Teachers as Learners
Dear Families:
While some of you have already had your Family Conferences, the bulk of middle school families will have their conferences tomorrow. Students and advisors have invested significant time in preparing for these conferences and I hope that they provide you with a clear picture of your child’s learning experience so far this year. A key belief that informs these conferences is the idea that students need to reflect in meaningful ways on their experience as learners in order to further the depth of their understanding; it is this act of reflection that helps students to understand in more profound ways their strengths and challenges. It also helps them to take appropriate action to address both of these domains.
The same is true of LREI faculty who are fully committed to the idea of being reflective practitioners. A critical component of the work of reflective practitioners is dependent on the time that they are able to spend with other colleagues engaged in purposeful dialog about their practice.
In this spirit, approximately once a month during our Tuesday divisional faculty meetings, middle school faculty members meet in their chosen Professional Learning Group (PLG). PLGs are facilitated by a colleague or a pair of colleagues and represent a forum for shared inquiry and professional growth. The PLGs are non-evaluative and faculty run; they represent a focused and solution-oriented approach to supporting reflective practice. The aim of these meetings is to provide a space for faculty members to exchange ideas, learn from each other and support one another in reaching their professional goals. The group allows each member to examine his/her practice in a non-judgmental and non-evaluative setting. A group succeeds to the extent that it helps all of its members to set and reach their goals and move to a new level of professional practice. This year’s groups have chosen to focus on:
- Differentiated Instruction
- Integrating reading into the curriculum
- Assessment and Action Research
Agnes de Lima observed in The Little Red School House that “we take the child as he is and where he is [and] try to understand him, and then seek to help him understand the kind of world in which he lives and the part he is to play in it.” This represents a core value at LREI and one that hinges on our ability to “fit the school to the child.” This is certainly hard work and while no school can be all things to all children, it does create for us a moral imperative to try our best to meet the learning needs of our students.
Through thoughtful inquiry and reflective practice, teachers can and must come to know their students. This allows teachers to structure the learning experience to meet the varied needs and approaches to learning that are present in the classroom. So from a historical perspective, differentiating instruction is nothing new at LREI. The faculty members who have chosen this as their area of focus are framing their work around the foundational ideas that
- no two children are alike,
- no two children learn in the identical way,
- an enriched environment for one student is not necessarily enriched for another, and
- we should teach children to think for themselves,
Their inquiry recognizes that although essential curricular goals may be similar for all students, the methodologies employed in a classroom must be varied to suit the individual needs of all children. Therefore, learning must be differentiated to be effective. Differentiating instruction calls on teachers to create multiple paths so that students of different abilities, interests or learning needs experience equally appropriate ways to absorb, use, develop and present concepts as a part of the daily learning process. Through their work, the members of this group will make this work the focus of their inquiry.
Assessment is a crucial component of the learning experience for students and structuring meaningful assessments is a demanding and important task for teachers. In addition to the more traditional forms of assessment, like tests and quizzes, which require thoughtful planning and preparation, as a progressive school, we are also committed to the use of meaningful authentic assessments. The creation of these kinds of assessments also require substantial teacher expertise.
Authentic assessments ask students to read real texts and use real materials, to write for authentic purposes about meaningful topics, to confront meaningful problems that may have multiple solutions, and to participate in tasks such as discussions, presentations, experiments, journal and letter writing, and regular revision of their work. Most importantly, authentic assessment values the thinking behind the work, the process, as much as the finished product. As you can well imagine, creating assessments that are focused on clear learning goals and aligned with the curriculum and that are simultaneously relevant to and appropriately challenging for students is no small feat.
The group of faculty members who have decided to dig beneath the surface of their assessments has also chosen to do so using action research as a way of gaining greater insight into their work in this area. Action research is a methodology that calls on teachers to look at their own work and to identify areas of inquiry that can be investigated in their classroom or schools. It is a “reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a ‘community of practice’ to improve the way they address issues and solve problems.”
Reading is a critical cornerstone of the LREI experience. Our third professional learning group has chosen to look at the many ways in which reading is integrated throughout the curriculum. They are approaching this work with a particular focus on connecting with students through texts that are meaningful and relevant to the adolescent experience.
Through targeted readings of thematically related texts and scholarly writings on the integration of reading in the curriculum, group members will become more familiar with a diverse selection of grade level titles so that they can make individual recommendations to students, select titles for literary circles and book partnerships, and supplement classroom libraries. Group members will also share insights on texts and reading strategies and will discuss ways that these texts and strategies can be better implemented into the curriculum and used to better meet the needs of individual students.
While the work of all three Professional Learning Groups allows teachers to focus in on important elements of their teaching practice, ultimately, the work of these groups is focused on enriching the learning experience for all middle school students. What better goal could there be!
Best,
Mark