Professional Learning with Teacher Communities the Knowles Way

Katey Shirey, Knowles Teacher Initiative
Andrew Wild, Winooski Middle High School and Woodrow Wilson Graduate School of Teaching and Learning

If teaching were like sports, then team practice would be crucial, even if the teaching event was individual. Research shows that like athletics, teacher community activity leads to teacher learning,¹ and yet, some studies have found that teacher learning-community time often focuses on social community building rather than on improving practice.² Nationally, new teachers (zero to five years) are more likely to agree that other teachers contribute to their classroom success,³ yet typical school structures limit teacher-to-teacher access.⁴ The Knowles Teaching Fellows Program helps new teachers build community and advance instructional practices.⁵ After practicing cycles of instructional inquiry with other Fellows, we were encouraged to start inquiry groups back home to further our local instructional development and grow our professional communities and leadership capacities.

Expert teacher educators at Knowles (Program Officers for Teacher Development, or "TDs") taught us a method of instructional inquiry that harkens back to a legacy of examining student work.⁶ We focused on deep questions about our teaching, such as, "What is the relationship between tasks and talk in my classroom?" In year-long inquiry cycles, we investigated these questions by collecting student data (verbal comments, written work, etc.) and analyzed it using prescribed discussion protocols. Working in teams meant that we had to expose our teaching methods and student outcomes in vulnerable ways. Leaning on the protocols to stimulate conversation, the TDs created an environment where we felt happily obligated to bring in our work and receive feedback. Taking risks together relied on us having built some trust, and in turn, taking risks helped increase our interpersonal confidence, ensuring that it would become easier for us to share in the future.

During this work, we were encouraged to seek evidence of student thinking and to try to reframe whatever deficit we might see on the surface in asset terms. Were students struggling with solving kinematics problems because of algebra issues? Or was the math fine, but the frame of reference confused? How could we tell the difference? As beginning teachers who were sometimes self-conscious, the focus on student data helped us get out of our heads and focus on what matters most—impacting student learning. We turned the student work over and over, looking at it as if it were physical data, seeking patterns or anomalies. The protocols slowed us down and helped us see what others were seeing as well. Valuing multiple interpretations of student data became a habit, and it helped us develop a deeper curiosity for our peers’ input. In turn, this work refined our feedback to teachers and students, helped us reconsider our assessments, and refined our expectations for our students.

In a way, it was the same thing we Knowles Fellows were doing with one another. Whatever we internally thought about these other new Fellows, that they might not have useful subject expertise, or might not understand our unique contexts, the protocols helped us set aside our initial judgments and see our peers' strengths. Listening and sharing, we heard ambitious goals and novel ideas. Working in this way, we realized that these Fellows, though novice, could offer us a lot, and we found ourselves pushing them as well! The work helped us understand one another's assets and contributed to our feelings of community strength and connection. Plus, we were making real instructional realizations and changes.

Knowles TDs not only led this process for us, but they metacognitively broke it down; they taught us how to describe and structure the process and encouraged us to suggest it to our peers. Comfortable in the inquiry, if we invited colleagues to do this work with us, then we would simultaneously develop our teacher-leader stances. Because of my confidence in the process, I (Katey) led a group of local physics teachers to investigate student sense-making which is explanation based on experimental evidence.⁷

Through Knowles, I learned that engaging in inquiry work with peers was useful in helping me tackle difficult instructional questions. Back home, I had a dilemma about student sense-making from experimental evidence. I noticed students speeding through the post-lab work I assigned them and making incorrect or incomplete conclusions. It was hard for me to tell if they had really understood the lab but just made simple errors, or if they didn't know how to make sense of the phenomenon and so couldn't make an appropriate claim from the evidence they collected in the lab.

I wrote a PTA grant for substitutes so I could observe and meet with other local physics teachers to investigate student reasoning. We used discussion protocols to focus on student data and looked for turning points in sense-making, such as where inference moved toward defensible conclusions. We shared strategies for cultivating conclusions from data (Five Practices⁸, whiteboard meetings, etc.) and agreed that we needed to recognize well-reasoned arguments more explicitly. We decided to make a big, public celebration of these moments of clarity. Through this work, I got to know my district colleagues better, but I was more excited to have articulated a collective need and to have explored strategies that could help us all.

The purpose of Knowles helping Fellows learn instructional inquiry is to provide time and space for Fellows to work together to improve their instruction and to create community among colleagues. Fellows learn the practices of collective inquiry explicitly and receive support to bring inquiry to their local contexts. Fellows are empowered to act concretely to develop their leadership capacity and more deeply incorporate themselves in their local networks as well as utilizing peer collaboration to improve practice. Four hundred Knowles Fellows are building communities with each other and in their schools by using learning-focused collaborative inquiry and sending ripples through the educational system.

Physics graduates who will be either first or second year teachers in the Fall of 2021 are encouraged to apply for the Fellowship. Applications for the 2021 cohort will open in May 2020. More information about the Fellowship and its application can be found here.

Andrew Wild taught high school conceptual physics and chemistry in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to earning his PhD in science education at Stanford. Currently he is the Community-Based Learning Coordinator for Winooski Middle High School in Vermont and the Chair of the Graduate Learning Community for the Woodrow Wilson Graduate School of Teaching and Learning, developed in collaboration with MIT.

Katey Shirey’s work focuses on the intersection of art, science, and education. Katey earned Bachelor's degrees in sculpture and physics and her master's in science education at the University of Virginia before teaching high school physics in Arlington, VA. Since earning her PhD in science education at the University of Maryland, Katey has worked for the Knowles Teacher Initiative to support teachers in finding deeper connections among science, math, engineering, technology, and art to enrich and improve student learning.

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¹ Grossman, P., Wineburg, S., & Woolworth, S. (2001). Toward a theory of teacher community. The Teachers College Record, 103, 942-1012. (PDF)

² Wood, Diane. (2007). Teachers' learning communities: Catalyst for change or a new infrastructure for the status quo?. Teachers College Record. 109. 699-739.

³ Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. (2010). The MetLife survey of the American teacher: Collaborating for student success. Place of publication not identified: Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. (2010). Retrieved December 19, 2019, from ERIC. (PDF)

⁴ Little, Judith Warren. "Inside teacher community: Representations of classroom practice." Teachers college record 105.6 (2003): 913-945. (PDF)

⁵ Galosy, J. A., Gillespie, N. M., & Banilower, E. R. (2018). Sowing the Seeds of Change: Supporting Teachers to Be Agents of Social Capital Development. In Networked By Design (pp. 111-130). Routledge.

⁶ Little, J. W., Gearhart, M., Curry, M., & Kafka, J. (2003). Looking at student work for teacher learning, teacher community, and school reform. Phi delta kappan, 85(3), 184-192. (PDF)

⁷ Zangori, L., Forbes, C., & Biggers, M. (2013). Fostering student sense making in elementary science learning environments: Elementary teachers' use of science curriculum materials to promote explanation construction. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50(8), 989-1017. doi:10.1002/tea.21104 (PDF)

⁸ Cartier, J., Smith, M., Stein, M., & Ross, D. (2013). 5 practices for orchestrating productive task-based discussions in science. Reston, Va.: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.