We are excited to announce that Aija Simmons is our new Associate Director of Teacher Leadership. For years Aija has been our model at Mills Teacher Scholars for what it means when a teacher embraces an inquiry stance towards teaching. Aija fluently articulates the questions she has about how her students are learning and what it is that she wants them to learn. She locates, collects, and collaboratively analyzes student learning data around these questions in order to make informed instructional decisions. She publicly models her own thinking process and supports her colleagues as they grapple with their own questions of practice and as they develop their instructional leadership capacities. This year Aija will be busy leading our work with Emery Unified, continuing to co-direct our Teacher Leader Network, and co-develop our Coaching Through Inquiry framework. She will bring her adult coaching expertise to New Highland Academy (NHA) where she will support new teachers at NHA to take an inquiry stance, and she will support our thriving partnership with Oakland Unified’s Social Emotional Learning and Leadership Department.

  In our 2014-15 program evaluation survey, conducted by WestEd, our teacher scholars’ feedback indicated overwhelmingly positive attitudes about their collaborative inquiry work through their Mills Teacher Scholars partnership. What aspects of the Mills Teacher Scholars work resonate with teachers? Facebook posts such as these imply that educators are rarely upbeat and active participants in professional development opportunities. The reality that we experience at Mills Teacher Scholars is that teachers are open and hopeful to new professional development, but often jaded by the top-down training model they have frequently experienced. In this top-down model the goal is to “tool” the teacher with new curriculum and content strategies to implement and the delivery often resembles the banking model of learning where key information is deposited by the trainer into the minds of the learner (the teachers). Undoubtedly, teachers need access to the most current thinking about enhancing student learning, but professional development design impacts both teacher engagement in the process and professional learning outcomes. Those designing learning experiences for teachers need to carefully consider the following questions: What is the instructional approach for teachers to build their conceptual understanding? How does the local knowledge of teachers intersect with district or school learning goals? In our 2014-15 WestEd Survey Mills Teacher Scholars participants’ feedback indicated overwhelmingly positive attitudes about their learning through engagement in their year-long Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry experience.

A new set of standards has districts and schools racing to implement aligned curriculum. In teacher professional development efforts there is an unprecedented focus on curricular implementation and in the implementation rush, the curriculum can become the end game and the students’ learning...

At last month’s Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum, attendees walked away with new ideas about what teacher-led learning looks like and sounds like.  From using video to strengthen collaboration and instruction to understanding the connection between academic learning and social...