Building Leadership To Support Teacher Learning: The Mills Teacher Scholars Principal Inquiry Network

September 9, 2015

The larger goal of the newly formed Network is to support school leaders to harness the potential of the Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work at their sites to support transformational systems change. Through this newly formed Network, leaders of Mills Teacher Scholars partner sites will work with their school-based colleagues to: develop a deeper understanding of how teacher inquiry can improve instructional practice and align school-wide expectations and practices build competency around how to set the conditions to support teacher learning and teacher instructional leadership consider new ways to leverage existing teacher leader competencies at their school site The Anna Yates (Emery Unified) team meets to collaboratively craft a statement that articulates how their Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work will move them towards their school improvement goals. As teacher scholar leaders from their sites met in the adjacent room, Principal Network participants at our August meeting had a chance to experience the Mills Teacher Scholars thinking space for themselves. Veteran MTS partner principal, Paco Furlan (Rosa Parks, BUSD) modeled the idea of sharing an authentic dilemma of leadership with principal coach Eve Gordon, who supported him to think more deeply through probing questions and comments. Principals then had a chance to explore their own question of practice in small groups before joining up with their teacher scholar leaders next door. Site leaders and teacher scholar leaders were asked to collaboratively craft a statement that articulates how their Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work will move them towards their school improvement goals. This messaging, that aligned teacher leaders’ vision with the principal’s would then be shared with their staff on the opening professional development day. Here are statements from two of our partner sites:

Teachers as Agents of Their Own Learning

June 11, 2015

  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.

Celebrating Our Teacher Leaders

June 11, 2015

“The Teacher Leader Network has helped me understand that being a professional is not knowing it all and dictating it out to others, but instead being a person who people feel comfortable sharing their own knowledge with and getting them...

Photo Highlights from the Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum

April 23, 2015

Over 200 attendees joined us for our Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum 2015. This year’s event highlighted the process Mills Teacher Scholars uses to support teacher learning at sites–with posters, panel discussions and teacher consultancies giving attendees a real glimpse into...

Cross-Disciplinary Teacher Learning at Albany High School

April 23, 2015

In many high schools, collaboration around teaching and learning occurs only in departments and meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration is rare. Albany High School, in its second year of teacher-led, inquiry-based professional development, and in its first year of partnership with Mills...

Mills Teacher Scholars Partners with OUSD’s Social Emotional Learning and Leadership Development Department

February 19, 2015

The wordle above illustrates the OUSD SEL teacher scholars' reflections on their all-day Mills Teacher Scholars experience. As we support our teacher scholars from across the East Bay to engage in making sense of the Common Core standards, we are hearing a repeated refrain: student success hinges on their social emotional learning (SEL) competencies. Indeed, there is wide-spread agreement  that the SEL competencies are foundational to achieving the communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity goals embedded in the Common Core State Standards. But how do teachers support this competency building while developing content understanding? Mills Teacher Scholars is excited to partner with OUSD’s Social Emotional Learning and Leadership Development and Developmental Studies Center to explore this question with a group of dynamic SEL teacher leaders from Caring School Communities demonstration schools. In late January seventeen K-6 OUSD teachers from Parker, Emerson, Crocker Highlands and Garfield elementary schools began a year-long series of collaborative inquiry sessions that focus on two essential questions: What conditions do we need in place to support collaborative adult learning communities that build understanding? How do the Caring School Community Curriculum and the OUSD SEL standards support students’ academic content development? Focus on conversations that promote understanding The all-day January session at Mills College at Northeastern University provided opportunities for teachers to notice, name and better understand how social emotional learning and building academic content knowledge overlap for both adults and students. SEL teacher scholars deconstructed a video of a powerful teacher learning conversation, identifying the adults’ SEL competencies and discourse moves, then participated in a learning discussion themselves. Throughout the session the teacher scholars surfaced the conditions and agreements necessary for teachers to engage in learning conversations together.

Exploring Teacher Leadership

February 19, 2015

Mills Teacher Scholars had the privilege of spending Valentine’s Day with the more than eighty teacher leaders who turned out for the Exploring Teacher Leadership conference at Stanford on Saturday, February 14th. Sponsored by the National Board Resource Center and CTA, Executive Director, Carrie Wilson, and Associate Director, Daniela Mantilla participated in the event, which marked the roll out of the Teacher Leadership Competencies that National Education Association, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the Center for Teaching Quality created. Mills Teacher Scholars was identified by the partners in the Teacher Leadership Initiative as an organization that builds and leverages teacher leader competencies to support instructional leadership and as an organization that supports schools to build and leverage the skills that National Board Certified Teachers develop through the rigorous certification process.