Get the RSS feed | Elizabeth Helfant Archives

Communities of Designers and Professional Learning
by Elizabeth Helfant


Learning, the ultimate goal of education, is not an optional activity for educators anymore. Gone are the days when doing the same activity year after year yields satisfactory results. Change, like it or not, occurs far too rapidly and is a necessary component of contemporary education. Skills students need evolve, technologies that can be employed change rapidly, and the learning profile of the students we serve seems to shift weekly. To stay current requires a significant investment in personal and institutional learning. It is ongoing learning that sustains change and will allow schools to proactively meet students’ needs rather than reactively and defensively guard against change and the work that it requires. This ongoing learning requires a variety of mechanisms to support it. Faculty can be engaged with a Personal Learning Network (PLN), a Professional Learning Community (PLC), and a Community of Designers.

 

All readers of this blog are well aware of the power of personal learning networks, a concept best encapsulated by a diagram put forth by Alec Couros and later made more colorful by Silvia Tolisano. Many have participated in Professional Learning Communities as described in Senge’s work, The Fifth Discipline. Senge defines learning communities as places “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together" (p. 3) Effective Professional Learning Communities have several key attributes:

  • ·         Shared vision and values
  • ·         Collaborative culture
  • ·         Focus on examining outcomes to improve student learning
  • ·         Supportive and shared leadership
  • ·         Shared personal practice

A more complete explanation of these attributes is found on the website of The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement. This site accurately states the two fundamental requirements for a PLC:

  • Knowledge is situated in the day-to-day experiences of teachers and is best understood through critical reflection with others who share the same experiences (Haar, 2003; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2006).
  • Actively engaging teachers in PLCs will increase their professional knowledge and enhance student learning (Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2006).

The difference in the PLN and PLC rests in the role of the institution. A PLN is centered on an individual’s learning needs, some of which are rooted in professional growth. The PLC is driven by institutional learning goal and initiatives, common experiences and collective, shared refection. On some level, most schools probably have a PLC. However, the professional learning community that exists informally will typically be weak because it will be fragmented into those who willing want to learn and those who choose not to and it will lack the shared vision and values attribute. If I reflect on my own institutional PLC I have to acknowledge that it is loosely formed and just beginning to be organized around shared vision and values. The leadership has owned the PLC and provided several significant opportunities for institutional learning to occur around the topics of curriculum design, differentiation, and assessment strategies. Our PLC will benefit greatly as we acknowledge its existence and begin to be more intentional about the learning we are collectively investing in.

 A third mechanism to support learning is the Community of Designers as defined by Mishra, Koehler, and Zhao in Faculty Development by Design, Integrating Technology in Higher Education. This mechanism is one that allows for the development of faculty who have a solid TPCK knowledge base, a base that understands how pedagogy, content and technology can be interwoven to produce excellent contemporary teaching.  A Community of Designers is (taken directly from the book) an approach to professional development that asks teachers to “focus on a problem of practice and seek ways to use technology (and thereby learn about technology) to address the problem.”  “By participating in these communities of design, teachers build something that is sensitive to the subject matter (instead of learning the technology in general) and the specific instructional goals (instead of general ones). Therefore, every act of design is always a process of weaving together components of technology, content, and pedagogy.” “In a nutshell, a design community is a group of individuals (teacher educational faculty, educational technology specialists and students, pre-service teachers, and in-service teachers) working collaboratively to design and develop technological solutions to authentic pedagogical problems faced by the teacher education faculty. The essence of this approach lies with four key words: community, design, products/solution, and authentic problems.”

While I’ve used Mishra, Koehler and Zhao’s words and their communities of designers were created among teachers and pre-service teachers, this mode certainly translated to our new approach to professional development. This approach is partially a subset of the institutional professional learning community. As we move forward with our curriculum overhaul, each grade level team will design one unit in a community of designers. The community will consist of the teachers teaching the course (anywhere between 2 and 5 teachers), the librarian, the instructional technologist (me), the learning specialist, and in some cases a teacher from another discipline (a science teacher with the math units). We’ll use the TPCK model and will consider the role of content, pedagogy, and technology. We’ll use UbD and determine what the essential questions are for the unit. We’ll decide what skills need to be taught and will pull form our every evolving notion of the 21st century skill set and contemporary literacy. We’ll look really closely at how we plan to assess students using a range of assessment strategies including preassessment, formative and portfolio assessment. We’ll design some authentic learning tasks like designing a kit for the St Louis Science Center, creating an electronic exhibit, producing a documentary about a global issue or writing a graphic novel collaboratively as a class. Armed with that information, we will design the learning process in a way that leverages technology to strengthen our ability to get the desired results.  We’ll go back and identify what needs to be differentiated, understanding that technology can be a powerful tool to deliver differentiated content and to allow for differentiated student artifacts of learning. We’ll determine what the final summative assessment will be and because we are developing a more sophisticated understanding of TPCK, it won’t necessarily be a test or a paper.

We have done this process twice this year and found it to be very effective. I bring an understanding of technology tools and their application to the table. The learning specialist has far more expertise in differentiation and learning profiles. The teacher from another discipline helps make trans-disciplinary connections. The librarian ensures that we select the proper supporting resources and implement information literacy/research skills where they need to be. The conversations about assessment that occur during the learning process have led to advanced discussions on what rigor in learning looks like. They have us actively discussing how to include learning profiles instead of a grade at the completion of a unit. A learning profile would give the student feedback on their product, their process, and their progress. They have moved us into the realm of portfolio assessment and considering how we might use portfolios to assess skill development across disciplines. There is much work to be done but Communities of Design just might be the vehicle for developing TPCK proficiency and designing some powerful, engaging curriculum.

We’ll still provide traditional conference and workshop opportunities. We have an entire line up this summer and you are all invited too.   You might notice that we have an assessment week lined up that is in part a direct result of conversations that emerged from our Communities of Designers, our Professional Learning Community, and the Personal Learning Networks of several teachers. The key to good PD however, is rooted in the follow up and the time spent moving what is learned in PD opportunities into practice. The PLC and the Community of Designers provides structures that facilitate that transition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.

Post new comment

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>