Professional Development

Six Professional Development Activities that Produce Results in the Brief Hours We Have Available

2010-11-09T08:53:00.000-08:00

Why don’t teachers use new strategies after attending professional development? A few teachers resist because they are just not ready to change. But willing, and potentially willing, teachers resist because they do not feel prepared.

Professional development often fails to help teachers prepare to succeed with new teaching strategies. A risk of failure creates anxiety, and resistance is a by-product of this anxiety. Time constraints make it difficult for professional development (PD) to help teachers meet a readiness threshold for trying something new. Nevertheless, professional development should offer a reasonable assurance of success.

While trying to find more time and resources for PD, we must find ways to be more effective within the system we have. In the brief time available, we have to solve the problem of failing to transfer new teacher learning to the classroom. Then we can focus on building a system that supports this transfer.

There is always risk trying new strategies, so there will always be a need for a little push. But we need teacher buy-in. You cannot force the best of our creative spirit, and our best ideas are needed to continually adapt and solve problems of teaching and learning. Risk has to be reduced to a level sufficient to create individual willingness, which will become a collective willingness.

There are very specific PD activities that increase the impact on teacher readiness and new strategy implementation:

1. Get the creative ink flowing: Teachers must be able to design and adapt their way to increased achievement. Exacerbated by time constraints, micro-level design feels creepy to teachers because, while being imperfect and ambiguous, it demands specificity and clarity. But like the imperfect experience of learning to ride a bike, teachers need to experience the imperfect ride of the creative process. The status quo hides in the shadow of ambiguity - process cycles from ambiguity to clarity, from shadow to light, are the cycles of improvement.

2. Coaching: A critical moment in improvement happens when the creative ink begins to flow for the first time. New questions arise from a new level of specificity. You need adequate shoulder-to-shoulder coaching to respond to the demand for answers from an initial spike in questions. This support is needed to maintain a sense of achievability. If teachers stay stuck and unsupported too long, they can naturally decide it is unachievable and not worth the effort. The cost of losing teachers here is greater than the cost of keeping them in the first place.

3. Collaboration: Coaching transitions to collaboration. Teachers must be able to share rich ideas and experience as they create and learn from each other. This collaborative wisdom is required to meet time demands as ideas and materials move through revisions more quickly compared to ideas processed in isolation. These groups must be more than just PLC’s; they have to quickly produce quality classroom-ready materials that increase a teacher’s belief that they are doing the right thing to teach their content to students, and that they are ready to succeed when they try.

4. Creating materials of practice: Teachers must quickly modify and adapt materials to increase achievement for mainstream, ELL, and SPED students. During design and planning, both materials and the process by which they are created influence a teacher’s readiness for reform. As teachers brainstorm and share ideas about materials, they individually test and fit new ideas. As materials take form and begin to define instruction, teachers develop a sense of predictability and control for trying new strategies. Teachers begin to feel ready. Failing to provide this opportunity to plan and adapt is failing to create a sense of readiness and stability for new teaching. Design helps clarify instruction and separate important from unimportant content. Research-based strategies look like something during moments of instruction in the classroom. These moments need planned. During instruction, materials help facilitate research-based, reading, and writing strategies, often simultaneously; and materials provide data for clear and immediate student feedback. In classrooms, written materials provide students opportunity to clarify and align ideas to objectives, and help students develop and articulate learning. After instruction, students have an historical record of their learning to study, build, and revise. Teachers have powerful evidence of teaching and learning to share with all stakeholders, and they have evidence for analysis.

5. Designing for analysis: A new level of clarity and purpose is achieved in the design phase if teachers know they are preparing to analyze student work samples after materials are used. During instruction, teachers observe with a more critical eye what is working and what isn’t. After instruction, the stage is set for a collaborative analysis of student work. More is reveled, revisions are made, and reform continues as teachers learn from practice around materials of practice.

6. Designing quality beginnings: It is easy to become overwhelmed with the many ideas and demands about school improvement. To make things more manageable, we need to focus on teaching leverage points. One leverage point for improving teaching is improving the beginning of a lesson or reading assignment. Small changes here can produce big results. By connecting new information immediately to the student, and injecting rich ideas at the very beginning of a lesson, all remaining time and effort spent on the topic are positively affected.

Another way to view quality beginnings is choosing how you are going to begin with people. We make choices about the actions we take based in part on whether or not something looks and feels achievable. We should look for more time to prepare teachers for change; meanwhile, we can begin classroom-focused PD activities that help teachers prepare and produce classroom results. Better teaching has a definite look in the classroom.

Achievement: We need to design it, use it, and analyze it within the system we have.

Leverage Point Series: Learning Teams

2010-11-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

The degree of risk we are willing take varies for each individual. Teachers confront a risk when considering whether or not to try a new strategy in their classroom. This risk is as serious as the individual teacher believes it to be, and choices are made accordingly.

In our business, there is not enough time for professional development, so there often is not adequate time to prepare teachers for planning and using new strategies. We expect teachers to take risks and figure some things out on their own. Some teachers will plan and tinker their way through using a new strategy, and some will continue teaching the way they know how because they don’t feel ready to do something new.

I love working with teachers over a period of days and watching them move through different phases of change. Unfortunately, however, "days" of training are too rare and hard to come by. What we have available are short blocks of time. The challenge is helping teachers in the brief time available meet a personal threshold of risk-taking sufficient to try a new research-based strategy.

One way to help teachers prepare is having them work in small groups. They need the collective wisdom to quickly solve problems and refine ideas. And we need others to help us identify "blind spots" in our teaching. But these small groups must produce tangible support for teachers that they can apply to their threshold for change and the risk it represents. These groups have to produce classroom-ready materials that facilitate better teaching.

Refine your group work so a teacher begins with specific objectives students struggle to understand, and finishes with new materials that close the instructional gap. We know what the research-based strategies are, but we need to give them form and make them ready to teach. Both process and materials influence the threshold for change; they help teachers believe it's going to be okay.

After instruction, your small group should meet again to analyze student work samples. This completes the short cycles of improvement that create a steady march toward achievement.

Leverage Point Series: Strategies That Teach Content, Reading, and Writing

2010-09-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

If there are students in your school struggling to read and write, and if you have teachers struggling to find their place supporting literacy, consider this leverage point as a starting place.

Learning to read or write is overwhelming, and teaching students to read and write can be equally overwhelming. Because of this, either teacher or student can shut down and avoid the anxiety altogether. In fact, both can develop strategies to avoid a confrontation with a literacy problem.

Five years ago, when it was time for us to walk the walk of literacy integration, when it was time for us to show evidence of this walk, I knew I had to find a way to meet teachers wherever they were on their literacy journey, and I had to show them easy ways to teach reading and writing while doing a better job of teaching their content. And time...we had to show teachers how to support literacy without adding more time.

Planning for my next summer institutes, I put out on the table strategies from Direct Instruction, Classroom Instruction That Works, reading, and writing. I was looking for common ground. I had to find overlapping strategies or concepts that could be used as a leverage point.

To make a long story short, the overlapping concept that emerged from my exercise was Main Ideas, Supporting details, and Organizational patterns (often expository). Ideas, and how those ideas are organized, can be used as a synergistic focal point to support teaching content, reading, and writing.

While designing materials to help teachers clarify and teach content that is better aligned to objectives, it is easy for us at the same time to help them create materials that support reading and writing. Teachers become more confident teaching their subject while helping students identify main ideas from the text, and then discussing with them how those ideas are organized to make or enhance meaning. Expository text becomes less of a mystery as they seperate important from unimportant, and learn tools to understand similarities and differences.

Building on learning how to find ideas and patterns in text, students get better at articulating ideas and providing supporting details. They begin to see how to organize those ideas to express a sequence of events, a cause and effect relationship, or a problem and solution. They learn how to describe an item with clarity and focus.

Rather than being overwhelmed and avoiding Six Traits, we celebrate a welding or history teacher’s commitment to teaching students two traits: Ideas and Organization. When they are ready for more traits they go there; meanwhile, we have a starting place.

Focusing on ideas and organization, teachers discover better ways to teach throughout the lesson, beginning with better ways to activate prior knowledge and build background. By the way, activating prior knowledge and building background is another big leverage point in design. Richer ideas and better understanding injected at the beginning of a lesson creates higher-order opportunities throughout.

Leverage Point Series: Materials of Practice

2010-09-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

In the right setting, teachers quickly learn how to modify and adapt materials to increase achievement for mainstream, ELL, and SPED students. Creating the environment in which teachers collaborate on these materials is a leverage point for implementing and analyzing classroom improvement.

As teachers brainstorm and share ideas about materials that teach content and create readers and writers, they have an opportunity to individually test and fit new ideas. More important, during design as materials take form and define instruction, teachers develop a sense of predictability and control for trying new strategies. Failing to provide this planning opportunity is where we fail to help teachers prepare for change. They need the rich ideas and support of working together to answer questions as they make materials classroom ready.

Once prepared, written materials payoff in classrooms as they help facilitate research-based, reading, and writing strategies. Students have materials that help them clarify objectives, ideas, and patterns as they develop images of learning. After instruction, students have an historical record of their learning to study, build, and revise.

For teachers, written materials provide instant feedback that can be shared with students. After instruction, teachers can use the student work samples generated from materials to conduct an analysis that targets more improvement and revisions. And the materials provide evidence to all stakeholders of high-quality teaching.

Consider how Wiggins and McTighe classifies evidence of learning:

1. Final products: (e.g., projects, models, exhibits)
2. Quizzes and tests
3. Public performances (e.g., presentations, role play)
4. Oral responses (e.g., questioning, interviews)
5. Observations (e.g., using observation checklist)
6. Written responses (e.g., Organizers, notes, summaries, papers, reflections)

In the chaos of our system, in place of custom written materials, we often find quickly manufactured quizzes and end-of-chapter questions. However, students struggling to read, write, and understand need more. Raising achievement requires more.

Defining similarities and differences, note-taking, summarizing, cause and effect, problems and solutions, and main ideas and supporting details, requires teacher who can adapt and modify materials to make content accessible and understandable to their students. The students of these teachers master content while becoming readers and writers.

Leverage Point Series: Get the Creative Ink Flowing

2010-09-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

All other leverage points in this series are dependent on the first: Get the creative ink flowing. Whether activating prior knowledge, comparing and contrasting, or developing an engaging curiosity in a struggling reader, if you want classroom change, you have to let teachers roll up their sleeves and plan materials that become the new change.

Rather than a teacher learning a new strategy, if we were talking about someone learning to paint, no one would argue how illogical it would be for the new painter to learn to paint without painting. We easily understand the value of the new painter mixing color, taking brush in hand, carefully loading it with paint, and feeling the pressure of the strokes on canvas. However imperfect the young painter is at applying the new strokes, feeling and seeing key elements of painting come together is invaluable to achieving a sense of predictability and control in the art and craft.

Our teachers’ canvases are their “materials of practice”, and yet we ask them to learn new teaching without working on their canvases all the time. I’m not talking about units, curriculum maps, or even lessons; I’m talking about materials of practice ready to use in classrooms that define instruction, that define a research-based moment of classroom instruction.

Sometimes a lack of time and budgets force us into sending a large group of teachers into a room so they can listen to the latest great idea; but however challenging, we must find a way to get the creative ink flowing. Like through the hand of the young painter, there is no replacing the experience of a teacher with pen in hand breathing life into a new strategy as elements of instruction are aligned in the materials they use. Quality requires this creative ink.

While designing materials (evidence of good teaching), content is clarified and aligned to objectives, flow becomes focused as teachers turn to each other to clarify ideas, teachers think through good beginning, middle, and ends of lessons. However imperfect, teachers begin to see themselves and their students succeeding in the new strategy as revisions and plans take form. They are designing predictability and control into the art and craft of teaching.

I’ve heard the best of teaching shared and explored around the development of classroom materials. Yet, too often teachers attend workshops on a new strategy, and then they are expected some time in the future to make the strategy appear in their practice. Rarely does this happen. What usually happens is the best intensions to "finish later" are quickly consumed by the relentless flow of other ideas and priorities. In the blink of an eye good intentions become faded memories.

We must support teachers creating and talking about classroom materials that are the new strategy. These materials help develop students who read, write, and think - they model to students how to comprehend, articulate, and organize clear ideas.

We have to be more relentless than our challenges; we have to make time for teachers to collaborate around materials of practice. You’ll see later that these same materials set the stage for analyzing student work samples.

Leverage Point Series: Introduction

2010-09-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

Over the next weeks, I'll post a series that highlights the most important lessons learned while providing staff development to teachers. This ongoing evolution of lessons learned targets ways to LEVERAGE results from the challenges we face.

You don't have to be in education long to recognize how time, specifically a lack thereof, influences much of what we do. This is especially true with professional development. Knowing what it takes to improve teaching, the lack of time often forces us into training situations we do not prefer.

But sometimes challenges like this help us find solutions we would not have found in more ideal situations. It is precisely the frustration created by a lack of time that makes me continually challenge and discover what is important, how certain teaching strategies reinforce each other, how some content strategies also teach reading, how all teachers can easily support writing without taking more time, how teachers can feel confident trying a new strategy in a short time, and more.

As we continue, we'll see how teacher-created "materials of practice" benefit teachers, students, and stakeholders while defining and improving instruction. Focusing on students who do not understand, we will see how designing research-based materials expand the circle of understanding in classrooms, which leaves fewer students needing individual plans. We will talk about how instructional design should first focus on the beginning of a lesson or reading assignment, because richer ideas and deeper understanding created here will create better understanding throughout. And we will talk about how every teacher can easily teach reading and writing while becoming better teachers of their own content.

It's true, there is not enough time. And trying something new usually ends up being harder than we anticipated. But we just keep trying and we find ways to get it done.

You do not have to wait to discuss ways to overcome the challenges to implementing the best of what we know about teaching and learning. Write anytime (Prestonww49@yahoo.com)

Engaging Teachers with a Streamlined Version of Understanding by Design

2009-12-07T15:15:00.000-08:00

Excitement filled the room as curriculum specialists and web designers from four universities designed the coolest unit design template. There was no shortage of ideas with valid arguments about what should be included in the final design.

Later, the excitement was quite different when I introduced this template to my first group of teachers. As the template was revealed, I could see the teachers deflate in their chairs. I'll never forget the hope in their faces turning into something more lifeless. But bless their hearts, willing to comply, they were soon going from box to box, and dropdown menu to dropdown menu, filling in the blanks. Like robots, they were filling in the blanks. I vowed to never again visit this day on another teacher. This was nine years ago.

What happened? The design model was sound, the research-based strategies were sound, and the template was way cool. The problem was that it became more about the template than their classroom.

I contrasted this day to a another day when a room of teachers was filled with laughter and creative passion; new ideas seemed endless, and energy was off the charts. The creativity was raw, innocent, intimate, and personal. That day, we were scanning and editing family photos, and shooting and editing video.

Discovering fast and easy ways to teach photo and video editing, it was easy for teachers to focus on their content. The process was so streamlined the day was less about the program and more about what mattered to the teachers that day - pictures of their families and stories they wanted to tell.

I decided I had to streamline the lesson design process and somehow get the creative ink flowing. I had to make it less about the improvement model, less about the template, less about the research, and more about what mattered to teachers - teaching and students. Somehow I had to get teachers to stand willing and open-minded in front of the canvas of instructional design. This streamlining was the most important thing I've done to engage teachers and help them find meaning, purpose, and motivation in the improvement process as they make it their own.

To do this, I began by identifying the overall goal in simplest terms; weave research-based teaching into the alignment of standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Keep in mind there has been a long evolution of strategies and materials to make this what it is today, but I'll outline the process. By the way, you'll see I'm a big fan of backwards design.

The basic process is this:

1. Have teachers select very specific objectives from which to begin. Hopefully, performance objectives that represent where students are struggling the most.

2. Brainstorm a body of evidence. Challenge the existing practice and focus on written evidence because this leverages many research-based strategies.

3. Sequence the evidence into a beginning, middle, and end of lesson. Every day has a beginning, middle, and end full of research-based opportunities.

That's it. We quickly begin a process of improvement by linking and aligning their objectives to evidence of student understanding. Teachers soon believe this is about their teaching, their students, and their classroom.

The beauty about this focus on evidence is that it begins by meeting the teachers where they are ( i.e., the evidence they already have). However, we then expand and challenge their body of evidence, which in reality is expanding how they might teach differently while clarifying and focusing instruction. We focus on their content and focus their content.

We emphasize written evidence because of its ability to facilitate research-based strategies such as pre-assessing, activating prior knowledge, similarities and differences, advanced organizers, note taking and summarizing, providing feedback, reading, and writing. Then, following instruction and classroom use, written evidence in the form of student work samples provides a means for analyzing results and measuring success.

Even imperfect at first, the hands-on experience allows teachers to begin to see and feel an alignment of standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessment. They begin to share a common language. Objectives, content, and instruction become more focused. Data finds meaning in the cycle as a tool for teachers to target curriculum for renewal that will have the most impact on achievement. Teachers begin to feel predictability and control for doing something new.

Streamlining instructional design can ignite confidence, raise expectations for the achievable, and breathe life into small, intimate, meaningful cycles of improvement. Quick, practical cycles of designing, teaching, analyzing results, and making revisions, provide purpose for collaboration and collective learning.

When a specific curriculum is open to renewal, one that defines moments of instructional time, change is more likely. Working beyond lesson plans, creating materials of practice, the best of what we already know and the best new ideas can be evaluated, tested, and fit for their proper place in a journey to increased student achievement. Conversely, without these small cycles of change, without making materials ready to teach, new ideas are quickly overwhelmed by a relentless stream of other ideas, soon fading beyond the reach of new classroom practice.

Streamlining is hard because we know so much about what works, and there will be valid arguments to do many things. It is too easy to underestimate the personal implications of change and overestimate the amount of content that can be successfully assimilated into classroom practice.

Finding Leverage Points and Measuring Classroom Success

2009-12-07T15:09:00.000-08:00

I've worked with hundreds of teachers from many districts. For too long local and state administrators, my training staff, and I were overly impressed with the progress teachers were making at our institutes. Don't get me wrong, there was good reason to be impressed. Walking around the room, you had to admire the professional dialog and collaboration while teachers created new lesson plans and materials. The problem was not recognizing and celebrating this great work, the problem was failing to focus on what happen in classrooms after the institutes.

During staff development, as we increased the connection between research-based strategies and instructional design, we increased our ability to predict positive outcomes in classrooms. But we could only predict classroom success at the institute. Those of us focused on measuring success in classrooms knew too little was being transferred from the institutes to actual teaching practice.

During my classroom follow up, again and again I would find lessons used poorly if used at all. I could attribute this failure to a lack of support at the school. And I knew this lack of support was due in part to the design of my professional development. I failed to define for administrators what successful change looked like. I failed to clearly define how administrators could and should support new teaching.

Instead, during the last day of the institutes we celebrated presentations of good lesson plans. The presentations were quite good and full of good intentions. Similarly, during the school year when lesson plans were due, school administrators celebrated the vastly improved lessons. However, this focus on lesson plans created a false hope about what was actually happening in classrooms. We assumed too much. It was convenient to assume better lesson plans led to better teaching. But this was true in only a small percentage of classrooms.

To have more of an impact on learning, we had to change our professional development design. To be more certain of the impact of PD on classroom teaching, we needed to focus beyond the lesson plans by measuring and celebrating better teaching.

This idea wasn't new. We've known this to be true through research. I did believe the research that suggested I needed to define measurable classroom outcomes, but I hesitated. We use an evidence-driven design process, and I hesitated to define what evidence looked like in an individual classroom because evidence varied for each lesson. How could we define measurable change with so many variables?

However, after another year of more impressive lessons followed by more unimpressive classroom results, I decided I somehow had to give definition to classroom success - I had to define better teaching as a result of professional development. This was a turning point.

Once I decided I had to define measurable classroom-level criteria for change, answers came rather quickly because of revisions to professional development that had already begun.

We were struggling to make better connections between instructional planning and research-based strategies. To help close this gap, we began doing panel reviews and peer reviews, and more, wherein teachers would have to describe in detail and show us that they were prepared to, for example, activate prior knowledge, teach similarities and differences, or increase reading comprehension.

Quickly, with the addition of these reviews, the importance of a particular type of evidence was made more clear. As teacher after teacher was challenged to demonstrate how they would facilitate research-based, reading, and writing strategies, written responses were demonstrated as a leverage point for better teaching. This is an important leverage point.

To further understand the impact of written responses, it is helpful to look at one way evidence is classified by Wiggins and McTighe:

1. Final products: (e.g., projects, models, exhibits)
2. Quizzes and tests
3. Public performances ( e.g., presentations, role play)
4. Oral responses (e.g., questioning, interviews)
5. Observations (e.g., using observation checklist)
6. Written responses (e.g., Organizers, notes, summaries, papers, reflections)

Of the six classifications of evidence above, written responses provide teachers the most opportunity to facilitate research-based teaching and literacy strategies as students interact with the materials in their own handwriting. Conversely, quizzes, tests, and other forms of evidence relate more to simple checks for understanding than they relate to research-based teaching and literacy integration. Before I illustrate this in more detail, it is important to note that we combined the emphasis on written responses with an emphasis on certain text structures.

More than any other text structure, high school students struggle consistently with expository text patterns. Yet these informational-based content patterns are at the heart of so much new content to which students are exposed in our world today. Using expository text structures as a leverage point for academic integration and improvement in this instructional design course, the patterns become the foundation from which we create opportunities to clarify and focus content, and to teach content more effectively using research-based teaching, reading, and writing strategies.

Note that expository patterns include Description, Enumeration, Time/Sequence, Compare/Contrast, Cause/Effect, and Problem/Solution. With these text structures in mind, a well-crafted “sequence” organizer, for example, can be used to teach steps for preparing a recipe, a science experiment, a timeline in history, a procedure in the medical field, a procedure for solving a math problem, repairing a computer, or a sequence of events for framing a wall in the construction class.

Now more thoroughly throughout the design process, teachers invent custom materials that become classroom evidence (i.e., student work samples) of research-based strategies such as Similarities & Differences, Advanced Organizers, Note taking & Summarizing, Pre-Assessing, Activating Prior Knowledge, and Reading and Writing strategies. As teachers alternate from independent to collaborative work, they produce practical tools that leverage multiple research-based strategies. This level of design makes change personal while creating a powerful sense of predictability and control for doing something new. Moreover, these materials create opportunities for teachers to provide feedback; and students generate an archive of learning from which to build upon, study, and revise.

Lying within this leverage point was an answer for measuring success. We have since refined tools and methods for analyzing student work samples. Not only did this provide evidence of classroom change, these samples provide a means of collaborative learning where teacher change happens best - in and around classrooms.

By designing professional development for classroom implementation, administrators can now look beyond curriculum maps and lessons plans to the materials used to teach. If professional development has planned for it, administrators can ask their teachers for evidence of research-based teaching, and they can ask for evidence of supporting reading and writing in every classroom. Asking for evidence of improved classroom teaching, facilitating an analysis of work samples, and sharing and celebrating results, are practical ways of offering critical system support and continuing the improvement cycle.

Professional Development and Teacher Change

2009-11-21T07:48:00.000-08:00

"If you want to improve instruction, what could be more obvious than collaborating with fellow teachers to plan, observe, and reflect on lessons." (Lewis, 2002)

We know how to improve teaching; we know what works. When we fail to have an impact in classrooms, we generally fail to create conditions that allow us to do the very things we know will increase student achievement; we fail to allow teachers time to create and design; we fail to prepare teachers for something new. Seemingly minor deatils about how to implement what works continually defines success and failure.

Consider this statement from the AERA's Summer 2005 issue of Research Points:

"To be effective, professional development must provide teachers with a way to directly apply what they learn to their teaching. Research shows that professional development leads to better instruction and improved student learning when it connects to the curriculum materials that teachers use, the district and state academic standards that guide their work, and the assessment and accountability measures that evaluate their success."

Okay, but how? I've been haunted by more failure than success when trying to apply what works in the context of many personal and system variables - in the context of current realities. Many times the failure of my professional development efforts had to do with minor details that carried major implications. Most of the challenges had something to do with, 1) underestimated the personal implications of change, and 2) overestimating the amount of content that could be assimilated into classroom practice.

Today, I know the most of our success lies within the preparation, use, and measurement of the materials teachers use to teach.

Change is personal

There are risk-takers out there, but change is hard for most people. We seek the comfort provided by predictability and control in our lives. We set goals and are motivated by what we belief we can successfully do and control. It is no different for teachers in classrooms. Change threatens predictability and control. This threat is as serious, scary, and dangerous to a sense of well being as each individual teacher believes it to be.

People who choose to engage in change events do so with the belief that predictability and control will soon be regained. Herein lies an important need that must be met with professional development.

Addressing the implications for change, professional development should create conditions full of opportunities for teachers to test and fit new teaching strategies against their current beliefs and practices. And teachers need time to create predictability and control in their plans and materials.

Designing instruction beyond the lesson plan, in the process of creating ready-to-use classroom materials, each teacher is building confidence. We need to match their threshold for risk taking with confidence building plans and materials that define quality instruction.

Further, as we define the depth and breadth of understanding for a lesson, the right materials can be measured, evaluated, and revised, creating short cycles of improvement. The right materials provide opportunities for clarifying ideas, providing feedback, taking notes, writing, and celebrating success. Materials become archives of learning to study, connect, revise, and sythesize.

Overestimating content

As you see, assimilating new ideas into classroom teaching takes time. But what is the cost of not finding the time. Consider the cost of professional development that is never implemented. Time is required to deconstruct ideas, construct ideas, and reflect; and time is required to collaborate and share ideas while making critical connections between standards, instruction, and assessment.

It is easy to overestimate the amount new content to include in professional development. When too much content is thrown at teachers at one time, the amount of work time to create materials and assimilate new ideas is reduced, and then once again teachers do not feel supported or prepared to teach a new way.

On the other hand, consider the value of teachers experiencing a new strategy, and experiencing increased engagement and understanding. Even if this begins with designing and experiencing a few moments, these quality moments become more likely to be adopted as practice and reproduced in other lessons.

Details matter. Increase a teacher's belief in their ability to design, teach, and analyze quality moments in their classroom, and you have increased their ability and motivation to create and teach a quality curriculum.