Our second in person meeting gave us a lot of opportunities to test the meeting structure that we decided upon at our first meeting.
Meeting participants:
Chioke, Ed, Thomas
Topics:
Our anchoring Papers were:
- Developing Great Teaching Lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development, Teacher Development Trust
- The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft
We followed this up with:
- 3 Ways Administrators Can Nurture Teacher Growth, Melissa Roy
- Smoothing the Way for Change, Beth Holland
Meeting Begins:
Participants began by reviewing our anchoring texts.
After reviewing the papers, the communal threads and understandings could be defined as:
A. Validation that teachers can continue to improve and develop, that “old dogs can learn new tricks”.
B. Teacher lack of motivation or growth may be linked to school culture or lack of mentoring.
C. Teacher buy in is critical in development.
Second Phase:
(Sectional/subjects PLC sessions, connecting the topic of discussion to the experiences and specific knowledge of the sections/subjects.)
We applied knowledge of our subject and sections to the paper specifically to our context.
We discussed:
I. Examples of constantly developing teachers in our schools and how they positively contribute.
II. Personality traits that innovative teachers espouse
+resilience, enthusiasm, solution driven, growth mindset,
– leadership, bossiness, ego-driven were mentioned as detrimental
III. Which papers we personally preferred and connected with the most:
Ed: The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft
Thomas: The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft
Chioke: Smoothing the Way for Change, Beth Holland
Third Phase (skipped with just 3 participants)
PLC sessions divided by randomizer to allow intersubject and intersection discussion and digestion of topic material
Fourth:
Community collaboration, with applying topics towards our educational goals, following a reciprocal feedback cycle.
Thomas: Hopes to take conclusions from these papers to his next school (congratulations Thomas!) and that these papers should be reconnected to development and discussions in future PLC meetings, as it can form an excellent pre-requisite thinking activity or agreed-upon way to approach our thinking, namely that we can all improve.
Chioke: Teacher buy-in and being an (empowered) agent of change is vital to reforming and improving a school. Teachers are the engine that drives the school forward, and revitalizing teachers needs to be the focus of any school that seeks to improve or even to maintain.
Ed: Further research into the best metrics, stratagems, and methods to both gauge and effect change is needed. That being said, the idea that teachers do not plateau (without wanting to or giving up) is a powerful one that comes as a relief. The idea of someone’s best professional years being in either the middle of their career, or worst, at the start, is incredibly bleak. This idea of continual improvement should be a starting point of each PLC, or professional development. Furthermore, administrators should invest time and effort into determining what factors in their schools are demotivating teachers, or contributing to any sense of a “plateau”.