Schools are accustomed to changing –promiscuously and routinely without producing any improvement- Elmore.
At Matchbook Learning, we’d like to put an end to promiscuous professional development. By promiscuous professional development, we mean demonstrating or implying an undiscriminating or un-selective approach to why educators choose certain professional development topics and the indiscriminate or casual way educators often go about deciding the relative value of the experience.
Over the past five years in particular, teachers routinely share experiences regarding poorly designed professional learning in blogs and end of year surveys. In addition, compliance related professional development often dominate top down mandates from state agencies.
Recently, the emergence of EdCamps, job embedded learning, teacher led professional learning all create cool and whimsical opportunities to learn a new skill, technology tool, or process that is useful in terms of anytime, anywhere learning. And yet, school leaders have a dilemma in terms of the rate of learning for adults just as they have it for students.
The choices can feel endless, and the whimsical nature of professional development experiences can mimic promiscuity in a relationship. Minus a long-term commitment and with the absence of accountability, educators can often feel like they are going to a host of “one night stands” instead of being a part of a long germ growth experience or relationship. All of these market place approaches lead us to a few questions and solutions as to how we are approaching the nexus of turning promiscuous professional development into purposeful professional learning at Matchbook.
Four questions that move us towards more “committed professional learning relationships” at Matchbook include:
What does accountability mean in a long-term relationship?
We’ve now spent over two decades in Professional Learning Communities (PLC) research and practice as an industry. Fidelity ranges across the country as leaders cycle in and out of systems, and very often organizations have not defined the “vows of a union”. Our guidance for the industry is what we are learning about commitment within our community about measuring both formal and informal learning. As Elmore writes, "accountability must be a reciprocal process. For every increment of performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I must have a reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in performance."
It is very important to be explicit about expectations up front and to clarify what is constituted as “stepping out” on the relationship by “flirting” with other vendors, courses, experiences and non-aligned professional learning. In order to minimize the temptation of our school leaders and teachers to “flirt” with others or “step out” on our expectations, our model has developed clear learning outcomes, metrics to incentivize performance, and choice architecture for educators through a badging cycle.
Indeed there are nuances around professional learning, improvement, and exposure. In seeking to codify the rate of professional learning, sometimes educators miss coaching moments among each other and other “teachable moments” where learning is happening all of the time all around us with every person in the building. Discount a culture of learning in favor of what you can only measure, and educators can miss some opportunities to move the organization and the individual.
Is it more important to have an experience or a commitment?
Dick Elmore writes, “Improvement means engagement in learning new practices that work, based on external evidence and benchmarks of success, across multiple schools and classrooms, in specific areas of academic content and pedagogy, resulting in continuous improvement of students' academic performance overtime.”
While choice driven professional learning may result in a few classroom changes or a thrilling one night webinar stand, it does not focus on changing processes or structures for scale. We’re working very hard at Matchbook to align our performance improvement process with the Baldrige Framework for Excellence. We’ve chosen this framework due to a track record of education results. In an effort to meet the standards of excellence in the seven Baldrige categories, we’ve launched a micro-credentialing process that is both scalable and aligned to our student learning cycle for all adult learners at Matchbook.
In our professional learning model, our staff members begin the relationship with us by going through our MBL-U two-week course, which is their initial commitment to the learning phases of the badging process. Then after having gone through the “learning”, “conferencing”, “applying”, and “assessment” phases in 90-day cycles throughout the year, each is evaluated on their individual strengths and gaps aligned to our professional learning categories under the Baldrige Framework.
Staff members get a voice in how the early dating with our model will go as they self-reflect during 90-day reviews and on their end of year reviews. From those in collaboration with coaches, they begin to personalize where they need coaching and supports. They also reserve the right to accelerate that process by earning badges not just in a role area like teaching, but also in areas like technology, senior leadership, or finance in coaching conferences with our team. All of these protocols are very much like committed relationships. They require check-ins, demonstration of effort, empathy for struggle, and supports to grow in our model and as an individual. And we do not prohibit informal learning, peer to peer observations, or learning with students in design cycles or challenges. We just make sure that the 90-day cycle and the resulting teaching portfolios at least codify the journey.
Can professional development achieve individual and collective goals in a long-term relationship with Matchbook?
In many school districts across the country, teachers or principals often submit their own individual goals, school goals, and growth goals in the form of a self-reflection checklist. Moreover, courses, conferences, and workshops often populate the portfolio as well. For the individual, a strategy or tool to enhance their practice may make its way back into practice, but more often the one day stand with development or conference inspirations provides an enthusiastic thrill for the moment and then participants are left without follow through or a call back. Additionally, if they do decide to try a relationship with the idea or practice, it is often unclear how the time invested and the strategy behind it actually improved the collective good of the school. It is kind of like saying, I’ve dated a lot of suitors and that has taught me what I want and don’t want. The reality is we learn from every relationship and those learning moments are hard to codify.
Promiscuity alone does not lead to wisdom. Wisdom is found in an understanding of how to be emotionally available to individual growth and the collective good. The value of true transformation is also found in how one improves his or her capacity to contribute to the collective good of the school or the organization. In our work at Matchbook, we are aligning capacity development areas through our badging effort, but also incentivizing with real dollars how that badging pursuit impacts the collective good of our academic, behavioral, satisfaction, and retention goals.
We want a committed relationship with our employees for many years to come, and we want them to try things in the relationship that spices things up. Attending an online course in and of itself is not wrong, learning never is. However, we want to ensure at all times they understand the value of a learning opportunity and the relationship between that and the collective good for Matchbook Learning. In turn, we want to reward the investment of their time for both informal and formal learning.
Should we change attitudes or practice first in moving towards committed relationships?
Guskey argues, “that practice changes attitudes rather than vice versa. Rather than exhorting teachers to believe that students can learn differently, or that different students can learn at higher levels; we should show teachers the practices that go with these beliefs. If the new practices succeed with those students, then teachers have the opportunity to change their attitudes about the practice”.
Teachers at Matchbook do not earn badges to demonstrate a specific skill. Rather, the badge is attained only after consistent, frequent demonstration. We set 90-day cycle benchmarks so we can be reflective with teachers about what they are learning. We want them to see other teachers in practice and reflect on what they saw through video and observation. The next step in true Guskey fashion is to practice that skill or disposition until the success is internalized and validated by the badge process. Furthermore, we hold to expiration dates on the badges as practice and attitudes often have to be adjusted over time with new practice, research, and techniques that further student learning.
In all, we desire autonomy and freedom for our team at Matchbook within a framework and process that impacts the collective good. A huge premise in our efforts is that we must continue to be explicit about how our work directly correlates to student learning and adult capacity. We are confident that our current “practice” will help employees develop a monogamous relationship for many years to come at Matchbook Learning. We seek an end to promiscuous professional development, because it fractures the core understandings between our team and our schools. Most importantly, it inhibits the kind of acceleration we seek for our students and the opportunities that await them downstream.
By Bryan Setser and Amy Swann
