At four o'clock on a fall afternoon, 16 Chicago public school teachers arrive at a local school for a graduate class. A buzz of excitement begins as one teacher opens a bag and produces topographic maps of Earth structures that her students made out of craft foam. Today it's her turn to share a video of her teaching, and these are samples of her students' work from the lesson that she taped. After viewing the video, her colleagues help her reflect on what took place during her lesson and analyze why some students “got it” while others clearly missed the mark.
These motivated and enthusiastic teachers are participating in a professional development class offered by Northwestern University's Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS). The center has been offering these professional development classes, funded by a grant from Lucent Technologies, for two and one half years. To date, 88 teachers have participated.
A partnership between Northwestern University, the Chicago Public Schools, the University of Michigan, and the Detroit Public Schools, LeTUS has developed inquiry-based, technology-infused middle school science curriculums for five subjects—earth and environmental science, weather, biology, animal behavior, and physics. Each of these curriculums engages students in inquiry around a driving question, such as “What is the quality of the water in our river?” To help them in their inquiry, students use software as a tool for modeling, visualization, and data collection and analysis.
The professional development class described here focuses on two of the five courses. Each teacher in the class is using only one of the two curriculums. The common bond of using the same curriculum has brought these teachers together. In this class, they're learning how to teach the courses and expanding their knowledge of inquiry-based teaching and learning.
- Courses are grounded in practice.
- Courses engage teachers in reflection on their practice.
- Courses build and support communities of learners.
Grounding Professional Development in Practice
This class is grounded in practice. All participants must be teaching one of the two curriculums during the 10 weeks that they participate in the class, so they can share common experiences and can provide mutual support.
For most teachers who take this class, inquiry science is a new experience. Many find their new role difficult. Being a facilitator instead of the person with all the answers requires extra work and flexibility on the part of the teacher. Because the inquiry science curriculums emphasize collaborative, small-group work, students are often not in the same place at the same time. Classroom management can be a challenge. One teacher likened it to “trying to keep 30 beach balls under the water at the same time.” Teachers benefit from sharing those experiences with others who are also going through them.
The professional development class is specifically designed to support implementation of the LeTUS curriculums. Each week, the class instructors model teaching a lesson from the curriculums, and the teachers take the role of students. Later, class discussion focuses on the methods that the instructors used and the pedagogical topic for the week. The instructors then link these issues to the readings for the week, creating the continuity necessary for teachers to develop a richer understanding of the new skills that they are developing.
Experiencing the lesson from the students' point of view helps the teachers understand the instructional theory and the methods behind the lesson. In addition, having experienced the lesson as students, the teachers can more easily see where their students might have problems understanding or carrying out tasks.
For example, during a lesson from the unit on Earth structures, teachers worked on locating plate boundaries on a flat map, in preparation for doing this activity with their students the following week. Two teachers working on the area around Iceland were having great difficulty because their plate went over the top of the globe, but they were working on a flat map. One of the teachers said, “Now when I teach it, I'm going to have the Iceland group draw their plate on a globe so that they can visualize the top of the world and how the plates fit together up there.”
That teacher later reported that her students were able to see how the plates fit together much more quickly than she and her partner had. Experiencing the lesson herself, rather than just reading about it, gave that teacher a clearer picture of what her students needed to do. It enabled both teacher and students to succeed.
Enabling Teachers to Reflect on Practice
During the video portion of each class, teachers show a five-minute clip of a lesson in their classroom. They are asked to step back, consider an interesting event from the lesson, and reflect on its meaning. Was something interesting or surprising? If a group of students was working to solve a problem or engaging in an interesting discussion, did the students exhibit some misconceptions? If the teacher was leading a group discussion, how effective were the discourse and questions?
Let's look at how the teacher from the beginning of our story approached her video. Her clip began with her instructions to her students about how to construct topographic maps, and then showed one group of students trying to assemble their map. In reflecting on what she saw in the video, the teacher identified a point in the instructions where the students got lost. With the suggestions of her classmates, she constructed ways she could go back and help the students correct their misconceptions. This type of reflection on practice directly affects classroom instruction and student learning.
Building and Supporting a Community of Learners
Because teaching can be an isolated profession, participating teachers place great importance on the community of colleagues that develops in this class. Sharing takes different forms. The videotapes provide a window into another classroom and allow teachers to share what takes place there. The teachers also share concrete and practical items, such as materials, resources, and equipment. But most important, they share themselves—their thoughts, ideas, concerns, and frustrations. This sharing lays the foundation for the development of a true learning community.
Sharing takes on added meaning in the LeTUS classes because all teachers work with the same lessons from the same curriculums. As one teacher said,When you hear comments and viewpoints of a range of teachers as we did, it always opens up new vistas and you come up with some new ideas and new methods to try. That was probably the most valuable part of the class.
Teachers in the class also develop a strong bond with the class instructors. Two classroom teachers handle the weekly teaching of the class; both have used the LeTUS curriculums and are experts in using inquiry and technology in their classrooms. As participants bring up difficulties they've had in their classrooms, it is comforting when the instructor can say, “I had that same problem with my students, and here is how I handled it.” Staff from Northwestern's school of education and content-area experts also lead the class from time to time. The blending of expertise from classroom experience, schools of education, and content-area disciplines into one class illustrates how all the pieces can fit together into one community of learning.
This learning community extends beyond the time spent each week in class. Teachers in the class participate in an electronic mailing list where they share reflections on assigned articles that they read. Their reflections inform the discussion of the article in the next class. The e-mail list also provides a place for the teachers to post questions that arise during the week. Teachers are encouraged to check for e-mail messages daily and share their strategies through it.
Promoting Teacher Growth
Designing professional development opportunities that affect teachers' daily activities is a challenge and an opportunity. The LeTUS professional development class is grounded in practice and uses teacher reflection within the support of a community of learners to help teachers implement a rigorous and challenging new curriculum with their students. As one of our teachers wrote in a final journal reflection, “Teaching should be a reflective endeavor that promotes continued growth in the abilities of the teacher. This course has done just that.”
