For the past decade, my colleagues and I at Leysin American School have focused on supporting teacher agency. In the early years, our motto was “Continually becoming the professionals we already are.”
We’ve supported teacher agency with the belief that innovation and substantive change in the way we do school will come directly from educators in action research cycles of teaching and reflecting, day after day.
In this EdSurge podcast, host Jeffrey Young speaks with Justin Reich about what Justin argues is the only way for teaching and learning to get better at school: “The way [teachers] change their teaching practice is by experimenting with stuff and then sharing the results of those experiments with their colleagues.”
Reich is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He’s held many positions, including ninth grade world history teacher and wilderness educator. The ideas in this podcast are also presented in his latest book, Iterate, available November 2023.
“Presently, there are many teachers who think professional development is pretty boring and pretty lame, and that is an unfortunate indictment of our education system.”
Oh yes. Professional development (PD) often misses the mark. Sometimes it’s the wrong topic at the wrong time. Sometimes it’s just plain boring. I’m sure that Reich would say one reason for this is the manner in which PD is structured. As an example, he explains that a sports team would not just listen to theoretical explanations of a new play before running the play in a game. No way. They would instead experiment with the new play, try it out, reduce the complexity of the new play to practice it.
Our professional development center at Leysin American School (LAS) bases its work on this notion of experimentation and collaboration. We try things out, share things with others, reflect and replan, and experiment some more. We learn in short iterations, we make little bets, we fail early and safely (which isn’t really failure at all, it’s called learning), and we adopt a mindset of action research. We get better at what we practice – and we get even better when we reflect on what we practice.
That is key.
“Most teachers are patient pragmatists … [they are] waiting to see if there is some evidence – not in the abstractions of research articles, but if there is evidence from their colleagues that these things help students.”
Of course we are. We are patient and pragmatic because we have experienced more than one initiative that, although well intentioned, missed the mark. “Most teachers are naturally suspicious about new ideas that come from on high, because there is a new idea that comes from on high every year or two.” Or we have heard that something is research-based and best practice when, based on our own experience, we know better. At least in our context, with our students, with our personal professional abilities.
Reich continues: “If you want to get teachers to do something new, you have to get them to learn from one another … That is the main way that teaching and learning actually changes at schools.” And “If you are a school leader, this is essential information, essential framing for you, because essentially your job is to facilitate peer learning.”
This last statement is so important. A leader’s role is to create a culture in which teachers can learn from each other, because that is indeed the main way teaching and learning actually changes. The leader’s role is not to know more – that isn’t possible – nor to identify the best external provider of professional development, the best materials, the best whatever. No, no, no. The goal of the leader is to help teachers learn from teachers, in iterations. In his words: “The job of the school leader is to try to spin that process as quickly, as efficiently, as joyfully as possible.”
There are probably many ways of spinning that process. For us at Leysin American School, the process has been defined by asking teachers to identify the professional development that is right for them, working together with colleagues on campus and outside people or programs that they identify themselves. Sometimes this is through informal group meetings over the course of the school year, sometimes this is as a passion project supported with a stipend and the help of a colleague in our research center. Often we make introductions to bring people with similar questions and interests together, in person and online. We ask teachers to talk and reflect and try things out and to talk and reflect some more.
Reich: “So things that school leaders can do is … make it easier for teachers to conduct experiments.”
As a school leader, are you helping teachers conduct experiments? Does your mindset, your schedule, and your PD program support teacher-led experimentation? Ask yourself the questions that Reich poses in the podcast:
- How am I helping teachers … invest in innovations?
- How am I creating “the conditions where teachers get a chance to learn from one another?”
- How do you make sure that all that experimentation doesn’t happen in a thousand different directions, how do you help … encourage a community to pick a few different things ….?
It isn’t easy, as a leader, to get past the confirmation bias that comes with the position. School leaders generally got where they are because they have demonstrated serious ability and motivation in more than a few areas of education. There is a natural tendency to want to direct, to tell, to lead in the manner we are often told a leader leads. But when it comes to the professional development of teachers, we need to be very humble. As one professional training book puts it, “Telling Ain’t Training.” Building capacity for shared efficacy is training, or at least a necessary condition for training to thrive. This is quite different from “telling.”
Let’s have Reich summarize for us:
“Teacher leadership is essential for school improvement. You cannot improve schools without empowering teachers to be trying to generate new, better practices, going through these iterative approaches of trying one thing, seeing how it works, trying a little bit better things, and then sharing what they are learning with others. That’s the only way that teaching and learning in schools gets better.”
Resources
Leysin American School Educational Research