The Monthly Recharge - March 2017, The Future of Professional Development

Professional learning at its roof-raising best
Leadership+Design


"We design experiences for the people who create the future of teaching and learning."

 

In our work, we build capacity, create conversations, and make connections.

 

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Plan your professional learning adventures with L+D in 2017. 


Coming this Summer . . .
4D Studio: Design. Dare. Disrupt. Dream.
June 26-29, 2017
The Steward School/Bryan Innovation Lab, Richmond, VA



Wonder Women!
July 10-13, 2017
Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA



November 5-8, 2017
La Fonda on the Plaza, NM
L+D Board of Directors

Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy
Jump Associates, CA

Lee Burns
Headmaster
McCallie School, TN

Sandy Drew 
Non-profit Consultant, CA

Matt Glendinning (Secretary)
Head of School
Moses Brown School, RI

Trudy Hall (Board Chair)
Interim Director of High School
Forest Ridge School, WA
 
Brett Jacobsen (Vice Chair)
Head of School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian, GA
 
Barbara Kraus-Blackney (Treasurer)
Executive Director
Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools (ADVIS), PA 

Karan Merry
Retired Head of School
St. Paul's Episcopal School 
 
Carla Robbins Silver (ex-officio)
Executive Director
Leadership+Design, CA

Mary Stockavas (Treasurer)
Director of Finance
Bosque School, NM

Matthew Stuart
Head of School
Caedmon School, NY

Brad Weaver
Head of School
Sonoma Country Day School, CA

Paul Wenninger 
Retired Head of School
Professional Learning: The Ultimate Road Trip
Carla Silver, Executive Director, Leadership+Design
Greetings!  

As we continue to explore the Future of School this year, we couldn't possibly refrain from an issue entirely devoted to professional growth.  From the beginning, Leadership+Design has aspired to offer professional learning that felt different and that was less informational than inspirational, that was not transactional but transformational.

We continue to bring  PD to schools and individuals in many different venues, but here is the truth - it has never been easier and more exciting to be a learner.  Ten years ago, if I had wanted to learn something new, professionally or personally, I had a couple of choices in front of me. I could attend a class, seminar or workshop.  Or I could read a book or listen to an audiotape or watch a video tape.  Today, I have access to learning 24/7, and I do everything I can to take full advantage of my options.  Here are five things I personally do daily that I could not do even five years ago.

1. I sign up for online classes and MOOCS - from design to programming to economics to graphic design, I have countless, free courses at my disposal. Really good classes, taught by adroit experts - many of whom are Ivy League superstars.  My next curated learning experience - Steve Martin's Master Class!

2. I'm a podcast junkie.  As a runner, I make full use of the long run to dive into podcasts.  And while, yes, "Missing Richard Simmons" is a fun diversion, I spend most of the time on my Sunday runs listening to shows like Freakonomics Radio, TED Radio Hour, and the Tim Ferris Show. "How to be More Productive."  "How to Be Great at Just about Anything."  "How To Make Hard Decisions". "An interview with Corey Lewandowski." I even learned from one podcast that I have literally rewired my brain listening to podcasts. Very meta.

3. Social Media  If I want to engage with other like-minded educators with good ideas and solid resources, Twitter is my jam. Through a limitless source of interesting articles, conversations and connections on topics, both explicitly and tangentially related to the world of school and education, I keep up to date on the 
 
4. YouTube.  If I need to know HOW to do something, I can learn it here. There is not a tutorial or class that doesn't exist on youtube.   Give me a set of VR goggles and I'll be under the hood of my car by 2018.

5. Google.  It's so easy to take for granted the ease of discovery and pure access to information that Google provides.  When someone tells me that we " have always had books and encyclopedias" I smile and nod but wonder when this person is going to accept the fact that access to knowledge is unprecedentedly ubiquitous.

So how does this change or reframe the kind of professional development that schools should offer faculty and staff each year?  In my opinion, this changes everything that schools should do for teachers (and yes for students too. . . but this issue is about professional learning). 

If you are offering on-site professional learning for your adult community,  I offer you four criteria that will make it worth your time and your dollars AND will make learning feel like the adventure it is meant to be. The future of professional learning and the NOW of professional learning rests in these four rules.

1. Give participants personal choice.  Leadership+Design team members are often asked to come and deliver a three-hour or one-day professional development workshop for teachers.  ALL teachers. We can do it. And we think we actually do a pretty good job engaging a large group of faculty and staff.  Our workshops are highly experiential, upbeat, fun, customized and usually well-received - but not always by everyone. Sometimes we can actually see the air get sucked out of a room by an unenthusiastic staff member and it deflates those who are really engaged.  It's caused us to wonder - is the "forced march" into any professional development experience, including L+D's own dynamic human-centered design experiences, really ever necessary? What if we gave faculty and staff more choices in the on-site professional learning experiences, allowing them to pick what is most interesting to them at different times?  Consider giving a small, passionate group deep training and then let their enthusiasm be contagious.  If every faculty member has that opportunity, imagine the viral learning that might occur.  
 
2. Maximize the HUMAN experience.  If professional learning does not maximize the face to face time, and build teams and strong relationships, then we are missing the point. Onsite professional learning must build capacity, but it also needs to take full advantage of being human together. Professional development days are one of the few times we all take a break from the business to be together and present with one another. Make it collaborative, make it messy.  Deepen human connections.  Get humans talking to one another.  Leverage the discomfort and love that happens when people get together in person and have to navigate diverse values, motivations, and perspectives.  Allow that human experience to be a learning laboratory. I am by no means a luddite.  I love my tech more that anyone, but what if your PD days were email, phone and text free and people just had to talk to each other like the olden days.  Despite our suggestion about choice above, we also know there might be times when you do want the whole professional community to be together in a learning posture, but if that is the case, don't lose sight of the most fundamental benefit of being together - deepening relationships and human interaction.

3. Make it ongoing. Like all vaccinations, a shot in the arm is inherently a good thing, but without boosters, the effect is limited and ineffective.  If you bring someone on-site in August  to work with teachers (preferably a small group) and never see them again, you have had a vaccine with no boosters. Multiple touches that go progressively deeper will give your professional learning staying power.  The people at Leadership+Design see ourselves as collaborators and partners with schools and we know we have only short term impact in one day, and we know that with 3 or 4 experiences, we can deepen the work and the impact with a school community, especially if the work is connected to a school's mission or strategic direction - which brings me to the final criteria.

4. Connect professional learning to mission and strategic initiatives. Schools have gotten more intentional about their professional learning, but I still get plenty of calls mid-year.  "We are looking for some PD. We want to do design thinking with our faculty. What can you provide us in three hours?" Once again, this feels more transactional than transformational.  The best PD doesn't just teach a new skill, it helps build culture and it should amplify mission and help to achieve a strategic goal.  For some schools, developing design thinkers might actually be aligned with a strategic vision.  Sometimes a school has another big question it is seeking to answer around assessment, the use of time, space, inquiry-based instruction, admissions or hiring. We can help schools answer those messy, ambiguous questions AND provide faculty and staff with the habits, mindsets and skill sets of designers - but not in three hours.  But maybe in 3-4 carefully curated days.

These four major criteria for extraordinary and transformational
PD inspired us to create the NextQ. This program, designed to feel like a road trip for a school community, is a four touch (minimum) experience for schools that supports a community throughout a whole year as it pursues a
 compelling question. This experience might be big and broad enough to engage the entire professional community, or it might be best for a small team.  The NextQ builds both
individual capacity, as participants develop skills and mindsets of design thinkers, collaborators, communicators and problem solvers,  and institutional capacity, as the school moves closer to developing an answer and solution to its next big question.  You can check out the whole program here.  Be sure to watch the short video that explains the details (created for us by Conor McArdle, Assistant Director of Multimedia Strategy and Production  Marketing and Communications at The Peddie School).  Questions you might explore with your professional community or a small team of designers:
  • How might we develop a greater professional culture of experimentation, risk taking, adventure and joy?
  • How might we reimagine time and space that support more learner-centered experiences?
  • How might we more provide more avenues for students to develop individual passion and purpose?
  • How might we reimagine the admissions process to be more inclusive and reflective of our program?
  • How might we redesign the hiring process to attract and identify candidates who are strong collaborators and creative thinkers?
All of us at L+D are passionate about designing learning experiences for the people who are creating the future of teaching and learning (it's actually our mission), so come learn with us - this summer at Wonder Women or 4D Studio, in Santa Fe in November,at one of our Bootcamps next year,  or onsite in your own school - maybe as a NextQ School.

Warm Regards,

Carla Silver
Executive Director
Leadership+Design
Networks, Feet, and Bridges: Putting Learners at the Center of Professional Development
Greg Bamford, Head of School, Watershed School
What's the future of professional development? I think we should reframe that question, and ask ourselves: what is the future of learning environments? After all, we should respect educators by putting the same thought into their experiences that we put into student learning.

Here's what happens at schools of the future: learning is relevant and personal to the learner. It's developed through hands-on, authentic activities that bridge the gap between theory and practice. It's constructed through dialogue, where each learner can build on the ideas of others.

The future of professional development, similarly, is real-world and learner-centered. But compare those principles to the last professional development event you went to: the norm is death by PowerPoint and rows of interlocking chairs facing a speaker.

While I enjoyed the recent NAIS conference in Baltimore, the best parts are always the chance encounters that happen in convention center hallways and hotel foyers. It's why I pay too much for drinks in hotel bars after the formal sessions I'm ostensibly there to see.

With that in mind, I offer three principles for future-focused professional development:

Design for chance encounters. When the Gates Foundation designed its new headquarters in downtown Seattle, they built deliberately wide stairwells in the hope that it would allow conversations between team members who run into each other on their way to different silos. This is the "happy hour principle" - one reason the shared spaces at a conference, like lobbies and bars, are the most provocative.

When we designed Traverse at Watershed School, we built on this design insight: what if we extended the interstitial times between formal sessions, making chance encounters between other activities a design principle? We scaled our event at a level (no more than 100 attendees) where everyone could have a meaningful connection with other participants they had never met. Salon dinners, happy hours, and yoga sessions alternate with organized, hands-on expeditions. Home groups allow newly formed cohorts to debrief at designated spaces. The result is an experience where people leave with new collaborators.

Honor the law of two feet. One of the best parts of the last NAIS conference was the speed innovation session, where eight schools presented 15 minute mini-sessions on core innovations at their school. Like an unconference or edCamp, participants could see what was happening and go wherever felt most relevant. They could stay for the whole mini session or easily pivot if the topic wasn't what they expected. This radically de-centered professional development allows for flexibility in the moment - and also allows you to feature the many different kinds of expertise in your community.

We have recently begun using this format in Head's meetings at the Association of Colorado Independent Schools (ACIS), where I serve on the Professional Development Committee. By providing a container for adult learners to go wherever feels most relevant, you can reduce planning time while increasing engagement and satisfaction.

Mind the gap. Here's what the gap between theory and practice looks like in professional development: teachers shaking their head as they exit, telling themselves: we just can't do that at our school.

Just as the debrief is a regular part of expeditionary learning at Watershed School, great professional development includes time for reflection. This means unpacking the emotional impact of an experience, thinking about how we can transfer ideas to different grade levels and contexts, and creating an action-plan with your team. It's not enough to encourage people to debrief once they get home: once the plane lands back home, everyone's inbox explodes, and it's too late.

At Leadership+Design events like the 4D Studio coming this summer, we create time for team cohorts to think through transfer and make a plan they can share with others. As John Dewey is apocryphally reputed to have said, we do not learn from experience; we learn by reflecting on experience.

Adults deserve to be honored as learners, and the same intentional design that drives our work with students should drive our work with colleagues. Let's all step away from the slide deck, put educators at the center of the experience, and create the dynamic environments that spark action and learning for our teams.
Create. Practice. Do. 
Crystal Land, Head of School, Head Royce School
In his recent TedX talk, Dave Mochel, mindfulness coach, talks about the importance of simply practicing something we want to do more of in our lives. He reminds us that there is a tremendous benefit to being still, to paying attention and to practicing how we want to be. In his talk, Dave asks: What are your practicing right now? He does not ask, what's on your "to do" list? What are you thinking about for tomorrow's class? But, what are you practicing right now?
 
How does this connect to the future of professional development? I have attended more conferences than I can possibly count. Hundreds most likely. I love conferences, just as I love being a student. You have probably been to many of these same conferences. Subject area conferences, tech meetings, national and regional confabs, local benchmark groups, and more. I generally am engaged and can find some piece of compelling content to take back to my school and colleagues. The format is consistent: I listen to the experts; I take notes; I absorb the ideas, and then I return--with all kinds of ideas--to my community to share.
 
Imagine, though, if we could create professional development experiences that go beyond content acquisition and are mission-
driven and require immersion. Imagine if, like the renowned arts educator and philosopher from Columbia Teacher's College Professor Maxine Greene, we could approach every professional development experience with the "wide awakeness" and imagination she so passionately embraced. Professor Greene said, " A teacher who is in charge of his own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to be in charge of their own." Greene believed the arts, in particular, and experiential learning, in general, have outcomes that outlast traditional learning. Her research showed that authentic assessments, such as performances, are the ideal route to engagement and learning.
 
Both Dave Mochel and Maxine Greene set the foundation for a future where professional development is about the inner life of the educator and answers the key questions:  who we are and what type of journey do we hope to engage in? It's not that content is unimportant, but being "in charge of our own freedom" is central to a memorable professional development experience that ultimately changes our perspective. If we truly want to model 21st century learning to our students, seeking experiential, growth-oriented professional development is the best way to do this.
 
I believe educators and leaders are searching for alternative kinds of professional development, ones where we are doing more by practicing skills that help us align our internal selves with the external demands of our work. In a cohort called, "Women Rising," a Bay Area Leadership group for independent school women educators, participants actively practice being a leader. This year, for example, each member of our group was tasked with delivering a five minute professional talk on any topic of choice. Think Toast Masters. Think mini Ted Talk. There were no restraints on topics but plenty of discussion on how to deliver the remarks all prompted by our year's reading  of Presence by Amy Cuddy. Participants spent hours preparing remarks on a wide range of topics from educational to inspirational that were then delivered to our cohort. As listeners, we actively listened and provided feedback. The goal: a good and safe place to practice. The outcome: a powerful performance by each woman.
 
In L+D's summer Wonder Women conference, participants have the same opportunity to create, practice and do. Prompted by a real world case study with a placement firm on innovative strategies to increase women candidates for leadership positions, design groups engaged in a process to gather information and research, develop models, test and then present prototypes to a formal panel of experts. They created; practiced and then...performed. The stakes were low enough to encourage risk-taking and high enough to encourage high fidelity models that demonstrated refined leadership competencies.
 
As a facilitator for each of these groups, I can honestly say I came away with as much or more than I gave. I was not the "expert," but a coach and a supporter who offered feedback and insights along the way. After last summer's Wonder Women formal presentations, I gained appreciation for the risks the women took, and the pride and confidence they gained from the experience. I left with reminders and affirmation of what I hope to practice each day as an intentional, mission driven leader.
 
Following these two remarkable experiences, I'd ask all of us to consider:
  • What kind of internal work can you practice each day to be the leader you strive to be?
  • What if you had the opportunity to give a Ted Talk next week? What topic would you spend your 15 minutes creating?
  • What kind of innovative prototype would you develop to answer a pressing question at your school or organization?
 
The future of professional development is embracing those real world moments where you can "be in charge of your own freedom" and create, practice, and do. As Dave Mochel says, "Be careful what you practice, for you are going to get better at it."
 
How Might We Liberate the Workshop Day?
Embracing equity, bias, and professional development
Dan Ryder, English teacher, Mt. Blue Campus, Farmington, ME
By and large, educators endure.

We sit through countless slide deck presentations, all seemingly built from the same template, each stacked with bullet points read aloud word-for-word, graphs and charts too small to discern, images pixelated and watermarked beyond clarity, broken video links embedded improperly and all of it tarnished by liberal application of comic sans.

We hear false empathy in the words, "I know this is boring and we'll be taking a break in just a couple of minutes after I share this next piece with you," and the empty promise in the assurances, "There will be ample time for questions and answers at the end."

We watch colleagues rise in oh-my-aching-back unison, stretch for a two-minute reprieve, before lowering back into the pedagogical malaise of a sit-and-get session in a too-cold room.

With so much written about new models of professional development and so many resources available for little to no cost, one has difficulty imagining an administrator or professional development team hires an uninspiring lecturer or disengaging facilitator on purpose.  It would seem only a deliberate act of negligence, or devastating case of apathy, could hire a maudlin, ill-prepared talking head more concerned with agendas and handouts than application and authenticity. Yet these experiences persist throughout the edusphere -- pre-K to higher ed -- despite educators expressing frustration, if not outright disdain, for such approaches.   

With teaching shortages on the rise and educator morale on the decline, ineffective professional development experiences run an even greater risk of unintended consequences.  While it might mean a lost afternoon for some, or a disappointment for others, educators who feel deeply invested in their own improvement may well feel marginalized when their needs remain unmet time and time again.  These are often the educators most frustrated with the status quo, committed to finding solutions, and seeking growth opportunities for themselves and their students.  Yet these individuals often feel confined and isolated, unheard and undervalued.     

Having now vilified those who would organize less personalized professional development experiences, and victimized those who receive more traditional professional development, I would call for a pause.  How might we adopt an alternative perspective?  What if these leaders bring exactly the sort of speakers that meet their own needs? What if these delivery models represent a sincere expression of altruism?  What if their belief systems place a premium value on efficiency and consistency over exploration and customization?  Perhaps the problem is not so much a lack of empathy for their users, but a limited self awareness of biases informing these designs and the impact those biases have on disaffected educators.

At SXSWedu 2017, representatives from Oakland's  National Equity Project and Stanford d.School's K12 Lab Network co-facilitated an exceptional workshop on a new posture in design thinking, coined "liberatory design."  Intended primarily for use in design challenges related to marginalized populations, liberatory design inserts a new phase in the d.School's celebrated design process.  Before diving deep into empathy for the user, designers look inward, taking inventory of their own identities and biases that may well impact the design process.  As equity designers progress through the other phases, they take deliberate "equity pauses," moments to calibrate, account for bias, before progressing.  Where so often design thinking calls for a distance from self, as objective a focus on user needs as possible, liberatory design instead seems to call upon a different tact: owning those biases, becoming aware of their influence, and leveraging self in the service of others.   

There already exist some emerging professional development structures that embrace balanced principles of equity, unity and individualization.  EdCamp, the popular unconference format, calls for user-generated workshops and sessions, where those in attendance decide upon the scope and sequence for the day.
PD that gets participants on their feet.
 Participants rule with their feet, moving from session to session as their needs and interests require, whether in the middle of a time block or no.  Anyone in attendance might lead a session and in the cases where no leader emerges, a critical conversation may well suffice.  

Flipped and asynchronous professional development allows fordeeper dives into passion points for educators, more self-regulated pacing, and opportunities to access materials, information and resources not readily available within a building, district or institution's confines.  Well curated selections and careful attention to the instructional design strategies evident help educational leaders identify online webinars and courses of most likely value to faculties.

And the growth of social media professional learning networks most not be understated.  Providing time and space for colleagues to cultivate robust PLNs, to assist one another in the formation and traction of these spaces, and to engage in dialogue on the various platforms has potential for tremendous value.  Building the network means nothing if it is to merely collect digital dust.  Employing the network in the service of targeted professional development could well prove transformative.  

Design thinking has come under criticism in some circles for failing to engage the user in the design process, creating something of a paradoxical dynamic that calls for authentic empathy while establishing victim and savior statuses.  And in the case of equity work, this has the potential to perpetuate an otherness that is the impetus for the design challenge in the first place.  While it may not call for direct collaboration between designer and user, liberatory design seems a noble attempt to vault some of these barriers to authentic solutions.

Educational leaders may well want to dive deeper into liberatory design as it may well be the catalyst in the professional development shift from endurance to engagement.   
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Dan is a high school English teacher by title, idea wrangler, design thinker, improviser and educator by practice.  He has taught nearly 20 years at Mt. Blue Campus in Farmington, Maine. A co-founder of EdCamp Western Maine, member of the moderating teams of #DTK12chat, a social media-based design thinking in education community, and #edchatme, a teaching in Maine community, he can be found on social media @WickedDecent.  He's co-author with Amy Burvall of Intention: Critical Creativity in the Classroom, from EdTechTeam Press.


               

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