What fascinated me the most from our readings and video
presentations on the educational systems in Finland, Singapore, and Korea was
the rigorous teacher professional development. I’ve mentioned in other blogs
that I was fortunate to have had a wonderful mentor teacher my first two years
of teaching that modeled for me best practice pedagogy in and out of the
classroom. But that mentorship paled in comparison to what other countries are
doing to ensure their teachers are of highest quality (reduced teaching load
and shared planning time for beginning teachers!). Instructional rounds, or
teacher observations, I feel, are imperative to improving teacher practice. Getting
into classrooms to observe other teachers’ practice has been a part of our
school improvement process. I’ve taken many best practice ideas from other
teachers through these observations and used them in my own classroom. I’ve
heard horror stories of beginning teachers thrown into classrooms with little
or no support system from administration or faculty. That is just unacceptable
to me. The video showing teacher-mentor collaboration after an observation was
eye-opening. I wondered how many of my colleagues would have submitted to that
kind of critique and taken the advice to improve their instruction.
I appreciate how Jessie’s school invests in teacher
professional development. I’m sure that makes the teachers at her school feel
valued. Having shared collaboration time is valued in our school, but it’s just
minutes a day, not enough time to make any earth shattering changes in our classrooms.
Darling-Hammond says, “Whereas teachers in high-achieving nations spend 40-60%
of their time preparing and learning to teach well, most U.S. teachers have no
time to work with colleagues during the school day.” This is so true. My
grade-level team spends evenings sometimes until 6pm planning and
collaborating, yet we don’t really have specific, targeted goals that can make
substantive changes in our classrooms.
I agree with you on improving our teaching practices through collaboration, observation, and feedback. I think there are two issues: trust in each other and time. I think that trust could be mostly resolved if we had more time to work together and had a common vision of what we want our schools to be. Good job.
ReplyDeleteI was fortunate to have the same mentor you had for my first two years in Lapwai as well. I think she helped make me a better teacher and I will be eternally grateful to her for all of her dedication and time. Unfortunately even though the members of the leadership team at our school have had the opportunity to participate in the instructional rounds and benefit from this I have not been able to do this. I think I could really benefit from seeing other classrooms and applying those practices in my own classroom. I hope that more of our staff will get this chance! I so agree we need more time to prepare and learn to teach well. I really value collaboration time but it just never seems to be enough time!
ReplyDelete