By Ben Owens
What a difference a year makes! One year ago, I and a small group of pioneering teachers from four districts across Western North Carolina kicked-off a pilot project at the Cullowhee Campus of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). This ambitions project, “Scaling the Pockets of Teaching Excellence,” was initiated on the premise that in-classroom, peer-to-peer teacher collaboration would not only provide an alternative to the traditional “sit & get” professional development, but would also lead to deeper learning and a richer sharing of teaching and learning best practices throughout schools in our region. As described in an EdNC article, the pilot project was quite successful and received a significant amount of positive feedback from the participating districts and elsewhere (https://www.ednc.org/2015/05/12/professional-development-for-teachers-by-teachers/).
Yet it was not entirely clear if the effort would continue. I had initiated the work as a yearlong “policy project” during my tenure as a 2014 Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellow and although the results were significant, there was no expectation that I repeat it over a second year. Nevertheless, having witnessed the impact this work had had on some of those original teachers, I could not let it simply end as a nice footnote of interesting education ideas here in North Carolina.
This is what ultimately led Dr. Dave Strahan and I to coordinate and kick-off a second phase of the project earlier this month at NCCAT, only this time with 30 educators from seven Western North Carolina districts (three times the original participants). The hope is that as the project enters its second year, it will provide us a proof point that this type of low-cost and highly impactful professional learning is a model we can scale and sustain across a wider region of North Carolina.
As with the original project, the kickoff took advantage of the beautiful NCCAT setting with a series of team building exercises and sessions focused on building the case for in-classroom teacher leadership and teacher-led professional learning that uses the Learning Forward Standards as a framework. This process helped teachers with similar content and grade-level backgrounds, but from different districts, develop trusting partnerships which could be leveraged as they created personalized growth plans that will be their focus over the course of the year. The partners also developed logistical plans for “immersion sessions,” where they will spend at least one day in each partner’s respective classroom – watching, listening, learning, and sharing best practices specific to their growth plans. In fact, some of these immersion sessions were already underway, only a week after the kickoff!
One difference from the pilot is that this year’s cohort of teachers will be able to take advantage of an innovative digital learning platform thanks to the generous financial support of Hope Street Group. The Kickup platform allows teachers to use the project’s network of peers to facilitate support for their individual instructional needs. This technology allows the partners to better facilitate the face-to-face interactions, as well as an easy and focused way to follow-up such visits with chats, the exchange of resources, and live video sessions.
The last and perhaps best part of the project kickoff was when each teacher team took time to reflect and report-back on their individual growth plans. This is where any apprehension I had as to whether all the time and energy to reboot this work would really pay off. The obvious level of quality and focus in their plans is what gives me great optimism that this group of teachers will indeed redefine what high quality, teacher-led professional learning looks like. The framework Dr. Strahan and I initially provided was all that was needed for these innovative teachers to develop strategies that I am convinced will indeed lead to more positive outcomes for students as we quicken the pace of best practice sharing and scale-up across Western North Carolina.
Ben Owens spent 20 years working as an engineer, and is now a math and physics teacher at Tri-County Early College High School in Murphy. Ben, an NCCAT alum, can be found on Twitter at @engineerteacher.
