On the Road to Oz, 2| Professional Development

Sally Harrison, who draws on 27 years of classroom experience, is the teachers' teacher in the Edmonds School District.

"Well," he said, with a sigh, "I'm not much of a magician, as I said; but if you will come to me tomorrow morning, I will stuff your head with brains. I cannot tell you how to use them, however, you must find that out for yourself."

So what does this professional development work look like?

Of course, there are the traditional workshops and seminars. There's a mentoring program for new teachers that involves training for the mentors as well as the neophytes. A wealth of written resources is readily available to teachers via newsletters, Web sites, recommended reading lists, and research summaries. In fact, one of the first projects Harrison and her staff undertook when embarking on this journey was a research project investigating best practices for professional development. Their findings were published in an 82-page research synthesis, cowritten by teachers and district personnel. (See In the Library.)

But perhaps the most effective professional development strategy has involved the creation of "teacher leaders" and, later, "learning teams" throughout the district, an example of the evolution Harrison describes.

After decentralization, the district lost its central staff development office. Teachers — busy with day-to-day operations — realized that they had little time for keeping abreast of educational issues or planning ongoing education. They needed some support. In particular, a number of teachers — particularly at the elementary level — were unhappy with the mathematics textbooks they were using and wanted help finding a better way to teach math.

In 1991, Darlene Atik, then a Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA), suggested that the district apply for grant funding for training to restructure math instruction. An application written by teacher leaders and a grant writer landed Edmonds a National Science Foundation matching grant worth more than $1.6 million over five years. The project enabled the district to train a cadre of teacher leaders in a summer institute with outside math consultants. These teacher leaders then shared their learning with colleagues throughout the district. To support the effort over time, the teacher leaders attended regular meetings throughout the school year to further their training and discuss implementation issues. In the beginning, only a handful of schools opted to participate, though there was interest in rolling out the program throughout the district over subsequent years.

For teachers participating in the program, the experience was nothing short of profound. The workshop was far from another dry lecture or preachy sermon. Instead of listening to someone drone on about how to teach math, teachers were given the chance to be students themselves. They experienced learning math in a new way. Many self-confessed "math haters" had a revelation: they loved math.

Susan Ardissono, then a third-grade teacher at Evergreen Elementary, was one of them.

"Prior to that experience, I was math phobic, and I came to see how talented I was in math," Ardissono says. "I remember one 'Aha!' came when we were learning about multiplication. We were cutting out little triangles when — wham! — I finally realized what square numbers were. It made me sit up and take notice. If kids don't get it, we need to give them hands-on learning experiences. It changed my understanding of how kids learn. It changed the way I teach."

Other teachers recount similar bolts from the blue. In becoming students again, teachers were better able to understand what their students require in order to learn. What happened in those initial math trainings became infectious as teachers began to approach teaching all subjects differently.

As the process evolved and was fine-tuned, teacher leaders became known as learning teams. Regardless of nomenclature, however, the concept remains essentially the same: Take a small group of teachers, provide them with an intense learning experience, ask them to take their learning back to share with other staff members, and support them all as they experiment in the classroom and continue to share their learning with each other.

An important aspect of this kind of training is what Harrison calls "watercooler learning." One of the richest things teachers have to share is their own experience. When teachers have the opportunity to share their own stories, they learn from each other and grow collectively.

Today, every school in the district relies on learning teams for staff development. Many even have multiple teams in different areas.

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