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Encouraging Teacher Growth with Learning CirclesBy Jill Armstrong
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Professional development is a phrase that becomes an integral part of an educator’s vocabulary. It is something that we do after school, during the summer months, or on pre-selected “No School for Students” days throughout the year. The premise of the professional learning is to assist the educational world in topics that include understanding new teaching trends, becoming more proficient in subjects taught or discovering new strategies for reading and math. Most teachers will spend an average of 25-30 hours in professional development each school year by participating in 2 hour sessions, multiple day conferences or online webinars.
My mother was an elementary teacher for over 35 years. I remember her attending after school meetings and travelling multiple days in the summer to attend full day “PD” sessions. She never seemed to like the idea of sitting in 8 hour meetings when she could be enjoying the summer sunshine. When I began teaching, I was well aware of the professional development requirement and had a preconceived notion of what would occur during the meetings. Essentially, I went into many sessions with an attitude of boredom, “I’m doing this because I have to do it”, and not expecting to gain much information. This isn’t to say that my district’s professional development choices are bad, boring or not useful to myself and my students. In fact, our district leaders strive to create sessions that are relevant to every grade level, follow the current educational trend, and can be applicable at any time to any teacher. The question may be asked at this point, “What is the problem”? There isn’t necessarily a problem, however, more of a ‘not using our in-house resources’ that I think we should explore.
I began to have the idea of using our own teachers and faculty to conduct professional development after I started to attend conferences and learning sessions outside of my district. The first conference that sparked my interest was the Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teachers and Teacher (ECET2) in Morehead, Kentucky in 2015. ECET2 is a new style of professional learning that is heating up the educational world across the country. It is a one day learning conference where teachers are sharing their ideas and resources to other teachers. It is a time to celebrate the profession of teaching and provides an opportunity for educators to network together building friendships and contacts. ECET2 includes a ‘meeting of the minds’ three times during the day called Colleague Circles. It consists of 6-10 teachers sitting at a large round table and discussing pre-written questions that address common challenges regardless of school districts. I was excited after attending my first ECET2 and began to get a renewed interest in professional learning sessions. Another PD style that is currently spreading across the country are EdCamps. These are dubbed as ‘unconferences’ where the schedule isn’t created until the participants arrive at the venue. The hosts will set up a large white board with times and room locations, attendees will fill in titles of sessions based on what they want to contribute to the day’s learning outcome. When the schedule is full, participants choose where they want to go and visit those sessions always remembering to use the Rule of Two Feet, if a session isn’t working for you, find one that is.
Though I liked the concepts of both professional learning styles, I didn’t think much about them or how to approach the idea of implementing them at my high school until I learned about CTEPS. I discovered Classroom Teachers Enacting Positive Solutions (CTEPS) through a fellow teacher and CTEPS alumni Carly Baldwin. She encouraged me to apply and I was accepted a few months later. Lauren Hill has created a phenomenal program that walks educators through a series of steps and levels to help formulate ideas, create a goal and ultimately implement a plan of action. Along with alumni turned coaches and our bird groups, we have access to many additional ideas, opinions, and guides that give us the ability to produce a program that addresses an issue, problem, or concern that we have within our respective school environments.
My product changed multiple times during the year-long CTEPS adventure. I ultimately decided to focus on my initial idea of using the teachers within my building to discover, create, and facilitate professional learning sessions. After much consideration, I approached my principal with my idea. I wanted to combine the unconference atmosphere of EdCamps and the colleague circles of ECET2 along with the roundtable module of professional development used at the AP Human Geography Reading each year to create a “hybrid child” of Greenup County High School’s own professional learning style. My principal was receptive to the idea which allowed me to continue with my journey through CTEPS.
I knew that the task would be larger than what one individual could handle on their own, so I gained the advice and work of three colleagues to become my team. These three teachers are our librarian, an English teacher and one of my fellow Social Studies teachers. Each of them quickly accepted my idea and are eager to help me in whatever way I may need. The concept was relatively simple, we want to have an hour of professional learning broken into 3 to 4 session segments. The topics will be determined by the teachers attending, sans the first inaugural PD which will have topics already chosen based on a survey. There will be a facilitator with each group, not to lead the session but to get the conversations started and keep everyone on track with the discussions. Once this was completed, we came up with the name of our professional learning, Greenup County Growth Circles or GC2 for short. Our logo was designed by our high school art teacher, it is displayed on the infographic.
My team and I wanted to get an idea of what our colleagues thought about professional development so we created a short online survey to gather their responses. You can find the results of that survey and the questions we posed to the teachers by viewing attachments A and B. They gave us great feedback on what they would like to know more about, which included 68% wanting more on curriculum and instruction. Next on the CTEPS pathway was to create product(s) that introduce our project to specific audiences and essentially ‘gets the word out’ about what we are trying to accomplish. Our products are an anticipation video that will be shown to the entire faculty a few weeks to a month before the first PD event, this will give the teachers a quick idea and intrigue them to want to know more about this new style of professional learning. The second is an infographic that will be sent within a few days to promote the first PD event.
The original goal was to conduct the newly styled professional development before the end of the 2016-17 school year, but time and logistics prevented that from occurring. Our new goal is to implement the sessions during the 2017-18 school year around the district-wide and building administration determined professional development days. Our mission is to show our fellow teachers that professional learning isn’t drudgery or filled with information that we can’t immediately incorporate into our classrooms. We want to celebrate our colleagues by allowing them to talk about the good strategies and procedures they are doing in their classrooms with others. We believe that not all educational learning must come from spending thousands of dollars or require hours of sitting and getting. Professional learning can be free, quick, and beneficial all within our own backyard. This is why we feel that GC2 will grow the learning of teachers...one circle at a time.
My mother was an elementary teacher for over 35 years. I remember her attending after school meetings and travelling multiple days in the summer to attend full day “PD” sessions. She never seemed to like the idea of sitting in 8 hour meetings when she could be enjoying the summer sunshine. When I began teaching, I was well aware of the professional development requirement and had a preconceived notion of what would occur during the meetings. Essentially, I went into many sessions with an attitude of boredom, “I’m doing this because I have to do it”, and not expecting to gain much information. This isn’t to say that my district’s professional development choices are bad, boring or not useful to myself and my students. In fact, our district leaders strive to create sessions that are relevant to every grade level, follow the current educational trend, and can be applicable at any time to any teacher. The question may be asked at this point, “What is the problem”? There isn’t necessarily a problem, however, more of a ‘not using our in-house resources’ that I think we should explore.
I began to have the idea of using our own teachers and faculty to conduct professional development after I started to attend conferences and learning sessions outside of my district. The first conference that sparked my interest was the Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teachers and Teacher (ECET2) in Morehead, Kentucky in 2015. ECET2 is a new style of professional learning that is heating up the educational world across the country. It is a one day learning conference where teachers are sharing their ideas and resources to other teachers. It is a time to celebrate the profession of teaching and provides an opportunity for educators to network together building friendships and contacts. ECET2 includes a ‘meeting of the minds’ three times during the day called Colleague Circles. It consists of 6-10 teachers sitting at a large round table and discussing pre-written questions that address common challenges regardless of school districts. I was excited after attending my first ECET2 and began to get a renewed interest in professional learning sessions. Another PD style that is currently spreading across the country are EdCamps. These are dubbed as ‘unconferences’ where the schedule isn’t created until the participants arrive at the venue. The hosts will set up a large white board with times and room locations, attendees will fill in titles of sessions based on what they want to contribute to the day’s learning outcome. When the schedule is full, participants choose where they want to go and visit those sessions always remembering to use the Rule of Two Feet, if a session isn’t working for you, find one that is.
Though I liked the concepts of both professional learning styles, I didn’t think much about them or how to approach the idea of implementing them at my high school until I learned about CTEPS. I discovered Classroom Teachers Enacting Positive Solutions (CTEPS) through a fellow teacher and CTEPS alumni Carly Baldwin. She encouraged me to apply and I was accepted a few months later. Lauren Hill has created a phenomenal program that walks educators through a series of steps and levels to help formulate ideas, create a goal and ultimately implement a plan of action. Along with alumni turned coaches and our bird groups, we have access to many additional ideas, opinions, and guides that give us the ability to produce a program that addresses an issue, problem, or concern that we have within our respective school environments.
My product changed multiple times during the year-long CTEPS adventure. I ultimately decided to focus on my initial idea of using the teachers within my building to discover, create, and facilitate professional learning sessions. After much consideration, I approached my principal with my idea. I wanted to combine the unconference atmosphere of EdCamps and the colleague circles of ECET2 along with the roundtable module of professional development used at the AP Human Geography Reading each year to create a “hybrid child” of Greenup County High School’s own professional learning style. My principal was receptive to the idea which allowed me to continue with my journey through CTEPS.
I knew that the task would be larger than what one individual could handle on their own, so I gained the advice and work of three colleagues to become my team. These three teachers are our librarian, an English teacher and one of my fellow Social Studies teachers. Each of them quickly accepted my idea and are eager to help me in whatever way I may need. The concept was relatively simple, we want to have an hour of professional learning broken into 3 to 4 session segments. The topics will be determined by the teachers attending, sans the first inaugural PD which will have topics already chosen based on a survey. There will be a facilitator with each group, not to lead the session but to get the conversations started and keep everyone on track with the discussions. Once this was completed, we came up with the name of our professional learning, Greenup County Growth Circles or GC2 for short. Our logo was designed by our high school art teacher, it is displayed on the infographic.
My team and I wanted to get an idea of what our colleagues thought about professional development so we created a short online survey to gather their responses. You can find the results of that survey and the questions we posed to the teachers by viewing attachments A and B. They gave us great feedback on what they would like to know more about, which included 68% wanting more on curriculum and instruction. Next on the CTEPS pathway was to create product(s) that introduce our project to specific audiences and essentially ‘gets the word out’ about what we are trying to accomplish. Our products are an anticipation video that will be shown to the entire faculty a few weeks to a month before the first PD event, this will give the teachers a quick idea and intrigue them to want to know more about this new style of professional learning. The second is an infographic that will be sent within a few days to promote the first PD event.
The original goal was to conduct the newly styled professional development before the end of the 2016-17 school year, but time and logistics prevented that from occurring. Our new goal is to implement the sessions during the 2017-18 school year around the district-wide and building administration determined professional development days. Our mission is to show our fellow teachers that professional learning isn’t drudgery or filled with information that we can’t immediately incorporate into our classrooms. We want to celebrate our colleagues by allowing them to talk about the good strategies and procedures they are doing in their classrooms with others. We believe that not all educational learning must come from spending thousands of dollars or require hours of sitting and getting. Professional learning can be free, quick, and beneficial all within our own backyard. This is why we feel that GC2 will grow the learning of teachers...one circle at a time.
Jill Armstrong is a Social Studies Teacher at Greenup County High School. She is an AP Human Geography Reader, 2016-17 CTEPS Team Member and advisor to the GCHS chapter of Rho Kappa along with being on the Rho Kappa National Advisory Board.
Use Jill's video and infographic to personalize professional learning.
