Imagine the routine professional learning experiences of an elementary teacher. Within a single month, she might participate in a schoolwide session on leading math discussions, engage in a coaching cycle focused on supporting small reading groups, attend a district training on antiracist teaching practices, and receive feedback from her principal about building relationships with students. Given that different leaders—school principals, instructional coaches, district staff, outside consultants, etc.—plan and facilitate these experiences, there’s potential for them to become isolated and inconsistent.
In our experience collaborating with school and district leaders to support transformational teacher learning, we’ve found that it is important for leaders to design for coherence. Designing for teacher learning coherence means working to build a culture of learning across PD experiences and supporting teachers to see their learning as connected and related to a common set of ideas—about schools, students, teaching, and learning. Coherence enables teachers to develop the same ideas in relation to their teaching practice over time and makes a difference in how instruction is transformed. Ongoing, intentional work is especially essential for disrupting inequitable patterns that are often deeply ingrained in classrooms and schools.
Below, we examine reflection questions and strategies that leaders can use to attend to coherence in design of teacher learning supports. We provide examples from elementary school leaders that we work with to help paint a picture of what attending to coherence can look like.
Pause & Reflect
What are the different professional learning supports—conferences, workshops, webinars, meetings—that the teachers you work with participate in? How might teachers be experiencing professional learning in your school or district as connected or disconnected? How, if at all, do the different leaders of these experiences collaborate or communicate?
What Threads Can You Pull Through?
The first step in designing for coherence is to take time to identify some common threads that might help weave together teacher professional learning. We’ve found two questions useful in making these threads explicit:
1. Is there a common theme that we are already working on that we could make more explicit and consistent? For example, in one school, the literacy coach was working with teachers on read aloud discussions, the mathematics coach was working on facilitating routine “math talks,” and the principal was leading a series of sessions on creating classroom communities that value students’ identities. The team realized that a common thread they could use to tie together teachers’ experiences was the goal of “cultivating cultures of purposeful talk in which students feel seen, heard, and valued.”
2. Is there an important idea in one professional learning space that we need to intentionally pull into other spaces? For instance, one school leadership team realized that while teachers were engaged in staff-wide learning interrogating implicit deficit views of students of color in teaching practices, the team had not explicitly worked with teachers to think about how these deficit views show up in content-specific instruction and learning (e.g., How do deficit views of students show up in our mathematics assessment practices?).
Pause & Reflect
What are possible themes that might serve as threads across professional learning experiences? Are there questions you have for other leaders to help you identify common professional learning themes or threads?
How Can You Weave Experiences Together?
The next challenge is to experiment with weaving together the professional learning supports in your school. We find it useful to think about coherence not simply as surface-level alignment between learning experiences or an outcome to achieve, but as a craft. Crafting coherence for teacher learning requires ongoing attention to how connected the learning supports for teachers are. Doing so involves intentional design, redesign, and participation on the part of leaders to weave experiences together as they unfold. While this may feel daunting, we’ve found that relatively small changes to how leaders think about, plan, and implement professional learning can go a long way. Here we look at three strategies we’ve experimented with in collaboration with local school leaders.
1. Make Connecting Comments
One strategy for crafting coherence is for instructional leaders to make small, intentional comments in their framing or reflections during teacher professional development that connect different learning experiences. For example, at the start of a grade-level meeting in which teachers were looking at student work together from a recent lesson, a principal said: “I’m thinking about our commitment in the staff meeting to interrogate our beliefs about what students are capable of and not just focus on deficits. Let’s make sure we bring that stance into today’s work and help each other notice the brilliance of our students.” In this brief comment, she provided teachers with an opportunity to connect their learning across professional development experiences.
2. Build in Time for Connection
A second strategy involves intentionally planning a short (10-15 minute) conversation or activity to allow for teachers and leaders to collectively make sense of connections between content areas. For example, as part of a session on teacher conferring in literacy, one literacy coach facilitated a 15-minute conversation in which teachers considered how conferring with students differs between literacy and mathematics instruction. In another example, toward the end of an all-staff session about equity and implicit bias in the classroom, the principal created space for teachers to connect to a recent district training on mathematics discussions. She asked teachers to discuss the following: “How might our implicit beliefs about students show up in our facilitation of math discussions? What questions do we have about how to make sure our discussions don’t perpetuate inequitable experiences for our students?”
Crafting coherence for teacher learning requires ongoing attention to how connected the learning supports for teachers are.
3. Use Common Tools
A third strategy, which requires more collaboration on the part of leaders, uses intentional design and common tools, such as documents, readings, instructional materials, and group norms. Seeing and using the same tools across many professional learning experiences can help teachers make sense of new ideas across content areas and provides multiple opportunities to discuss related questions or challenges with colleagues. For example, one group of school leaders we work with uses a document that describes core beliefs about students and teaching (e.g., “children are sensemakers” and “teaching includes becoming a student of your students”) across all teacher learning experiences. This tool supported teachers to connect individual, content-specific professional learning to a broader, underlying vision of teaching and learning. In another example, a school leadership team decided to incorporate excerpts from the staff book-study text Teaching for Black Lives across all teacher professional learning sessions for a six-week period. This plan supported teachers to engage with the text through different lenses and in relation to their teaching practice across multiple sessions and with all of their school leaders.
What Does this Mean for Leaders of Teacher Learning?
Crafting more coherent teacher learning experiences requires that we, as leaders, design our work differently and continually ask, “How can I support teachers to connect what they are learning, thinking about, and experiencing in other spaces?” By restructuring our work to regularly attend to coherence, we open up space to make sense of the complex transformations that our teachers and schools are engaging in. This may require new forms of collaboration with other leaders and new ways of planning teacher learning.
Now, look back at the three strategies above about weaving experiences together: What is something you could try in an upcoming professional learning experience with your colleagues? We’ve noticed that in using these three strategies, leaders model for teachers that it’s important to be curious about connections and to think across their learning experiences. Very quickly, teachers start noticing and contributing their own connections, or raising questions about points of conflict or confusion. In this way, we can create a culture in which all the educators in a building are developing together an understanding of how learning is connected.
