A blog post by Katie Martin

I recently shared this graphic on Twitter, which resonated with many of you and I wanted to share an excerpt from my book, Learner-Centered Innovation, where this graphic came from.

A school leader shared with me that, although she felt her school offered ample professional development, she was frustrated that they hadn’t seen a dramatic shift in the classrooms. She had hoped to see an increase in students solving authentic problems and using applications for deeper learning experiences. Instead, students used technology to upload and share information or to complete assignments that looked very similar to the work they had done without technology. In response, I asked the leader to describe a typical professional learning day. She told me that, in every after-school meeting, she showed teachers how to use different apps; in fact, she constantly shared tips on new apps and tools she came across. What puzzled her is that the teachers seemed encouraged in the meetings and even shared their own ideas.

As we dug deeper into why the training wasn’t translating into the classroom experience, she realized that her teachers were doing exactly what she had modeled for them: they were using new tools to do the same activities and teach the same content they always had. Although they liked learning about new tools, they hadn’t been modeled or used in a way that connected them to student applications for different or deeper learning.

I always cringe when I hear the word training used to describe educator professional development. Training happens to or is thrust upon people. Learning, on the other hand, is a process of developing knowledge through authentic and relevant experiences. If professional learning is ever going to be effective in bringing about change for students, it must shift away from something done to educators toward a process of creating a culture of continuous learning cycles and problem solving. There is a time to learn new skills or specific programs, but professional learning can’t end with information; content is only the beginning. The following table depicts common experiences that differentiate training from learning.

Shifting the Focus from Teaching to Learning

In education, we have a lot of systems that run smoothly because we have been doing them for years. The problem is that when we work with the same people, doing the same things, ineffective practices are rarely challenged or changed. Traditions and habits don’t inspire new ways of thinking for educators or for students. Here is an example, and I apologize to any English teachers reading this, but I have been in too many conversations about whether The Outsiders is an eighth-or ninth-grade book and have mitigated arguments between seventh-grade teachers about whether or not to teach Farewell to Manzanar. And if you know English teachers, these conversations can become heated. This same scenario plays out in many contexts, whether it is the play that is done every year or the unit that has to be taught in the fall because it has always been that way. One of many problems with these arguments is they are about territory and preserving the status quo, not kids, what they are learning, and why. If the comfort and preferences of adults become the priority rather than what’s best for learners, students miss out on powerful learning opportunities connected to their goals, questions, and interests.

As a result of doing what had always been done, when I was the literacy coach for our school, we noticed that many students were going through their day without the opportunity or expectation to read. Many students were performing below grade level on standardized tests and struggled to read the textbooks and assigned novels. Attempting to support students, teachers had resorted to creating PowerPoint presentations to summarize and convey key facts; books were read aloud, and teachers played recordings of novels so everyone could follow along at the same pace while short passages and multiple-choice worksheets were widely used to assess comprehension. We came to the realization that, if our students never read on their own or made meaningful decisions for themselves in school, they were going to struggle with these things out of school. While we grappled with this very real issue, our professional learning consisted of disparate events that offered no help. The English language arts department wanted to do better for our students, but I also knew that if they knew a better way, they would have been doing it already. We needed to learn new strategies to improve, and we had to shift the culture to focus on our desired student outcomes and align how we were designing and facilitating the learning experiences.

To achieve our goal of increasing reading practice and ultimately literacy, our English department had to shift our meeting structures from examining what we wanted and what we were teaching to reviewing student work to find out what they were learning. We wrote a proposal to our principal to purchase a copy of the book 7 Strategies for Teaching Reading for each teacher in our department and requested stipends for the teachers to meet regularly after school for eight weeks. The total cost of our request was less than $ 1,000 ($ 100 per teacher and $ 20 for each book). We read the book and came together after school to engage in collaborative conversation that allowed teachers to experience the new strategies in their own reading and learning. We then planned ways to support students in their diverse classes. Each week, we independently read about a new strategy, rotated modeling lessons for our colleagues, and collaborated on a plan to put the new ideas into practice. One distinction here is that we did not create a plan for one specific lesson; we thought about how to integrate the new strategy across various lessons and develop multiple iterations of the strategy to inform our practice. To ensure we were working to close the knowing-doing gap, we partnered up each week to observe each other and learn from the variety of methods we were each putting into practice. At the beginning of our weekly meetings, we shared what we were learning. The open reflection not only allowed us to create a culture of transparency in our team but also pushed us to try out new ideas and build off one another’s successes and challenges.

We shifted our conversations from what content and page number we were teaching that week to what we were learning and how we could impact student outcomes. This also meant that we had to bring evidence of learning from all students connected to our desired outcomes. We had to move beyond the spreadsheets and percentages to actually understand what was happening in our classrooms. We spent our time digging deep into our problems of practice, looking at student work, and interrogating our practices to ensure we were truly meeting the needs of the learners.

While our English department worked together to create better learning experiences for our students, reading about and discussing new ideas was critical for our growth. As we explored these new approaches and ideas, we began to rethink the traditional teaching of a class novel. We created more opportunities for choice and designed opportunities for students to grapple with text to make sense of it. We moved from designing learning experiences based on the content and page number we were teaching that week to how to design learning experiences that empowered our students and helped them develop the skills to become better readers, writers, and speakers. By being willing to make changes in the way reading and literacy had always been taught, we improved outcomes for our students.

Learner-Centered Innovation

Learner-centered innovation is not just about creating something new but doing something that yields better outcomes because of what we have created. With that in mind, we asked questions like, “How do we know that our idea is working?” and “What is the impact on desired student outcomes?” When we focus our efforts on what we want to accomplish, not simply the metrics or data from an isolated test or standards but on the type of student we want to create, we might find that our meetings and our learning experiences become more impactful.I would love to hear about examples of what you are doing to create job-embedded cycles of professional learning and the impact it is having!

To learn more about making the shift from training to learning, check out Katie Martin’s book Learner-Centered Innovation.