The way some districts approach Professional Development may not always be the best, and they tend to use the same methods, the same materials, and look at it in the same way, year after year. In this post, we interview Lacey Eckels, Science Instructional Lead at Jefferson County Public Schools, and unpack how they use Curriculum-Based Professional Learning. With this approach, teachers are experiencing the instructional materials as learners, before they’re asked to implement lessons in their classrooms through PD.
” [Our District] is in year two of a three-year phase-in of some high-quality instructional materials across the all our middle schools, Open SciEd”
If you’re not familiar, Open SciEd is an open educational platform where they’ve built instructional materials to support equitable science learning aligned to the NGSS. They’ve completed curriculum for Middle School and are also working on Elementary and High School content. All Open SciEd units are built around a storyline or a phenomenon where students make sense of something that happens in the real world.
“Our district has about 30 Middle Schools and about 90 teachers each grade level. We are eating the elephant one bite at a time; purchasing and implementing these new instructional materials. That alone is exciting to both teachers and kids; however, I felt strongly that there needed to be a shift in our professional learning that goes around it, right?“
“High-quality instructional materials are really important! Tons of research supports its importance, but I think the other side is the high-quality professional learning that goes along with it. We know that our teachers jobs are changing yearly with our new standards and that ‘raise your hands and give a right answer’ approach is no longer appropriate. We want them to wrestle with complex problems, collaborate with each other, investigate, and apply new information in creative ways.”
The language she uses to talk about how teachers make sense of novel phenomena/curricula is exactly the same as how educators refer to students making sense of novel phenomena.
“However, this isn’t how our teachers learned when they were in school. It’s also not how most teacher preparation programs developed for adults to lead these classrooms. Knowing that, what we’ve done to get teacher buy-in and excitement around professional learning is the Curriculum-Based Professional Learning Approach, where teachers are experiencing as learners the instructional materials that they are asked to implement in their classrooms.
The buy-in grows exponentially! Handing a teacher great instructional materials isn’t really enough; handing them great instructional materials while teaching them how to use those instructional materials, I still don’t believe is enough. It is the third piece that makes the difference; handing out great instructional materials, teaching all the ins-and-outs of the operational side of those materials, and then make you experience those instructional materials as a learner, so that you know what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like! You’re less likely to fall back on how you learn science as a learner which is the ‘raise your hand call on you’ what I would like to call the Ping-Pong approach when we’re looking for the Volleyball approach of learning”
There’s a lot to unpack here! Ping-pong vs Volleyball? In ping-pong we’re going back and forth, just asking and answering one-sided questions. On the other hand, the volleyball approach asks students and teachers to consider phenomena from different viewpoints have a lot of folks weigh in to develop ideas as a group!
If you’d like to watch the rest of the interview with Lacey, click on this link, and feel free to share this post with your colleagues who might find it interesting!
