Judith Warren Little on the Relationship between Professional Community and Professional Development

Judith Warren Little’s essay “Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School” is a significant essay for its description and justification of professional community at an educational institution. Little's essay is directed at K-12 education, but I think her comments may apply to college campuses as well.

The essay gives abundant food-for-thought about the nature of professional development and how it meshes with professional development. My summary will be selective and I’ll report only the ideas that are most relevant to my project.

A significant change in educator professional learning is a shift from individual expertise and commitment to the institution’s expertise and commitment. In other words, previously most professional development aimed to improve educators’ teaching skills; whereas nowadays educators engage in professional learning mostly to serve a larger goal of institutional improvement (e.g., improving student success).

A shift from an individual educators’ development plan to the development of the whole educational institution as a whole occurs because the institution is the entity responsible for student success. A resulting implication is that professional learning should be a social endeavor rather than an individual and solitary activity.

Little argues that professional community is a necessary part of any successful school. In fact, as professional community becomes an integral component of student success, the very essence of professional development evolves into a broader and deeper sense of professional learning. Unfortunately, many of these beneficial changes are conceptual and theoretical rather than practical and actual.

At the same time, the concepts of cooperation and collaboration shouldn’t be confused with professional community. Accomplishing tasks together (i.e., cooperation and collaboration) does not mean the same thing as developing trust, respect, and a mutual responsibility for student learning (i.e., community).

Because professional community can be difficult to preserve, specific communication practices, and interactional resources and protocols can help educators create and maintain professional community. Furthermore, educators must embrace and enact values that support learning.

The relationship between professional development (i.e., techniques to enhance teaching) and professional community (i.e., cultivating trust and respect) is a reciprocal relationship. Successful professional learning is a combination of professional development and professional community.

And that leads to my own personal thesis: professional learning = professional development plus professional community. Or, put another way: PL = PD + PC.

citation: Judith Warren Little. “Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School.” Washington, DC: National Education Assn., Dec. 2006. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/mf_pdreport.pdf

Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (part 2)

In my previous post, I summarized the first half of Linda Shadiow’s book What Our Stories Teach Us, and described how educators can use stories as a tool for professional learning. This is accomplished by, first, identifying stories of “critical moments” within our professional life, and second, analyzing those stories to uncover their significance. Now I'll continue this summary by describing the process of locating the underlying ideology revealed by the story.

Once you have identified a story and analyzed it, the third step is to use the story to identify the claims and assertions underlying your educational practices. Specifically, you try to understand what your story reveals about what you think about education, about yourself, about your methods and teaching style, and about your students. In short, your story exemplifies values, and you want to figure out what those values are and what they mean.

A story’s values are disclosed through (among other things) turning points in the story (moments that mark a clear before-and-after sequence in the plot), dialectical tensions, and dissonances. For example, stories may exemplify tensions or disconnects between opposing inclinations such as: intentions to act vs. actual behavior, what an educator wants to do vs. what they should do, actions that are good for us vs. actions that are good for students, and routine or ordinary events vs. extraordinary or unusual events.

The benefit of story analysis is that it shows to us the frameworks that underlie our teaching practices. Thereby we have a better feel for which of those frameworks we want to keep in place or strengthen, and which one we might want to reconsider or change.

And then, ironically, analyzing our stories of educational moments creates new stories (i.e., that time we analyzed our stories) that we reflect upon and share later on.

Shadiow also presented many of these ideas at a POD Network (Professional and Organizational Development Network) conference in 2010. The conference materials show that the session followed the book by encouraging session participants to identify an educational story, analyze the story for its components, and search for the underlying frameworks revealed by the story.

In the session description, Shadiow argues that educators may seek to make positive changes in their mid-career teaching practices, but may not have an easy way to accomplish that change. The solution, she offers, is to apply an auto-ethnographic analysis of one’s teaching stories to uncover or excavate the ideology or framework that allows for change.

The remaining pages of the conference session materials include handouts and worksheets that show the kind of story analysis she advocates throughout her book.

citations:

Linda K. Shadiow. What OurStories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Linda K. Shadiow. “CriticallyReflective Teaching: Excavating Assumptions and Pratices.” POD AnnualConference, St. Louis, Nov. 2010.

Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (Part 1)

Linda Shadiow's book What Our Stories Teach Us is an exploration of the role of story and narrative in faculty development. She provides a thorough program for analyzing teaching stories in order to learn from them and improve our educational practices.

Early in the book Shadiow establishes a three-part pattern for working with stories in a professional development context: identify, then analyze, then interpret and use stories. In this post I describe the first of these steps and part of the second step; a later blog post will pick up where this post leaves off.

Shadiow begins by explaining why faculty should want to use stories as a part of their professional learning. In short, stories are an integral part of our teaching identities (our identities as educators). Professional development means we improve our use of skills, but more directly, professional development means we understand and change our teaching identities and our persona.

Analysis of stories helps us uncover and understand the assumptions we make that structure our teaching practice. Put another way, stories help us get at the autobiographical roots of our educational practice. In this way I can't help but think of stories as like anthropological artifacts of our educational ideologies.

Analysis of our teaching stories leads to what Shadiow calls "double-loop learning" which is hunting and questioning our pedagogical assumptions (as opposed to "single-loop learning" which is increasing our teaching efficiency via new teaching techniques).

Once we are convinced that collecting and using stories is an important part of our professional learning, we then need to collect and code those stories for their content. As part of this process, good questions to ask are: Why did you choose this particular story to tell? Why has this story stayed with you? Of all the stories you could tell, why did you choose to tell this particular story in this particular context?

Once you have selected a story to analyze, you move on to identifying patterns within the stories. Stories are made up of settings, plot events, and characters. The characters of our stories can be especially interesting; we should keep in mind there are multiple versions of us in and around the stories we tell. There is the individual who is telling the story and there is the individual who the story is about. There is us the protagonist; us the narrator; us the learning and us the teacher; us the self as we were back then and us the self as we are today.

In a later blog post, I'll continue this summary of Shadiow's book by describing more about story analysis and how to locate the assumptions that structure the educator's ideology.

citation: Linda K. Shadiow. What Our Stories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Patrick Lowenthal on Online Storytelling as Professional Development

Patrick Lowenthal opens with the claim that current professional development activities don't actually change faculty behavior. As a result, he advocates storytelling (and specifically online storytelling) as a potential solution to this problem. Storytelling, he goes on to say, is not discussed much in the professional development literature, but it is discussed in the educational literature, and that's where he borrows many of his ideas from.

Stories, according to Lowenthal, have four characteristics that make them worthwhile professional development tools and that also separate them from other types of explanatory discourse. First, stories deal with concrete examples (rather than vague abstractions).

My commentary: Stories deal with common (or even universal) issues and conflicts that people experience and that audiences relate to. Likewise, stories also involve specific characters, acting in specific settings, with specific plot events. Insomuch as stories address larger themes, those themes are manifest within concrete and detailed situations.

Second, stories provide frameworks and contexts that situate meaning (rather than meaning embedded in the message itself, independent of any context).

My commentary: The situatedness of a story shows us how the story's meaning is bound to that context and makes sense mainly within that context. Explanatory messages, on the other hand, are meant to convey ideas that exist and make sense separate from the situation and without much of a context.

Third, stories build personal experiences that facilitate meaning making and memory (rather than merely transfer information).

My commentary: The audience of any communication event will experience that communication event personally and socially. If that communication is explanatory, on the one hand, our experience of the discourse will be information-rich, literal, and we will feel disconnected from the sources of that information. If that communication event is a story, on the other hand, our experience of the discourse is more likely to be eventful, symbolic, we are more likely to feel like we're participating in the events themselves.

And fourth, stories are embedded with the social context in which meaning is created socially (rather than other forms of discourse which create meaning in the language of the message itself).

My commentary: Because stories reveal specific and concrete instances, and because stories are embedded within contexts and frameworks, and because stories build experiences, the social quality of storytelling means the relational aspects of the communication are as important (or more important) than the content aspects. Stories are understood through relationships and social interaction more than explanations (which are understood largely through clear and effective expression).

Lowenthal makes one more point which I'm mostly glossing over here. He claims that moving professional development storytelling online means that digital storytelling applications become a viable option for professional development.

citation: Patrick R. Lowenthal. “Online Faculty Development and Storytelling: An Unlikely Solution to Improving Teacher Quality.” Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. 4.3 (Sept. 2008): 349-356. http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no3/lowenthal_0908.pdf

Appreciative Inquiry, the Golden Circle, and Bread & Butter (and Other Comparable Metaphors)

Simon Sinek's conception of a Golden Circle explains the motivations for change.

The primary motivator for change should be why the change should occur (inspiration for change). Why, in turn, motivates how the change should occur (process for change). How, in turn, motivates what change should occur (product of change).

In other words, motivations should move from the inside of the circle to the outside: why, then how, then what. (Typically, and ineffectively, people try to motivate in the opposite direction: what, then how, then why.)

While Appreciative Inquiry doesn't have a tidy diagram like the Golden Circle, I've seen a nice little triangle, explained by Paula Gunder and Christina Goff from Los Medanos College (and courtesy of the Basic Skills Initiative Leadership Institute) that gets at some of the key qualities of Appreciative Inquiry.

The bottom layer (or foundation) of the triangle is based upon relationships between people. Within relationships people identify the possible changes that the future holds (the next layer up from the bottom). Possibilities, in turn, allow people to formulate plans for action (the third layer up). And plans, in turn, lead to actions carried out by those people (the top of the pyramid).

The wider the layer, the more important it is. Relationships are the largest portion of the pyramid. They require more time, resources, and consideration, to cultivate. In other words, relationships are a fundamental part of the pyramid. Actions, on the other hand, are the top of the pyramid. That doesn't mean they're the least important part (they are, after all, the endpoint or the product of the change the pyramid represents). But they do require less time, resources, and consideration than the lower layers of the pyramid.

The = (equal sign) is the wrong symbol for this relationship because (of course) Appreciative Inquiry and the Golden Circle are not the same thing. But they are comparable. They are analogous to each other. And they are complimentary.

They are peas in a pod.

They are birds of a feather.

They see eye to eye.

Pick your favorite metaphor.

The analogy suggests that relationships should be the primary motivation for making change (i.e., why). Out of those relationships people will recognize possibilities and formulate plans (i.e., how). Actions, then, are merely the relationships, possibilities, and plans manifest in the doing (i.e., what).

The Golden Circle and Appreciative Inquiry. Different ideas expressed in different language. Yet each one gives meaning and clarity to the other.