Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - August 22, 2012 - S6

Common Core
Sparks
Learning
For Teachers
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5
themselves having to change their
delivery systems in preparation
for the standards.
“Many states are moving away
from the ‘train the trainer’ model
and trying to have more direct
communications with teachers,
because the message either gets
diluted or changed otherwise,”
says Carrie Heath Phillips, the
program director for the Council
of Chief State School Officers’
common-standards efforts.
Delaware has reached every
teacher in the state directly
through online lessons that lay
out the core shifts in the standards
from the state’s previous
content expectations.
Now, state officials are hard at
work building an infrastructure
for deeper, more intensive work.
The state has organized two
“cadres” of specialists, one in
reading and one in math, who
are fleshing out the core expectations
at each grade level, outlining
how each standard is “vertically
linked” to what will be taught in
the next grade, and crafting model
lessons. They’re also constructing
professional-development “modules”
for high-demand topics, such
as text complexity.
“We’ve had other standards,
but different interpretations of
what they meant,” said Marian
Wolak, the director of curriculum,
instruction, and professional development
for the state. “We want
this to be very clear and distinct
about how the standard applies at
that grade level and what the expectations
are for that standard.”
Based on the cadres’ work, every
the curriculum, it’s creating opportunities
for teachers new
to the district to observe those
“demonstration classrooms” at
work.
The Durand district’s new
teacher-evaluation system has
helped to make the common
standards real, says Gretchen
Highfield, a 3rd grade teacher.
And while teachers are understandably
a bit nervous about
the system, it’s also causing
them to rethink long-standing
practices.
district will have a clearinghouse
of resources for professional development
and be able to tap a local
specialist for additional training,
Ms. Wolak said.
Utah doesn’t have the benefits
of Delaware’s limited geography.
Its strategy has been building
the capacity of a critical mass of
trained educators in each district,
and then gradually shifting professional-development
responsibilities
to the local level.
In summer 2011, the state
trained about 120 facilitators—
teachers nominated from the
field with a track record of high
student achievement in their
subject—in pedagogical content
knowledge and adult-learning
theory. Then, those teachers facilitated
“academies” in ELA and in
6th and 9th grade math for their
colleagues, which were given at 14
locations in the state, according to
Ms. Dixon, the state’s director of
teaching and learning.
All teachers attending the ses-
sions come voluntarily and are expected
to have read the standards.
Afterwards, “the expectation is
that both the facilitators and
the attendees are back in their
classrooms, using the standards,
working with the standards, sharing
student work, and studying it
in [staff meetings], so their colleagues
are getting second-hand
experience,” Ms. Dixon says.
Additional academies are being
set up; the state estimated about
20 percent of its teachers attended
one as of last spring.
Rethinking Practices
For districts, the professionaldevelopment
challenge is in
finding the place to begin. Those
districts apparently the furthest
along in the process are integrating
the training with successful
efforts already in place.
The Springdale, Ark., district
has focused on providing teachers
with enough time to sort through
the standards and observe some
of them in practice. It’s given
teachers up to four days off to
develop units aligned to the common
core and encouraged teams
to discuss student work samples,
or “anchors,” to help inform their
understanding of expectations
aligned to the standards.
The district has recently focused
on training teachers in
grades 3-8 in math. It has spent
five years using a problem-solving
approach to mathematics known
as Cognitively Guided Instruction
that district officials say aligns
well with the common standards’
math expectations. With a handful
of teachers now well-versed in
“How do I show [an evaluator]
that students are thinking and
analyzing without a project or experiment?
It’s a big challenge, and
I think it will take a little time to
get there,” she says. “Before, with
the rote learning, you could create
a handout, put it in your file, and
just use it again next year. You
can’t do that when you’re looking
at students to apply these skills.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Highfield
says, she’s starting to see the benefits
for her students.
“Durand is a fairly poor district;
a lot of students don’t have a lot
of experiences,” she says. “We ask
them, ‘What do you want to do in
your life, with your learning? Can
you imagine it? How would you
get there?’
“I’ve seen a change in my stu-
dents, and I think that is a good
thing.”
This article originally appeared, in a
different form, in the Education Week
special report “Math, Literacy,
& Common Standards.”
Gretchen Highfield gives a
reading lesson to her 3rd
grade class. She says her
district’s emphasis on the
common standards is
prompting educators to
rethink long-standing
practices.
PERSPECTIVE
Blended PD: The Best
Of Both Worlds
By Jennie Magiera
Differentiated. Relevant. Engaging. These are all words
used to describe quality instruction. Yet how ironic is it
that they so rarely describe teacher professional development.
Most of the time we are talked at for several hours
on a Saturday morning, or in the afternoon after a long day
in the classroom, with nothing to engage us but a conciliatory
bowl of candy. This would not stand in our classrooms,
so why does it with teacher learning?
It doesn’t have to be this way. If providers of teacher
professional development were to simply adhere to the
tenants of good teaching, much could be improved. I’ve
actually been to extremely engaging PD sessions. These
were hands-on, driven by the participants, and immediately
relevant to my practice. In these shining examples of
teacher learning, the presenters acted more as resources
than as lecturers—allowing us to guide our own
learning and drive the content through our questions and
interests.
After such sessions, I always leave refreshed, renewed,
So, one may argue, why have live professional development
at all? Why not just let the whole thing take place
online?
While online learning has become revolutionary for
and excited to learn more. At the same time, I regret that
the session is over. I have the sense that my discussions
with colleagues are done and I have to go back to the
“grind.” How could I continue my learning from the session?

Ah, the Internet. Sites such as TeacherTube, the Teach-
ing Channel, and social-media outlets like Twitter have
made self-serve PD as easy as a mouse click or hashtag.
There is a simple beauty to being able to access the
classrooms and ideas of teachers from around the
world while sitting comfortably in your pajamas on a
Sunday.
6 EDUCATION WEEK 2012 CALENDAR OF EVENTS & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTORY
teacher learning, I still believe that in-person discussions
are what ignite our curiosity and drive us to seek out additional
knowledge and interaction. I get most excited
when fueled by the face-to-face conversations and interactions
with fellow educators in these sessions. The challenges
brought up in discussion push me to think differently
and strive to improve my practice. It no longer is
about whether I feel like clicking on that link I saw on
Twitter or the video on a teaching website. I am engaged
by the back-and-forth dialogue and then inspired to go
home and seek out that video or blog post to further my
thinking.
So what I propose is that districts consider a hybrid
approach: a differentiated, relevant, and engaging live
professional development to whet teachers’ curiosities
and ignite their passions, then an online platform for them to
continue to learn and pursue their new thirst for knowledge.
JENNIE MAGIERA is a 4th and 5th grade math teacher and a
technology and mathematics curriculum coach in the Chicago school
district. This piece originally appeared in Education Week Teacher’s
online forum Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable.
iStockphoto/mbortolino
Brian Widdis for Education Week_File
Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - August 22, 2012

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