Developing Minds, Developing Teachers

When I began teaching in the late 1960s, no one had heard of multiple intelligences, neurodevelopment, or differentiated instruction, to name a few important additions to the way we think of teaching and learning that have developed in the intervening years. I would no longer have a job if I were teaching as I did 40-some years ago; I and all teachers must continue to learn.

 

Schools need to project into the future, since we are educating our students to enter that future well equipped to bring positive and successful approaches to whatever comes their way. To remain relevant, schools and education have to be responsive to the rapidly changing lives that our students will lead, affected by things we haven’t yet imagined. Preschool students who began in the Beehive in 1998 are graduating this year into a world of social media that didn’t exist until they were in 5th or 6th grade. The pace of change affects all of us individually, but also our institutions, businesses, governments, and schools. All must figure out how to plan for an unknowable future.

 

Not surprisingly, the knowledge base of the teaching profession, like others, is evolving. Our role in our students’ learning is being reshaped by discoveries in neuroscience and the possibilities of the internet, to name only two important factors. To explore the skills and understandings that teachers will need to be flexible and inventive in the face of great change, we might look to people such as Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Sir Ken Robinson, Will Richardson, the folks at Project Zero, and educators looking at gaming and new technologies with an eye to their application in education.

 

Heidi Hayes Jacobs, a curriculum expert, feels that most schools are preparing their students for 1991. Get rid of the number two pencil, she says. This symbol for filling in testing bubbles should be abandoned as we move to the apt use of web 2.0 applications and social media to enhance the concepts schools are teaching, especially the ways in which students can show understanding. She points out that by the time textbooks are printed their content in many disciplines is obsolete; the notion that teachers are dispensers of knowledge has never been an effective model, but is even less so when it is impossible to keep up with the flow of new knowledge.

 

Sir Ken Robinson goes further, with his assertion that education must be personal, rather than standardized, since people and their brains, interests, and talents are individual, and each learner is the constructor of his or her learning. He makes a strong case for education being collaborative and active, given what we know about distributed intelligence and the methods by which people learn and understand things deeply. Education must also be flexible and dynamic to encompass the complexities and interrelatedness of the world. He suggests that we move from thinking about curriculum as subjects to thinking about curriculum as disciplines, where the focus is on skills, procedures, and processes. Assessments, instead of being judgmental, should be descriptive, as is appropriate to the continuous learning needed to encompass change. Pedagogy should focus on coaching and guiding, rather than lecturing and telling. These are not new ideas, but they have not been widely adopted.

 

Will Richardson agrees with Jacobs that schools need to be conceived differently. He quarrels with the fact that schools often do not allow students the full use of the technology that they already use in their lives outside of school. Take your phone out of your pocket and you have a billion possible teachers and the sum of human knowledge. Why aren’t we using that potential? Schools must be re-envisioned as places where we learn to collaborate with global peers, and as places of deep inquiry into the complex problems of the world.

 

Howard Gardner and his team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, known for their earlier work on multiple intelligences, now focus on identifying the kinds of minds we will need to develop for the future. He and his team of investigators have defined what they call “the five minds for the future.” These are ways of thinking that they have identified as necessary for the lifelong learning one needs in order to be successful in a world of rapid change. They call these five minds the disciplined mind, the respectful mind, the ethical mind, the creating mind, and most important for the 21st century’s overwhelming flow of information, the synthesizing mind. Each of the five minds has limitations and strengths, so collaboration is also an important skill for leveraging their use. According to Gardner, the future of education will involve teaching to produce continuous, lifelong learners. With globalization, the digital revolution, and what we are learning from neuroscience, we can see that successful people need to be flexible thinkers who draw from varying disciplines to solve complex problems. In order to do this, we need to learn to think in non-linear, systems-oriented ways.

 

Harvard’s Project Zero gives us an example of educational methods aimed at putting the ideas of such thinkers into practice. Last year three investigators from Project Zero published their work with schools in several countries on seeing such thinking at work. In their book, Making Thinking Visible, Ritchart, Church, and Morrison outline 21 practices to nurture thinking in the daily life of students. Schools that teach and use these thinking routines, which are targeted at solving specific kinds of problems, have shown that students using these practices become excellent posers of questions, thoughtful, creative investigators who reason with evidence and have disciplined processes to engage when a problem is put before them or when they identify one themselves.

 

As educators, we naturally look to our evolving knowledge of how learning best occurs to think about what would enhance our own learning— effective adult professional development. Neuroscience has supported a constructivist notion of learning. It has confirmed what we suspected all along: each brain is unique. We now know that we create the architecture of our brains by how we use them to process our experiences. Knowing that students (and teachers and parents) are literally constructing their brains leads us to want to make sure that the time we spend together, in school and out, is filled with experiences rich in possibility, intriguing problems, and questions to engage with. Since our brains are uniquely wired, it follows that one size does not fit all in any learning situation.

 

So, what kind of professional development translates into making a real difference in student learning? What is effective for adults who need to keep up with the fast-changing world of education?

 

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform, housed at Brown University, and the National Staff Development Council (now called Learning Forward), among others, have in the past 10 years compiled research focused on answering this question. They have identified a few key elements as important factors in effective continued learning for teachers, or anyone, really. Happily, these elements will look familiar to anyone with experience in a Catlin Gabel classroom.

 

First, new learning should be ongoing. This means that one-shot workshops, lectures, and conferences, while often interesting, rarely lead to change in the classroom. This result can be improved by adding follow-up coaching to the original experience.

 

Second, learning should be embedded in the job and the needs of the teacher. When this is the case, practice is built into the situation and is purposeful and relevant. We know that all of us have to live with, experiment with, and reflect upon new learning for it to be fully understood and useful. This takes practice over time, sometimes years. To justify putting this kind of time and effort into it, the purpose needs to be clear.

 

Third, for change to be truly systemic, it needs to be part of a larger reform or change effort. A single teacher or a small group may introduce an innovation, but to create systemic change, it must be picked up by others who come to see its advantages.

 

Fourth, inquiry-based collaborative learning creates the most improvement in instruction. Learning together in teams is much more likely to lead to systemic innovation than finding oneself the lone practitioner of a great idea. Using evidence of student learning is a key piece of the inquiry. Peer coaching enhances collaborative learning, as Bruce Joyce’s work has shown. Peer coaching helps consolidate new learning and integrate it into one’s teaching repertoire. Everyone concerned, coach and coachee, benefit. Professional learning communities appear to be the most effective model for this, according to the Annenberg Institute.

 

Professional learning communities embody all of the above attributes and mirror the kind of learning we expect in Catlin Gabel classrooms: collaborative and inquiry-based, centered on engagement in reflective dialogue about ideas, which is then shared with others. Sound familiar?

 

A good example of the power of learning communities can be seen in the Lower School. The division identified math as an area for improvement. Several excellent workshops were offered to the division faculty as shared professional experiences. However, things really took off when Courtney Nelson, who had taught several of the workshops, was hired as a math specialist for the Lower School to support teachers and students with planning, curriculum design, and coaching. She now co-plans with grade level teams and co-teaches some lessons with homeroom teachers. She helps teachers look at student work and analyze its strengths and errors, and then helps plan the next steps to move the students’ math understanding forward. Teachers report that this embedded assistance and coaching has been essential in consolidating their own learning and has strengthened the math understanding of Lower School students.

 

The fact that everyone is aware that change takes time and focus has helped, too. One teacher said, “It’s going to take me years to learn everything Courtney has to offer. I appreciate that we are just focusing on one thing this year. It really means we can dig in and make progress.”

 

Learning communities that investigate, practice, coach, evaluate, and research together over time hold great promise for Catlin Gabel, or any school. Working in such a collegial environment is also a great joy. One of the great gifts of being in education is that lifelong learning is built into the profession. One year is never like another, a lesson is never the same twice, and no student is exactly like another. It’s a beautiful thing.