The core belief of the Principal as Leader of Professional Learning Scholarship is that the principal is the lead learner in the school. In Meet the Promise of the Content Standards: The Principal, Joellen Killion states, “Successful principals shape the culture of schools, set clear expectations, and share leadership with others to create productive learning environments for students and staff.”
Kelly Hastings, Principal of Young Junior High School in Arlington Independent School District, is this year’s winner of the Principal as a Leader of Professional Learning Scholarship award. Her goal to lead the shift in teaching to a student-centered approach through a campus-wide Project-Based Learning initiative is what first brought her to Learning Forward’s Standards for Professional Learning.
Hastings piloted the first year of project-based learning with those who wanted to try it, but in the second year they expanded to all core classes and it stalled. “I realized I needed to do something to lay the foundation for this implementation. Going to the Learning Forward Summer Conference in Chicago was the first time I really took a deep look at the Standards,” Hastings explains.
Conversations at the conference about taking risks and having trust motivated Hastings, so she filled out the scholarship application and sent out an email to the school that she was taking this risk and to wish her luck. Modeling that risk-taking and putting herself out there has been a key to building relationships with her staff.
With the help of coach and thought-partner Linda Mayer, provided by the Learning Forward Foundation, Hastings has created a system for professional learning that wasn’t in place before, and is based on the focus of being responsive to teachers’ needs and feedback. She set goals that have supported student learning, specifically that Young’s professional learning communities (PLCs) answer the four questions of:
- What do you want students to learn?
- How are you going to know if they learned it?
- What will you do when they don’t?
- What will you do when students already know it?
This has guided Young Junior High School staff’s professional learning by creating systems so that these are each answered effectively. In their PLCs, everyone shares resources. The Teacher Support Interventionist (aka Instructional Coach), teachers, level leaders and others are encouraged to do so, but others have shared as well. This system makes professional learning risk-free and continuously improving.
At Young Junior High School, collaborative professional learning increases effectiveness and outcomes for students have increased because of the collaborative learning. SMART goals are aligned to student outcomes. Professional learning takes place in PLCs with core teachers, but it doesn’t stop there. Teachers collaborate in each other’s classrooms – learning walks, team teaching, and trading students. Teachers use hallways and other spaces in the building to expand learning from the classroom to all of the school.
When I first became a principal, I remember being told that you have to build people’s capacity – not just tell them to do something,” Hastings recalls. She and her team have done a great deal of work with formative assessment. They use the Data Analysis Meeting Worksheet to analyze district assessments that are given every six weeks. They look at results to break down what students are getting/not getting and how teaching needs to adjust. Teachers share resources such as Pear Deck – a free service that puts inquiry at the center of lessons and helps support self-motivated learners as teachers input questions for formative assessment and are able to break down responses by student and by concept.
Another resource is Quizizz which provides detailed class and student-level data on the quizzes teachers create. This helps provide teachers with an easy way to analyze the formative assessment data to make it less challenging and time consuming. Hastings shares examples like this in her Cool Things I saw this Week email.
Within a Walk-Through of the Week email, Hastings shares in more depth the things that different teachers are doing and the accompanying resources. She effuses, “because of all the different things I have seen as an administrator, I would be such a better teacher now! That’s why I share the ideas!”
To help teachers see what other teachers are doing, teachers set up a “pineapple chart” where they offer to “allow” other teachers into their classrooms to see what they’re doing. They have had several teachers sign up and many others who have taken the opportunity to see new things. Teachers are, also, engaging in learning walks with their evaluator/administrator and talking about how they can use what they see in their classrooms.
As this year’s Principal as a Leader of Professional Learning Scholarship award winner continues her journey, the Learning Forward Academy will also play a pivotal support role. Shannon Terry, Director of Professional Learning for Arlington Independent School District joins Hastings as a member of the 2018 Academy Class, and they plan to collaborate to take building stronger PLCs districtwide a priority using resources such as the REL Mid-Atlantic webinar on Creating & Sustaining PLCs.
As Young Junior High School and the Arlington school district work to provide more opportunities to open their classrooms and capitalize on the power of trust and relationships through PLCs, the Learning Forward Foundation is eager to follow their continued success using the Standards to build a community of learners!
Learning Forward Foundation Scholarships
The Learning Forward Foundation scholarship contest encourages educators to put their good ideas into action and apply their research and creativity to impact education’s most profound challenges. Learn more or donate to the Learning Forward Foundation scholarships and grants.
