10 Keys to Making Professional Learning Meaningful

Chances are, as you look at your calendar of scheduled professional learning days, you aren’t overcome with excitement. Traditionally, teacher professional learning has ranged from the good (the workshop that’s actually hands-on), to the bad (the never-ending PowerPoint presentation), to the ugly (remember that one presenter . . . ).

But, as the Common Core State Standards become the norm, the new standards and the expectations around problem solving and critical thinking are prompting a new look at teacher development. In the process, more districts and schools are thinking of ways to make professional learning meaningful and engaging.

The biggest challenge in teacher development isn’t teaching teachers something new, but ensuring that knowledge and skills are applied in the classroom. A 2013 study by the Center for Public Education found that the majority of teacher development has been ineffective at changing instructional practice and improving student learning. Still, CPE argues that the Common Core demands effective professional development that directly links teacher learning with classroom instruction to help teachers meet the demands of the new standards.

Keys to Strong Professional Learning

Fred Hang, Great Books Foundation senior consultant, has a simple litmus test for professional development, “Don’t bore me, don’t waste my time, and don’t talk down to me.” Above all, professional development should be useful, engaging, and applicable. As you prepare for the Common Core, look for professional development opportunities that incorporate these best practices.

1. You Do the Heavy Lifting
Similar to an ideal classroom in which students are doing the heavy lifting, in an optimized training, you’ll be doing the work. In Great Books courses, for example, instead of sitting and listening to an expert speak for hours on end, teachers begin to plan and lead their own discussions right away. During the course, teaches are engaged with the methodology that they are learning, says Linda Barrett, another senior consultant for Great Books, which makes the work stick.

2. Identify Key Takeaways
There’s nothing worse than ending a professional development session with a head full of buzzwords—and not much else. Indeed, you should leave any course with clear next steps and takeaways that you’re excited to implement in your classroom. When reviewing the schedule for an upcoming professional learning day or course overview, don’t be afraid to ask the instructor or facilitator, “What practical strategies will I have available at the end of the session?”

3. Establish the Connection to the Common Core
Right now, there are a lot of people talking about the Common Core State Standards without the true background knowledge of what they entail. If a professional development opportunity advertises itself as “Common Core-aligned,” be sure to investigate what that really means.

For example, Barrett begins her courses by explaining how the materials she’ll cover align with the Common Core’s expectation for complex texts. Teachers, says Barrett, “immediately see that these texts meet the demands that we have in our classrooms.”

4. Build on Background Knowledge
Just like your students come to you with knowledge and skills, a professional learning session should meet you where you are. That means being honest with your instructor or facilitator about what’s going on in your classroom and where you need help. “A lot of the things [that we cover] parallel things that classrooms are doing,” says Hang, “and I try to help teachers find connections so they don’t think they have to reinvent the wheel.”

5. Be Willing to Try New Things
In order to improve your teaching, you’ll have to change your behaviors in the classroom. For example, Hang focuses on teaching teachers how to listen within the thinking process. “You can’t discuss if you’re not willing to listen,” he says. Even if a strategy seems off base to you or like it won’t work in your classroom, sometimes it’s worth it to give it a shot. If it ends up surprising you, wonderful—and if it doesn’t, the failure can often add to your understanding of what your students need and why.

6. No One-Day Wonders
The Center for Public Education found that the professional learning that was the most effective incorporated follow-up services, including coaching or mentoring. Change takes time, so professional development should continue throughout the school year.
For example, during a coaching day at Dana School in Hendersonville, NC, a consultant from the Great Books Foundation observed and co-led discussions across classrooms and then debriefed with teachers. The course, says principal Kelly Schofield, helped teachers focus, not just on where students were already working, but on the next steps. In the fifth grade classroom, for example, students were already good at using the text, but they weren’t using that information to support their responses during discussion. The course, says Schofield, “gave us a lot of things to think about, but mainly, how teachers select and address student questions will move them forward.”

7. Consider All of Your Learners
As you progress through professional learning, think about how the strategies will apply on a practical level with your higher-ability students, those in the middle and the ones on the lower end. What techniques will you need to tweak for each group and why? “Sometimes our poorest readers are the best thinkers,” says Hang, which is why he encourages teachers to incorporate opportunities for students to talk and think before and during reading. In any professional development, ask about how to address students with ELL or special education needs, or other populations in your classroom.

8. Maximize 21st Century Tools
Technology is a crucial component of the Common Core, your classroom and your students’ lives, which means it should be a part of your professional learning as well. When pursuing a professional development opportunity, in addition to understanding how technology can support students’ learning in the classroom, check to see what resources are available to support your growth as well.

Recently, Great Books has added online options for schools and teachers. There is now a blended version of their core course, which incorporate one–day of in-person training with 4 hours of online material that is designed to support teachers’ development in the application of Great Books strategies. In the online portion of the training, teachers learn more about Shared Inquiry, apply it in their classrooms, and then provide feed- back online before moving on to the next step. Quality online professional development can provide the ongoing learning and reflection that can help make a one- or two-day workshop leave a lasting impression.

9. Time to Reflect
Reflection allows us to make sense of our learning, and incorporate that learning into our understanding. Professional development should provide time for individual and group reflection that helps you solidify and crystallize what you learned.

10. There Should Be Surprises
After Hang teaches a course, he often hears how surprised teachers are at what their students can do. “Before a course, teachers might say ‘my kids aren’t there yet,’” says Hang. “But after they take a course and use our programs in the classroom, teachers find out what their kids are truly capable of, and there’s always a level of astonishment.” Professional development should continue to bring new realizations as you incorporate it into your practice.

Samantha Cleaver has worked as a special education teacher and instructional coach, as well as an education writer and middle grade author. She is passionate about reading and literacy instruction, using technology in education, and connecting educators who are doing great things. Visit her web site.

11 Tips to Turn Every Student Into a Close Reader

Let’s face it, close reading isn’t often a skill that comes naturally. When our students get a new reading assignment, their first instinct is often to race to the finish line rather than engage deeply with a text.

Getting students to slow down, engage with the text in different ways, and reflect as they read are challenges for every teacher, and are the goals of close reading. They’re also at the heart of the Common Core English Language Arts standards. There’s no magic way to turn your class into top-notch readers overnight, but there are specific close reading skills you can teach that will help your students now and down the line.

In Harlem, NY, Mark Gillingham, senior researcher with the Great Books Foundation, watches a group of seventh-grade students reading aloud “The White Umbrella.” At one moment the narration becomes unclear and the students begin debating which character is actually speaking. Their genuine interest in figuring out who is speaking drives them to read, reread, and discuss the section. “This close reading of text that leads to authentic discussion is what the Great Books Foundation wants to cultivate in ALL readers,” says Gillingham.

The key is learning how to annotate effectively. “When students are drawing conclusions as they annotate their texts, they’re using high level reading comprehension skills,” says Linda Barrett, senior training consultant with the Great Books Foundation. “As their annotation improves, students may begin marking the points when a character makes a decision or when an author uses a specific literary tool.”

Nurturing these higher-level skills takes time and many different techniques. You can begin to strengthen close reading in your classroom with these eleven expert tips.

1. Be a Close Reader Yourself
As you teach close reading, it’s important that you know the text backwards and forwards. Every time you raise an issue or ask a question for discussion (e.g. “How do we know that Macbeth feels guilty?”), you’ll know how to help your students find the textual evidence and where it’s located in the text. Modeling close reading through your class discussion is as important as direct instruction in close reading.

2. Teach “Stretch Texts”
The purpose for having students learn close reading skills, says Gillingham, is to enable them to read increasingly complex texts over time. As you choose texts to use with your students, think about your purpose behind each text. Look for stories or articles that raise authentic questions and could be interpreted differently depending on each student’s background knowledge or prior reading. If you’re working with a novel, focus on a section that lends itself to ambiguity and interpretation. And be sure to occasionally assign “stretch texts” in class. These are texts that you wouldn’t expect students to read independently, such as a critical essay or short piece of philosophy. “It’s a text that’s meant to be difficult,” says Gillingham, “and may require up to a week of study.”

3. Teach Students to Look for the Evidence
If your students leave your class understanding how to provide evidence from the text, consider your year an unqualified success. It’s the most central skill of the Common Core standards, says Elfreida Hiebert, president and CEO of Text Project. “The Common Core,” says Hiebert, “focuses our attention on what content the text is helping us gain.” Push students to go beyond recounting facts and plot points. As you’re planning, think about what higher order questions you can ask in class discussion and written assignments.

4. Always Set a Purpose for Reading
After your students have read a text through once, help them dig deeper by setting a specific purpose for reading it again. That purpose could be to track a concept or theme, or to analyze how an author uses a literary element or creates tone. Giving students something specific to focus on requires that they return to the text and really focus.

5. Differentiate Your Instruction
Even if students aren’t able to close read a novel independently, they can still apply strategies to a passage. Students may listen to an oral reading of the text, work in a small group with teacher support, or work with a partner to reread a text and prepare for discussion. If the majority of your class is not ready for independent close reading, keep in mind that the overarching idea is to get students to think about different ways that people can interpret text and build their own arguments around text, which can be done with picture books or read alouds as well as novels and short stories.

6. Focus on Making Connections
Rather than asking students a myriad of comprehension questions, focus their reading experiences around connecting with and remembering the text. Plan and ask questions that help you understand if students understand the text, and where they need to dig deeper into the big ideas. Hiebert suggests focusing on how the text relates to what the student has previously read, and what else they might learn about the topic after reading this selection.

7. Model it First
If students are new to close reading, spend time modeling how to think about a prompt and how to annotate the text. You might want to use a document camera to project pages of the text and read through and annotate a passage around a central question, modeling your thinking. After you do a few pages, release the work to students and have them take the lead.

8. Let Them Make Mistakes
If some of your students have clearly misinterpreted the text, ask them to explain their thinking or help you see the connection they’ve made. This gives them a great opportunity to practice finding textual evidence. Students may also chime in with other interpretations. The important thing is that students clarify and refine their thinking strategies, not that everyone has the same “right” answer.

9. Close Read Across the Curriculum
Once students are familiar with close reading in one content area, expand the process to other texts and content areas. Close reading can happen in science, social studies, math, and other subjects. Students can spend time delving into charts and graphs in science, discussing a math concept, or working to truly understand the various interpretations of speech in social studies.

10. Use Student Questions to Drive Discussion
Here’s one technique to consider. During Great Books discussions, teachers start by compiling student and teacher questions that come from the text. Once the questions are compiled in a list, the teacher supports the students in reviewing all the questions, identifying ones that are similar and answering some of the factual questions that only require a short answer. Together, the class discusses the questions and decides which are the most interesting and worthy of further exploration. This is a great way to help your students learn to ask higher-order questions and to write good thesis statements.

11. Listen to Your Students
Along with close reading the text, you need to close read your students. When you begin to let students’ questions and ideas about the text take the lead, you’ll find your class will be much more invested in the reading. Your role will be to keep them grounded to the close reading process. If a student makes an assertion, can the class find the textual evidence for it? If not, why not? Is a new theory needed? As you probe into your students’ questions, you’ll learn more about where your students are and give them opportunities to engage deeper with the text. Ultimately, says Gillingham, “you are learning everything you can from your students.”

Samantha Cleaver has worked as a special education teacher and instructional coach, as well as an education writer and middle grade author. She is passionate about reading and literacy instruction, using technology in education, and connecting educators who are doing great things. Visit her web site.