Aija Simmons Often, new teachers spend their first school year feeling overwhelmed. Learning new curriculum, lesson planning, understanding school wide systems, and developing classroom management expertise add up to many moving parts...

This year, Mills Teacher Scholars facilitated teacher learning through collaborative inquiry with fourteen different teacher scholar groups. The focus in all groups is on supporting collaboration, data analysis, and equitable student outcomes through responsive and differentiated instruction. Mills Teacher Scholars facilitators carefully adjust program design to...

On May 4th, seventy-five Mt. Eden teachers gathered in the library to learn about their colleagues’ inquiry work. Eighteen Mt. Eden teachers from eight departments are participating in the first year of Mills Teacher Scholar inquiry work. Supported by...

Aija Simmons, Associate Director of Teacher Leadership In my 1st year of teaching, I was placed in a 5th grade sheltered English immersion classroom. Knowing the importance of oral language production for English Learners, I made sure my students got ample opportunities to turn and talk. My students were turning and talking all day long, engaging in mini-conversations that would last anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, depending on the content and purpose. In this first year, I used this “best practice” strategy to anchor lessons across disciplines without really examining if students were benefiting from it. At a certain point during my 2nd year in the classroom, I happened to overhear a conversation between two students during turn and talk that sounded completely off task and irrelevant. I, of course, intervened and got the students to go back to the topic and exchange a sentence apiece, but somewhere in the back of my mind a question began nudging at me. I found myself wondering why in the world we were turning and talking all day long when the truth was I had no idea what most of my students were even talking about and I had not developed explicit goals for this talk. This broad question, “What happens when my students turn and talk to one another?” would impact my practice in ways far deeper than just teaching students to engage in academic discourse. Using the Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry group to find the answer to this question helped me to develop my professional voice and to begin to clarify my stance as a teacher. I began to understand that the relationship between what I think I’m teaching and what my students are actually learning is quite nuanced. Closely monitoring student responses to specific lessons through collecting multiple forms of student learning data, including audio of the turn and talk conversations, helped me to clarify the reasons for my instructional decisions and to see my students in new ways. The increase in instructional confidence I gained through engaging in monthly collaborative inquiry sessions with my colleagues began to carry over into other professional spaces. In search of the answers to questions of practice, I became a teacher leader.