Last week I spent some time in a school delivering professional development. For two days I taught lessons, on Wednesday in a 6th grade classroom and on Friday in a 7th grade classroom. I taught in front of a dozen teachers, two principals, an assistant superintendent, and about 160 students. On Thursday, I played host to visiting teachers while my colleague Heather taught a lesson in high school. I am feeling a little raw around the edges.
There is no reason for me to feel battered and bruised. Heather and I undergo a debriefing protocol that includes norms cautioning the teachers to start with positive remarks and remain focused on the lesson, not the teacher. The teachers were kind, and their constructive criticisms were spot on. The host teacher in the 7th grade classroom gave me an easy method to determine if students had understood the lesson (thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down to indicate degree of understanding). I was in total agreement that my sloppy method of asking what they had found successful and confusing seemed to be an afterthought in my lesson. The debriefing conversations were interesting and focused and served the purpose of refining my lessons and helping the teachers who had observed me to adapt the lessons for their own purposes.
So why the self-doubt? I didn't experience a love fest, and I had been setting myself up for one. We are charting new territory in delivering professional development (PD), and I, being a retired teacher and having achieved some success in the classroom, was hired to be one of the two teacher facilitators. We are receiving some outstanding training ourselves so I set out to deliver only the finest lessons and world-class PD. I spent hours anticipating the needs of the teachers, embedding strategies into the lessons, and considering an engaging delivery. I wanted to offer the school something special; indeed, I thought I had to.
It turns out that the most significant contribution was to myself. And I believe I can make the case that this is what our method of delivery is all about. We are all teacher leaders. In a few months, their teachers will be conducting the lessons with other teachers observing and then they will sit in the very seat I sat in for debriefing. I am a model for what the powerful experience of debriefing can deliver--a time and a method for reflection on classroom practices.
Sure, I got kind and supportive comments, but even more important were the insights I gained for myself because I was placed in a position where I had to observe myself and my lesson. I was very conscious of the immediate changes I had to make because I hadn't considered that the goofy narratives 7th graders tend to write don't readily adapt to expository writing. (Can a man-eating donut lend itself to an informative lesson? Only if you have the insight to change it to "man eating a donut" and write a treatise on obesity.) I was thrilled to realize in my fourth coverage of the lesson that I always insert narrative into my own writing of expository pieces which confirmed my belief that if students develop informational pieces from their narratives, their pieces will be more interesting to read. Finally, my most important assertion for teachers was that we should all be modeling our messy first drafts in front of students instead of only sharing our finished pieces. It took an act of courage for me to develop and deliver a lesson that required cold writing on my part, but I was delighted when I discovered I could think in front of students and didn't have to do all my thinking after class.
I might not always deliver a stellar lesson, and I am inching toward giving myself permission to not demand it of myself. Instead, the most important thing I may be offering teachers is my observation of how the process of teacher reflection works. I will continue to observe how I change as a teacher and watch myself grow.
Note: The lessons I delivered were adapted from Jeff Anderson in Everyday Editing and Gretchen Bernabei and Dottie Hall in The Story of My Thinking.
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