Teachers answer to principals who answer to superintendents who answer to elected school boards. Yet states have central offices like the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) of North Carolina that want to support education improvement but don’t have the ability to mandate or do more than pass state policy. Take a step higher, and you have the same issue. National regions like the Southern Regional Education Board, SREB, are tasked with supporting and improving education, but they don’t even have the ability to pass policy. How can large entities like SREB and DPI, entities that exist for supporting and improving education, impact what happens in the classroom in their territories?
This week I’ve been working on getting a Race to the Top grant contract with North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI), and I’m excited about the opportunity. I’ve been wrestling with some of the potential deliverables a contract like that might demand. One challenge a state central office faces with a statewide professional development program is scale. How do a dozen or so state level contractors facilitate statewide education improvement? It’s a hairy question.
It doesn’t really matter what the content is quite yet. It doesn’t matter if the state wants teachers to innovate with blended strategies or track data to differentiate for individual student needs. The question is delivery. How does a relatively small, central force deliver the content? What’s impossible is to expect a dozen or so experts to get in front of a hundred thousand teachers across the state and facilitate any real change. Improvement, after all, takes more than a one-hour presentation.
So far the best answer I’ve managed to come up with is a statewide digital professional learning community, but how does one start something so incredibly large without it being “one more thing” on teachers’ plates? If it feels like one more thing to teachers and isn’t picked up and used by districts, it’s probably going to be put down and forgotten by everyone relatively quickly.
The trick is to blend the PLC processes and platform into processes the teachers are already following and maybe even save them some time while doing so. To illustrate, email and text messaging didn’t come about because someone pushed out professional development in the U.S. They became major methods of communication because they are faster than the postal service and calling people. Likewise, if teachers can see the time savings in what they are already doing, they will adopt a digital professional learning community process.
Platform is an important question. If the state uses a big, complicated, expensive new website that requires training and tons of work at the central level, then it looks like a ‘one more thing’ anti-solution. If, instead, the state uses what’s already out there, then we’ll have one foot on the path to success the day we start.
Edmodo is a social networking platform for educators, and coupled with a service like Yahoo Groups, the two become a PLC connector across the state and an a-synchronous meeting option for faculty meetings – a major time saver. There are lots of digital platforms out there, and it’s not necessary that everyone use only one -a school level community can happen on Facebook or Twitter, and the state can provide a resource base and a report-out location on Edmodo. As long as there is a norm set for reporting up and a resource base set for pushing down that works with the local level platforms, there is no need standardize. Standardizing kills innovation, and nobody wants that!
When teachers in small numbers across the state start to participate in a statewide digital professional learning community, the delivery of content suddenly has a home and the team is working toward a tipping point. Until the state reaches the tipping point, the PLC process is a sell. The state contractor team’s role is to get as many time saving tools and tips out there as possible; it’s not a good time to overburden and add to the responsibilities of the teachers across the state, although that’s usually a professional development pro’s first move.
Instead, the team should work together with local leadership to incorporate as much of the teachers’ responsibilities as is possible into the platform. Call it one stop shopping for teacher to-dos. Share how teachers and schools and systems are using it across the state with local leaders, and the professional development becomes like a kick-started motor that runs on positive outcomes. The state leaders provide the kick, and teachers and administrators across the state keep it going.
When the platform is working, then it’s time to share resources in a knowledge base. Once the tipping point has been reached, professional development experts serve as a filter to bring in data and research at a trickle. It’s important to remember that teachers across the state are already working 60 hours per week. Part of the digital PLC’s role is to decrease that time ask, not overwhelm them with a flood research until they turn off the computer in disgust. Define the outcomes, and watch for the deliverables to come back up the platform.
At this point, state-level contractors become coaches for local professional learning communities and they become experts on what is happening across the state. That’s important, because part of the advantage of the digital professional learning community is that it can come together across the state to help schools that are nowhere near each other geographically. I know a dance teacher in Wake County, NC at Powell Elementary School who is an integration expert. She teaches the curriculum using Gardner’s multiple intelligences research as if it were second nature to her. Imagine how much good she could do across the state if other dance and arts teachers could tap her expertise. The role of the state is to facilitate those connections, and smaller PLC circles will pop up as a result of them.
So, question for the crowd if I could refer back to my last article on Getting Smart and do a bit of crowdsourcing: If you were tasked with statewide improvement and had a dozen or two people to facilitate it, what would you do differently?
-Shu
Edmodo is a Learn Capital portfolio company.
DigLN, edpolicy, edreform, EdTech, PLC
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Even though the Internet destroys many considerations of geography, our mindsets still are immersed within geographic affinities (we have ‘North Carolina teachers’ and ‘Idaho teachers,’ not ‘teachers’). States still see geographic boundaries as important when, sometimes, they’re not as critical as they used to be (we need 50+ different teacher / principal / superintendent licensing criteria? we need 50+ school accreditation criteria? really?).
So I understand why a state department of education might want to create one or more statewide learning communities for educators. I would encourage those designing such systems to also ensure that a statewide focus not become an impermeable statewide wall that limits participation of others from outside the state. The more porous those boundaries, the more outside expertise and knowledge can inform local (and sometimes limiting) geographic mindsets. Those educators who are participating in ad hoc, global communities of practice can speak quite eloquently to the power of such professional learning spaces.
Good response Scott. I definitely hear what you’re saying about interoperability of state-level initiatives. In the same way that common core is going to make standards-linked content less expensive to districts across the country, interstate operability will limit our need to reinvent the wheel fifty times when someone gets the bright idea to create something like a statewide digital plc.
The only challenge I’d bring up is that education is in the hands of the state, not the fed government. So my question to you after reading your post is a clarification question: Are you proposing a shift towards more federal control of education, or are you pushing for better communication and interoperability between states?
Shu