Professional Development. Ish.

Today was my first taste of professional development for teachers in the US. The District has employed Teacher's Consltant Dr Jerry Goldberg to facilitate the next three PD days (there will be follow-up days in October and November too). Goldberg's theme was the District's focus for this year: High Expectations and Active Engagement for All Learners. Teachers from the middle and high school gathered in the Media Centre for an 8am start. Upon signing in, we each received a packet (booklet to you and I) containing information and activities on: high standards; VAK strategies and learning styles (called modalities here); building context and prior knowledge; using the 10-2 rule (basically breaking down lesson content and allowing time for processing); having whole class, group, paired and individual activities in lessons; self reflection and assessment; student engagement (and what it looks like); Carousel Brainstorming (it's ok to say 'brainstorming' here (!)); differentiation and the jigsaw technique...pretty much, in fact, everything a UK teacher covers as part of their training (I know I did back in 2000 - 2001). I imagine it's the same for US teachers too...though some of the terminology differs: no one here has ever heard of a plenary!

Goldberg took us through each of the aforementioned areas, probing us with questions and asking us to complete the exercises in the packet. I did rather like the exercise he used, which he himself got from a course, where he asked us all to fold our arms and then look at whether our right or left arm was in front. He then asked us to try and fold them the opposite way, which, for most, is more difficult. Try it! As a general rule, those who have their left arm to the front (like me) are visual learners (correct), those who have their right arm to the front are auditory learners and those who have no preference or who didn't agree with their category are usually kinesthetic learners. We were then allocated a number and asked to stand next to a sheet of flipboard paper. The paper contained a question. Two groups worked independently on each question (there were five in total), writing in a particular coloured pen. Every five minutes we were asked to move in a clockwise direction (this will sound familiar to some of my colleagues and students, I'm sure) and add to the ideas on the next question...and so on, until all five questions had been answered. The questions were all based around the theme and I was surprised at my level of input: everything we do in the UK, daily, basically addresses them. After a short break, we then teamed up with the group who had been working on the same question as us with the aim of summarising the content into three key points, which we then had to present to everyone.

Goldberg encouraged us to use his praise system, which involved counting to three and then giving a single clap, after each presentation. We were also encouraged to provide feedback on what we'd liked about the presentation, much like Fairfield students habitually do, especially in Drama.

After another short break for lunch (which, for me, was spent in my classroom, frantically trying to prepare for my students' arrival tomorrow), Goldberg continued to take us through his packet. The main focus of the afternoon was differentiaton (again, I was reminded of my PGCE as it was definitely a buzz word then too). This time, we were divided into home groups for a jigsaw activity. We chose numbers and then moved into expert groups, with the aim of reading a page of text on 'Differentiated Instruction' and synthesise the information so that we could feed it back to the members of our home groups. Each 'expert' was given four minutes to provide feedback...I managed it in one minute and four seconds. Read into that what you will!

Finally, we were again assigned a number and put into one of fourteen groups, each working on one of seven tasks (it was, I think, meant to be competitive, though this wasn't really followed up, possibly as we ran over time). The tasks were all meant to show us what we could do with our students to get them to synthesise information. Our objective was the same: to summarise what differentiated instruction is and isn't. The tasks ranged from making to columns of bullet points, to making an acrostic poem, drawing images, writing a recipe and providing a 3,2,1 of features. My group were asked to divide our paper into four and think of four common objects. We chose: a pencil; a chair; a car and a shoe. We were then asked to think of similes we could make using these objects and differentiation, such as 'some pencils are sharper than others' or 'everyone needs a different kind of shoe'. Once again, we had to present our work to everyone and by the time we'd all finished, we were almost fifteen minutes after our scheduled finish time of 2pm.

The rest of the packet will be covered in October. A quick flick through tells me the areas we have to look forward to are: higher and lower order thinking; power words; what learning will look like; tiered activities and scaffolding; KUD (which is like KWL) and cubing (for my department, this last one is on the 'Boys will be Boys' course feedback on commonstaff).