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Rounding UpAuthor: The Math Learning Center
Welcome to Rounding Up with the Math Learning Center. These conversations focus on topics that are important to Bridges teachers, administrators and anyone interested in Bridges in Mathematics. Hosted by Mike Wallus, VP of Educator Support at MLC. Language: en Genres: Education, Mathematics, Science Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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Season 3 | Episode 5 - Building Asset-Focused Professional Learning Communities - Guests: Summer Pettigrew and Megan Williams
Episode 5
Tuesday, 26 November, 2024
Rounding Up Season 3 | Episode 05 - Building Asset-Focused Professional Learning Communities Guests: Summer Pettigrew and Megan Williams Mike Wallus: Professional learning communities have been around for a long time and in many different iterations. But what does it look like to schedule and structure professional learning communities that actually help educators understand and respond to their students’ thinking in meaningful ways? Today we're talking with Summer Pettigrew and Megan Williams from the Charleston Public Schools about building asset-focused professional learning communities. Hello, Summer and Megan. Welcome to the podcast. I am excited to be talking with you all today about PLCs. Megan Williams: Hi! Summer Pettigrew: Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here. Mike: I'd like to start this conversation in a very practical place, scheduling. So, Megan, I wonder if you could talk just a bit about when and how you schedule PLCs at your building. Megan: Sure. I think it's a great place to start, too, because I think without the structure of PLCs in place, you can't really have fabulous PLC meetings. And so, we used to do our PLC meetings once a week during teacher planning periods, and the teachers were having to give up their planning period during the day to come to the PLC meeting. And so, we created a master schedule that gives an hour for PLC each morning. So, we meet with one grade level a day, and then the teachers still have their regular planning period throughout the day. So, we were able to do that by building a time for clubs in the schedule. So, first thing in the morning, depending on your day, so if it's Monday and that's third grade, then the related arts teachers—and that for us is art, music, P.E., guidance, our special areas—they go to the third-grade teachers’ classrooms. The teachers are released to go to PLC, and then the students choose a club. And so, those range from basketball to gardening to fashion to STEMs. We've had Spanish club before. So, they participate with the related arts teacher in their chosen club, and then the teachers go to their PLC meeting. And then once that hour is up, then the teachers come back to class. The related arts teachers are released to go get ready for their day. So, everybody still has their planning period, per se, throughout the day. Mike: I think that feels really important, and I just want to linger a little bit longer on it. One of the things that stands out is that you're preserving the planning time on a regular basis. They have that, and they have PLC time in addition to it. Summer: Uh-hm. Megan: Correct. And that I think is key because planning time in the middle of the day is critical for making copies, calling parents, calling your doctor to schedule an appointment, using the restroom … those kind of things that people have to do throughout the day. And so, when you have PLC during their planning time, one or the other is not occurring. Either a teacher is not taking care of those things that need to be taken care of on the planning period. Or they're not engaged in the PLC because they're worried about something else that they've got to do. So, building that time in, it's just like a game-changer. Mike: Summer, as a person who’s playing the role of an instructional coach, what impact do you think this way of scheduling has had on educators who are participating in the PLCs that you're facilitating? Summer: Well, it's huge. I have experienced going to A PLC on our planning and just not being a hundred percent engaged. And so, I think having the opportunity to provide the time and the space for that during the school day allows the teachers to be more present. And I think that the rate at which we're growing as a staff is expedited because we're able to drill into what we need to drill into without worrying about all the other things that need to happen. So, I think that the scheduling piece has been one of the biggest reasons we've been so successful with our PLCs. Mike: Yeah, I can totally relate to that experience of feeling like I want to be here, present in this moment, and I have 15 things that I need to do to get ready for the next chunk of my day. So, taking away that “if, then,” and instead having an “and” when it comes to PLCs, really just feels like a game-changer. Megan: And we were worried at first about the instructional time that was going to be lost from the classroom doing the PLC like this. We really were, because we needed to make sure instructional time was maximized and we weren't losing any time. And so, this really was about an hour a week where the teachers aren't directly instructing the kids. But it has not been anything negative at all. Our scores have gone up, our teachers have grown. They love the kids, love going to their clubs. I mean, even the attendance on the grade-level club day is so much better because they love coming in. And they start the day really getting that SEL instruction. I mean, that's really a lot of what they're getting in clubs. They're hanging out with each other. They're doing something they love. Mike: Maybe this is a good place to shift and talk a little bit about the structure of the PLCs that are happening. So, I've heard you say that PLCs, as they're designed and functioning right now, they're not for planning. They're instead for teacher collaboration. So, what does that mean? Megan: Well, there's a significant amount of planning that does happen in PLC, but it's not a teacher writing his or her lesson plans for the upcoming week. So, there's planning, but not necessarily specific lesson planning: like on Monday I'm doing this, on Tuesday I'm doing this. It's more looking at the standards, looking at the important skills that are being taught, discussing with each other ways that you do this. “How can I help kids that are struggling? How can I push kids that are higher?” So, teachers are collaborating and planning, but they're not really producing written lesson plans. Mike: Yeah. One of the pieces that you all talked about when we were getting ready for this interview, was this idea that you always start your PLCs with a recognition of the celebrations that are happening in classrooms. I'm wondering if you can talk about what that looks like and the impact it has on the PLCs and the educators who are a part of them. Summer: Yeah. I think our teachers are doing some great things in their classrooms, and I think having the time to share those great things with their colleagues is really important. Just starting the meeting on that positive note tends to lead us in a more productive direction. Mike: You two have also talked to me about the impact of having an opportunity for educators to engage in the math that their students will be doing or looking at common examples of student work and how it shows up in the classroom. I wonder if you could talk about what you see in classrooms and how you think that loops back into the experiences that are happening in PLCs. Summer: Yeah. One of the things that we start off with in our PLCs is looking at student work. And so, teachers are bringing common work examples to the table, and we're looking to see, “What are our students coming with? What's a good starting point for us to build skills, to develop these skills a little bit further to help them be more successful?” And I think a huge part of that is actually doing the work that our students are doing. And so, prior to giving a task to a student, we all saw that together in a couple of different ways. And that's going to give us that opportunity to think about what misconceptions might show up, what questions we might want to ask if we want to push students further, reign them back in a little bit. Just that pre-planning piece with the student math, I think has been very important for us. And so, when we go into classrooms, I'll smile because they kind of look like little miniature PLCs going on. The teacher’s facilitating, the students are looking at strategies of their classmates and having conversations about what's similar, what's different. I think the teachers are modeling with their students that productive practice of looking at the evidence and the student work and talking about how we go about thinking through these problems. Mike: I think the more that I hear you talk about that, I flashback to what Megan, what you said earlier about, there is planning that's happening, and there's collaboration. They're planning the questions that they might ask. They're anticipating the things that might come from students. So, while it's not, “I'm writing my lesson for Tuesday,” there is a lot of planning that's coming. It’s just perhaps not as specific as, “This is what we'll do on this particular day.” Am I getting that right? Megan: Yes. You're getting that a hundred percent right. Summer has teachers sometimes taken the assessment at the beginning of a unit. We'll go ahead and take the end-of-unit assessment and the information that you gain from that. Just with having the teachers take it and knowing how the kids are going to be assessed, then just in turn makes them better planners for the unit. And there's a lot of good conversation that comes from that. Mike: I mean, in some ways, your PLC design, the word that pops into my head is almost like a “rehearsal” of sorts. Does that analogy seem right? Summer: It seems right. And just to add on to that, I think, too, again, providing that time within the school day for them to look at the math, to do the math, to think about what they want to ask, is like a mini-rehearsal. Because typically, when teachers are planning outside of school hours, it's by themselves in a silo. But this just gives that opportunity to talk about all the possibilities together, run through the math together, ask questions if they have them. So, I think that's a decent analogy, yeah. Mike: Yeah. Well, you know what it makes me think about is competitive sports like basketball. As a person who played quite a lot, there are points in time when you start to learn the game that everything feels so fast. And then there are points in time when you've had some experience when you know how to anticipate, where things seem to slow down a little bit. And the analogy is that if you can kind of anticipate what might happen or the meaning of the math that kids are showing you, it gives you a little bit more space in the moment to really think about what you want to do versus just feeling like you have to react. Summer: And I think, too, it keeps you focused on the math at hand. You're constantly thinking about your next teacher move. And so, if you've got that math in your mind and you do get thrown off, you've had an opportunity, like you said, to have a little informal rehearsal with it, and maybe you're not thrown off as badly. ( laughs ) Mike: Well, one of the things that you’ve both mentioned when we've talked about PLCs is the impact of a program called OGAP. I'm wondering if you can talk about what OGAP is, what it brought to your educators, and how it impacted what’s been happening in PLCs. Megan: I'll start in terms … OGAP stands for ongoing assessment project. Summer can talk about the specifics, but we rolled it out as a whole school. And I think there was power in that. Everybody in your school taking the same professional development at the same time, speaking the same language, hearing the same things. And for us, it was just a game-changer. Summer: Yeah, I taught elementary math for 12 years before I knew anything about OGAP, and I had no idea what I was doing until OGAP came into my life. All of the light bulbs that went off with this very complex elementary math that I had no idea was a thing, it was just incredible. And so, I think the way that OGAP plays a role in PLCs is that we're constantly using the evidence in our student work to make decisions about what we do next. We're not just plowing through a curriculum, we're looking at the visual models and strategies that Bridges expects of us in that unit. We're coupling it with the content knowledge that we get from OGAP and how students should and could move along this progression. And we're planning really carefully around that; thinking about, “If we give this task and some of our students are still at a less sophisticated strategy and some of our students are at a more sophisticated strategy, how can we use those two examples to bridge that gap for more kids?” And we're really learning from each other's work. It's not the teacher up there saying, “This is how you'd solve this problem.” But it's a really deep dive into the content. And I think the level of confidence that OGAP has brought our teachers as they've learned to teach Bridges has been like a powerhouse for us. Mike: Talk a little bit about the confidence that you see from your teachers who have had an OGAP experience and who are now using a curriculum and implementing it. Can you say more about that? Summer: Yeah. I mean, I think about our PLCs, the collaborative part of it, we're having truly professional conversations. It's centered around the math, truly, and how students think about the math. And so again, not to diminish the need to strategically lesson plan and come up with activities and things, but we're talking really complex stuff in PLCs. And so, when we look at student work and we that work on the OGAP progression, depending on what skill we're teaching that week, we're able to really look at, “Gosh, the kid is, he's doing this, but I'm not sure why.” And then we can talk a little bit about, “Well, maybe he's thinking about this strategy, and he got confused with that part of it.” So, it really, again, is just centered around the student thinking. The evidence is in front of us, and we use that to plan accordingly. And I think it just one-ups a typical PLC because our teachers know what they're talking about. There's no question in, “Why am I teaching how to add on an open number line?” We know the reasoning behind it. We know what comes before that. We know what comes after that, and we know the importance of why we're doing it right now. Mike: Megan, I wanted to ask you one more question. You are the instructional leader for the building, the position you hold is principal. I know that Summer is a person who does facilitation of the PLCs. What role do you play or what role do you try to play in PLCs as well? Megan: I try to be present at every single PLC meeting and an active participant. I do all the assessments. I get excited when Summer says we're taking a test. I mean, I do everything that the teachers do. I offer suggestions if I think that I have something valuable to bring to the table. I look at student work. I just do everything with everybody because I like being part of that team. Mike: What impact do you think that that has on the educators who are in the PLC? Megan: I mean, I think it makes teachers feel that their time is valuable. We're valuing their time. It's helpful for me, too, when I go into classrooms. I know what I'm looking for. I know which kids I want to work with. Sometimes I'm like, “Ooh, I want to come in and see you do that. That's exciting.” It helps me plan my day, and it helps me know what's going on in the school. And I think it also is just a non-judgmental, non-confrontational time for people to ask me questions. I mean, it's part of me trying to be accessible as well. Mike: Summer, as the person who’s the facilitator, how do you think about preparing for the kind of PLCs that you've described? What are some of the things that are important to know as a facilitator or to do in preparation? Summer: So, I typically sort of rehearse myself, if you will, before the PLC kicks off. I will take assessments, I will take screeners. I'll look at screener implementation guides and think about the pieces of that that would be useful for our teachers if they needed to pull some small groups and re-engage those kids prior to a unit. What I really think is important though, is that vertical alignment. So, looking at the standards that are coming up in a module, thinking about what came before it: “What does that standard look like in second grade?” If I'm doing a third grade PLC: “What does that standard look like in fourth grade?” Because teachers don't have time to do that on their own. And I think it's really important for that collective efficacy, like, “We're all doing this together. What you did last year matters. What you're doing next year matters, and this is how they tie together.” I kind of started that actually this year, wanting to know more myself about how these standards align to each other and how we can think about Bridges as a ladder among grade levels. Because we were going into classrooms, and teachers were seeing older grade levels doing something that they developed, and that was super exciting for them. And so, having an understanding of how our state standards align in that way just helps them to understand the importance of what they're doing and bring about that efficacy that we all really just need our teachers to own. It's so huge. And just making sure that our students are going to the next grade prepared. Mike: One of the things that I was thinking about as I was listening to you two describe the different facets of this system that you've put together is, how to get started. Everything from scheduling to structure to professional learning. There's a lot that goes into making what you all have built successful. I think my question to you all would be, “If someone were listening to this, and they were thinking to themselves, ‘Wow, that's fascinating!’ What are some of the things that you might encourage them to do if they wanted to start to take up some of the ideas that you shared?” Megan: It's very easy to crash and burn by trying to take on too much. And so, I think if you have a long-range plan and an end goal, you need to try to break it into chunks. Just making small changes and doing those small changes consistently. And once they become routine practices, then taking on something new. Mike: Summer, how about you? Summer: Yeah, I think as an instructional coach, one of the things that I learned through OGAP is that our student work is personal. And if we're looking at student work without the mindset of, “We're learning together,” sometimes we can feel a little bit attacked. And so, one of the first things that we did when we were rolling this out and learning how to analyze student work is, we looked at student work that wasn't necessarily from our class. We asked teachers to save student work samples. I have folders in my office of different student work samples that we can practice sorting and have conversations about. And that's sort of where we started with it. Looking at work that wasn't necessarily our students gave us an opportunity to be a little bit more open about what we wanted to say about it, how we wanted to talk about it. And it really does take some practice to dig into student thinking and figure out, “Where do I need to go from here?” And I think that allowed us to play with it in a way that wasn't threatening necessarily. Mike: I think that's a great place to stop, Megan and Summer. I want to thank you so much for joining us. It's really been a pleasure talking to both of you. Megan: Well, thank you for having us. Summer: Yeah, thanks a lot for having us. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2024 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org
