Education Week - August 22, 2012 - S8

PERSPECTIVE
‘Hybrid’ Educators Forge New Roles
By Sarah Brown Wessling
PERSPECTIVE
PD That’s for Teachers,
And by Teachers
By Meenoo Rami
Every Monday night from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., EST, English
teachers from around the world “meet” via Twitter to share,
reflect, and question their daily practice in the classroom. The
topics covered on #engchat range from teaching Shakespeare
to digital storytelling. Each week, a selected practicing teacher
brings a new perspective, ideas, and questions to the forum.
Participants often leave with more questions than answers—
and that’s a good thing.
This is professional development for teachers, by teachers.
When I started #engchat, I doubted my ability to turn a nebulous
idea into a vibrant community. But that is exactly what
seems to be happening. This Twitter forum has become a central
meeting place for English teachers. Connections and conversations
even extend beyond Monday night chats, with teachers
sharing valuable resources in real-time throughout the week.
They post daily writing prompts, readings, and lesson ideas.
Those in need of inspiration or advice can peruse the feed or
pose a specific question to elicit responses from the community.
Teachers tell me all the time that #engchat is a professional
lifeline, their best professional development.
So how can #engchat help us understand what contributes
to effective professional learning? Here are some factors for administrators
and professional-development leaders to consider:
CHOICE: Can teachers make choices about their professional
learning? All teachers have different needs: Even weekly schoolwide
PD sessions cannot meet the needs of a diverse faculty.
LEADERSHIP: Do you encourage teachers to design and execute
professional-development sessions at your school? How are you
celebrating their strengths and challenging their biases about
learning and teaching? How are you encouraging them to share
their expertise and to envision themselves as professionals?
TIMELINESS: How are you meeting the day-to-day needs of the
teachers at your school? How responsive is your professionaldevelopment
system? Let’s say there’s a teacher in Room 208
who wants to use podcasting as a storytelling tool but feels
overwhelmed by the technology. How can you help this teacher
bridge the gap between the technical issue and pedagogical
idea? What resources can this teacher draw upon?
COMMUNITY: Do the members of the professional-learning
community in your school demonstrate trust, respect, and a
willingness to collaborate?
ITERATIVE: What basic ideas about teaching and learning do
you come back to again and again in professional-development
sessions? Do these ideas relate to core concerns like rigor, engagement,
and connection to students’ lives outside of school?
If not, how might you change that?
There are many formidable challenges in education today, but
there are also many innovative teachers with insightful ideas
about what works in classrooms. Let’s honor that expertise by
building interpersonal and interconnected learning communities
in our schools.
MEENOO RAMI, the coordinator of the #engchat weekly Twitter chat for
English teachers, teaches English at the Science Leadership Academy in
Philadelphia. This essay originally appeared in Education Week Teacher’s
online forum Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable.
8 EDUCATION WEEK 2012 CALENDAR OF EVENTS & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTORY
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One of the undercurrents in recent discussions
about improving professional development is the
role of teachers in creating their own best professional
learning experiences. Whether through
professional-learning communities, online forums,
or attendance at “unconferences,” we teachers are
asserting ourselves in new ways. The landscape of
professional learning is vast, and what we most
need are those assertive teacher voices, bringing
our classrooms into the conversations with the confidence
that we, too, are experts. In order to develop
and utilize that necessary teacher voice and experience,
many schools and districts are creating hybrid
positions where teachers are both in the classroom
and in leadership positions at the same time.
Last year, I took on a hybrid position in my district
that taught me a great deal about the challenges
and celebrations of having this kind of dual
role. My assignment was to teach three high school
English classes in the morning and then coordinate
professional development for the district in the afternoon.
Honestly, I didn’t think there could be a
more ideal situation. I would be able to hone my
leadership skills, have a larger circle of impact, and
still keep my feet firmly grounded in the reality
(and magic) of the classroom. Here’s what I learned:
CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE AND CREDIBILITY.
Whether I was working with administrators or
teachers, being able to talk about my own successes
and vulnerabilities in the classroom spoke volumes.
I wasn’t a talking head, but a colleague who was
also trying to make sense, for example, of the gradual-release-of-responsibility
model in my classroom
as much as through the research.
THE POWER OF TEACHER VOICE. When a school district
or building principal sees the impact of teacher
voice on professional learning, a new culture for supporting
effective teaching can arise. Recognizing and
cultivating this voice is not only important in our
own communities, but will benefit our entire education
system.
THE ILLUSION OF BALANCE. Perhaps the greatest
challenge of my hybrid-teacher assignment was the
feeling that I was never in the right place at the right
time. On paper it seems clear enough: teaching in the
morning, leadership in the afternoon. But despite educators’
predisposition to compartmentalization (i.e.,
with bells every 44 minutes), the reality is that both
jobs don’t live in neat compartments; instead, they
thrive on waves. The classroom may need to take precedence
for a few days before you have time to devote
your attention fully to the PD-leader job. Learning to
ride these (sometimes simultaneous) waves without
falling under is the real challenge. Having a network
of trusted and like-minded colleagues can make the
difference.
So as we continue to understand how to provide the
best professional learning for our teachers, we must
also remember the ways in which cultivating teacher
voice in our processes will lead us to more vibrant
communities of learners.
SARAH BROWN WESSLING, the 2010 National Teacher
of the Year, is a high school English teacher at Johnston
High School in Johnston, Iowa. This essay originally
appeared in Education Week Teacher’s Teaching Ahead:
A Roundtable.
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1
EDUCATION WEEK
VOL. 31, NO. 37 • AUGUST 8, 2012
AMERICAN EDUCATION’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD • © 2012 Editorial Projects in Education • $4
By Catherine Gewertz
On the verge of signing a contract to
RURAL ENGAGEMENT: Catherine Schlenker, center, works at a Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer camp with fellow
students, from back left: Abigail Melton, Grace Lee, Nadir Dunns-Thornes, and Jayna Viswalingam, far right. All are 13 years old.
Ms. Schlenker was among the rural students taking part through a scholarship program offered for the first time this year. PAGE 14
help design assessments for the common
standards,ACT Inc. has withdrawn
from the project amid conflict-of-interest
questions sparked by its own development
of a similar suite of tests.
Even though it involves only a small
subcontract, the move by the Iowabased
test-maker, and the questions
from the state assessment consortium
that propelled it, have set off ripples of
reaction and reflection in the insular
educational testing industry. That industry
is reshaping itself in response
to the unprecedented project by two
big groups of states to create new tests
for the Common Core State Standards,
using $360 million in federal Race to
the Top money.
Alarms Sounded
As Federal-Aid Ax
Heaves Into View
Cuts’ Fate Up to Congress
By Alyson Klein
Education advocates and the
Obama administration are anxiously
eyeing a series of across-the-board
cuts set to hit a broad swath of federal
domestic and military spending
programs early next year, unless a
sharply divided Congress can agree
on a long-term plan to put the nation’s
fiscal house in order.
Most education lobbyists expect
such a deal will prove elusive in the
months leading up to the November
elections, making the prospect of
looming cuts in education and other
programs a potentially volatile issue
in the congressional and presidential
campaigns. Congress then might have
to scramble to reach an agreement on
averting the cuts in a lame-duck session
right after the elections.
For now, the administration is making
the case that lawmakers should
spare education from cuts that the
Congressional Budget Office has estimated
at up to 7.8 percent of the U.S.
Department of Education’s budget,
which is $68.1 billion in fiscal 2012.
The proposed cuts would “put at risk
all that we’ve accomplished in educaPAGE
27>
Tension Builds Over AFT Reform Agenda
By Stephen Sawchuk
Detroit
Can a teachers’ union successfully be both a
hardball-playing defender of its rights and a collaborative
force for the common good?
It is both a question of philosophy and, increas-
ingly, one of policy direction for the American Federation
of Teachers, whose biennial convention
here showed delegates grappling with the tension
between the two approaches to unionism.
Though the AFT has, in recent years, been viewed
as the less militant of the two national teachers’
unions, its delegates spoke forcefully against attacks
on unions that have been couched in the
guise of education reform, took a stand against
the high-stakes use of standardized testing, and
passed a “solidarity pledge” on behalf of local affiliates
it asserts have been subject to unjust bargaining
situations.
At the same time, the union’s president, Randi
Weingarten, continued to call for affiliates to adopt
a “solution-driven unionism”—a phrase that appeared
to be a further gloss on her long-standing
call for unions to collaborate or reach compromises
with management.
“I don’t know to what extent the full-scale
onslaught in Wisconsin and Ohio is changing
all of this,” Richard Kahlenberg, the author of
PAGE 21>
The discussions offer a glimpse into
some of the thorny issues that crop
up as the two gargantuan assessment
projects move forward. How does each
group manage intellectual-property
concerns and potentially competing
interests when 20-plus states and hundreds
of players are involved? Even as
those questions elude easy answers, the
PAGE 22>
Publishers’ Guide
For Mathematics
Stresses Focus
By Erik W. Robelen
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS
When Technology Tools Trump Teachers
By Ian Quillen
Of all the recent budget cuts made by the
Eagle County, Colo., school district—the loss of
89 staff jobs through attrition and layoffs, a 1.5
percent across-the-board pay cut, and the introduction
of three furlough days—none sparked
as much anger or faced the same scrutiny as
the decision to cut three foreign-language
teaching positions and replace them with online
instruction.
At a spring school board meeting, supporters
of the targeted programs in French and German,
as well as the affected teachers, railed against
A new set of “publishers’ criteria”
crafted by the lead writers of the common
core in mathematics is intended to
help reshape K-8 instructional materials
nationwide by spelling out what it
means to align faithfully with the math
standards adopted by 45 states and the
District of Columbia.
The document blends general guid-
the 6,200-student district for replacing face-toface
instructors with a digital option they argued
would not be as rich or as meaningful.
The highly charged response reflects the fear
many teachers are beginning to feel that technology
could push them out of their jobs, especially
in an era of persistently tight budgets.
Emerging management models that rely on a
smaller number of highly paid teachers supported
by new technology and a larger roster of
relatively low-paid paraprofessionals are also
fueling such fears.
Those worries seem likely to grow, even though
PAGE 20>
ance with some real specifics, such as
suggesting how long textbooks should
be—fewer than 200 pages at the elementary
level—and at what grade
level it’s appropriate for chapter tests
to address particular topics.
A key mantra is the standards’ push
for focus—covering fewer topics in
greater depth—which the authors acknowledge
“can seem like hard medicine
for an educational system addicted
to coverage.”
Some in the education and publishing
fields have offered generally favorPAGE
19 >
edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY
Questions
Dog Design
Of Tests
ACT Gives Up Contract
For Common Assessments
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Education Week - August 22, 2012

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