Practicing What I Preach

As you know by now, I am looking for ways to make the professional development I provide more valuable to teachers. Last week I tried something new in a workshop I was conducting for a group of teachers. Rather than create a tightly structured agenda where I filled every moment with activities and talk, I did what I often encourage teachers to do — I created spaces in the agenda for the learners to become co-creators of their own learning experience.

I started each day with a section called “Feedback on Feedback” where I took time to address any feedback I’d received about the workshop and make adjustments to the agenda based on the needs of the participants.  If something wasn’t working, we nixed it right there and tried something else instead. If participants didn’t feel that an activity would help them reach the objectives for the day, we came up with an alternative.

I also included time for teachers to share their own strategies. Sometimes I invited certain teachers to share, other times I announced that we would have time to share and let teachers volunteer. Each teacher had five minutes to share a strategy or resource that was relevant to the instructional principles we were discussing and take questions from the other participants. They could share a strategy they were already using successfully with their own students or one they had developed as a result of the workshop.  I learned as much as the other workshop participants during these sessions.  In fact, these sessions were amazing for how they fostered a learning community where we were all co-creators of the learning experience.

I also included time for teachers to work together in subject-alike groups to apply what they were learning and create resources they could use immediately with their students. This was a chance for participants to find practical applications for the theorhetical principles they were learning.

Finally, for each learning activity, I included a “rouge” option. Partipants had the choice of completing the activity I planned, or they could negotiate an alternative activity they would complete instead. As long as they could demonstrate how their choice would help them achieve the objectives of the workshop, they were free to pursue it. Some of the best insights of the day came from people who chose to “go rouge.”

It was a huge risk but it paid off. The participants told me that it was a much more rewarding workshop for them and I can see from the activity on our follow-up electronic community that the participants are using what they learned in their classrooms and sharing it with their colleagues. They have an enthusiasm for the project that wasn’t present before and I believe that these teachers now own what they have learned and are adapting — not adopting– these strategies into their own instructional practice.

Here’s what I learned. While I am a firm advocate of creating spaces in lesson for students to take ownership over their own learning, I have always been afraid to do the same for adults. I thought that if I did, I would seem unprepared. I felt like I needed to have highly structured activities or people would feel that my workshops were a waste of time. What I am learning is that when I let go of the false notions that I have to be the expert and allow room for co-creating, the learning experiences in my workshops can model the types of learning experiences I believe should be happening in the classroom.  I cannot forget that the same principles that work for helping children learn also work for helping adults learn. I plan to spend more time practicing what I preach.

And the quest continues…

~Robyn R. Jackson

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This entry was posted on January 25th, 2010 and is filed under Classroom Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.