supports teachers and students at a rural, Title I school in Mississippi with over 90% of students living below the poverty line. 

Mrs. Sanders shares one experience that demonstrates a simple yet dramatic way that job-embedded professional development for teachers can be applied to the classroom.  

She is a mother of two girls--Nyla, 3, and Piper, 18 months.

So many times we bring in speakers and trainers, and travel far and wide to hear and receive the best professional development for our needs. Then we return from the trip, head back to our classrooms with the best intentions of implementation, but in the end we can’t find time to fit in something new, bury the materials under papers,  or fail to fully implement the full realm of training we just received… either way, we aren’t getting our money’s (and time) worth.

Mendenhall Jr. High choir receives Superior rating.

It Has to Apply to the Teacher First

The key to fully implementing professional development trainings is follow-up. And so many times this is nearly impossible simply due to the time and money invested in the initial round of training. And we know time and money are not things educators have a lot of.  Because of this, there has been a move for more schools to implement instructional coaches—a person whose goal is to train and then implement and coach side by side with a teacher on an on-going basis the strategies and best practices.  This has been an exciting and wonderful shift in our PD for both me and my staff. 

Drool Spill Clean-Up, Aisle 3...

But what job-embedded professional development for teachers look like? It changes every day and with every teacher, but here is what it looked like one day:

Earlier in the year I was working with a new teacher. We had decided to video her class and review her teaching because the students were telling her they were “bored to death.”  As I sat and watched the class, it almost appeared as if there was a carbon monoxide leak. The students’ heads were dropping one by one on their desks quickly followed by closed eyes and then the rumble of snores. The teacher asked me a question, and without even thinking I changed from coach to teacher-mode and began moving around the room and discussing the topic with the students. All of their little heads popped up and they began to discuss, share, and get excited about the lesson. As soon as I sat down and the teacher went back to lecturing and once again her audience hit the proverbial snooze.

When the teacher reviewed her lesson she was filled with excitement.  Although she was disappointed in her presentation, she was enthusiastic to see the shift in her students’ motivation when the class turned from lecture to discussion, and the simple change from standing at the front to “working the room.” We were able to pinpoint simple techniques that we could focus on to add engagement to her classroom.

PD Isn't Just About Teachers

We didn’t have to spend money or remove her from her students for a training that may or may not meet her needs. We were able to set personalized goals to meet her where she was both physically and professionally and move her step by step to the next level of performance. 

Not only is it huge for our teachers, but it’s an enormous benefit to our students as well, because we no longer have to remove their teachers to train them.  Because job-embedded PD is ongoing and catered to the individual needs of the teachers, we are seeing teachers move to more effective classrooms faster than before.  Our students are now getting lessons worth waking up for!  In an age of differentiated instruction, it’s almost amusing that it took so long to actually do that with professional development and our educators. 

March, Frameworks, and Videos

Hi, everyone! It's Jared Heath--the man behind the scenes, as it were. I wanted to let you know about a few changes going on. Let's start with the free conference registration:

Free SIIS 2012 Registration

Our guest bloggers for the month of March will receive free registration for SIIS 2012. No catches. No gimmicks. You get registration to the summit worth $395 for only a few thoughts--when was the last time someone paid you that much for a few hundred words?

The theme is "Job-Embedded Professional Development for Teachers--How to Apply PD to the Classroom." Maybe you have found simple methods of driving a concept home, or you have re-engineered your classroom. Perhaps you have your own form of PD that works particularly well for you. Whatever you're doing, tell us about it in a blog post! You can email me your post at jared.heath@schoolimprovement.com.

Job-Embedded Professional Development for Teachers

Starting on Monday, this blog and the Weekly Video Blog on schoolimprovement.com will begin focusing on the theme ""Job-Embedded Professional Development for Teachers--How to Apply PD to the Classroom." We want to know what you are doing in your classroom that breaks up the norm and introduces education in the most effective ways for your students.

Do you host webinars between classrooms for a joint teaching session? I always wished that I could have a joint history and science class--the Chinese dynasties are interesting, and chemical reactions were supposed to be interesting (I'm not really a science guy), but how fun would it have been to study the development of black powder in connection with Chinese warfare? Or to study math and art together as physics students explain certain principles and art students show how to mold clay on  the wheel? How about studying Jane Eyre in conjunction with health sciences and the spread of tuberculosis or the study of psychology and mental health?

So what's working for you? What's not? Let's talk about it right here.

Free Monthly Webinar

On March 22, School Improvement Network will host a webinar by  Learning 360 Framework trainers that talks about building structure around your professional development! Whether your district uses a framework, needs a framework, or employs other methods of professional development, this webinar will help you refine the training process and structure learning for both students and teachers.

Free PD 360 Videos

Don't forget to check the Weekly Video Blog every Monday! You can watch videos straight from the PD 360 library for free. Check out past videos that are there for your viewing pleasure. It's a small sampling of what PD 360 has to offer, and we want to help in any way we can.

Monday is the day--I look forward to what this month has to offer!

Why Job-Embedded Professional Development Is So Effective

Research has shown that job-embedded professional development, when conducted correctly, is more effective than traditional PD because it better addresses the needs of adult learners. In job-embedded PD, educators work on concepts or initiatives more than once, making the learning more effective and longer lasting.