these school-based sessions are not lectures or large-scale productions that function only as one-way communication from presenter to audience; rather, they are engaging activities that deeply involve participants in the learning process. The Preuss School, in La Jolla, California, schedules a later student start-time each Friday, providing all teachers time to collaborate and learn from one another every week. While the content for these 105-minute sessions varies, the two-part goal remains the same: sharing practices and ideas as the school prepares for the advent of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and strengthening the school’s cultural environment of collaboration. “In our Friday morning sessions, we want to model what we want to see in each classroom,” says Preuss Principal Scott Barton, “and it’s the idea that we learn more collaboratively than we do individually.” During one Friday morning session, Preuss science and social studies teachers modeled lessons that align with the Common Core, as their colleagues played the role of students. Following the lessons, teachers provided feedback to one another, and reflected on ways in which they can each adopt similar instructional strategies in their respective content areas. On most Wednesdays, the Brunson-Lee Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona—one of four schools in the Balsz Elementary
District—offers professional development workshops to its teachers. These weekly opportunities were first made possible in 2009, when the whole district converted to a school year of 200 days. Balsz district leaders realized that, with an additional 20 days of instruction across the year, the weekly school schedules could be reconfigured to shorten the student day on Wednesdays, so that they could reserve time for professional development sessions for all teachers then, without adversely affecting the quality or quantity of instruction. Brunson-Lee has about three of these PD sessions each month, typically led by the instructional coach, who is a content and pedagogic expert. The school principal and the instructional coach, working with much teacher input, have developed a calendar for these sessions, where the topics are tied directly to the school’s specific educational goals. For example, the school (and district) have focused on strengthening teaching around “writing what you read,” a method to improve both comprehension and writing skills at once, and, notably, an essential building block of the Common Core. During many of the sessions, the instructional coach, Sarah Ravel, models practices focused on teaching writing, while training all the school’s teachers together on how to implement these practices in their classrooms. (See “Spotlight,” page 31.)
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3: EMBEDDED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: BUILDING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH COLLABORATION
Peer-to-peer learning helps teachers to situate their own instruction within the broader learning goals for the school.