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Distance Learning Resources - SEL for Staff: Supporting Yourself

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LESS THAN ONE WEEK AWAY! Our Distance Learning Leadership Summit is November 23 & 24.

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Asking staff what they want to learn, and then breaking up into choice groups--sometimes with someone who has expertise in that area of practice to provide support and facilitate the group conversation.

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Pose a check-in question and move staff into groups of 3-4 to check in and build relationships.

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Our PD sessions this year have 3 options:
1. Live Zoom webinar
2. Asynchronous prerecorded Edpuzzle
3. Independent work to earn a badge

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Ceres EdTech Digital Learning Resource Guide

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Learn more about essential tools. Click on the icons below. Learn how to digitally communicate with your students and their families. Create standards-based lessons aligned with curriculum to post on various platforms. Provide opportunities for students to share their learning and knowledge with…

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Giving teachers a space to share their expertise with others in an informal conversation

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Edcamps are informal sessions by and for teachers, where anyone can present, and the focus is on collaboration and connections, group expertise, tech tools, and instructional design.

Photo credit: K.W. Barrett via flickr (CC BY 2.0)

During the past six years, hundreds of Edcamp events have popped up worldwide. Teachers from every corner of the globe have been organizing open opportunities for educators to collaborate and solve problems.

In spite of this growth and energy, there are still many educators who are either uninformed or skeptical of the Edcamp model for teacher professional development. Given the plethora of "silver bullets" and magical cures in education, some skepticism is healthy. It ensures that we refine and revise our beliefs through meaningful investigation.

What's an Edcamp?

Let's begin with a definition. In short, Edcamps are:

Free: Edcamps should be free to all attendees. This helps ensure that all different types of teachers and educational stakeholders can attend.

Non-commercial and with a vendor-free presence: Edcamps should be about learning, not selling. Educators should feel free to express their ideas without being swayed or influenced by sales pitches for educational books or technology.

Hosted by any organization or individual: Anyone should be able to host an Edcamp. School districts, educational stakeholders and teams of teachers can host Edcamps.

Made up of sessions that are determined on the day of the event: Edcamps should not have pre-scheduled presentations. During the morning of the event, the schedule should be created in conjunction with everyone there. Sessions will be spontaneous, interactive and responsive to participants' needs.

Events where anyone who attends can be a presenter: Anyone who attends an Edcamp should be eligible to present. All teachers and educational stakeholders are professionals worthy of sharing their expertise in a collaborative setting.

Reliant on the "law of two feet" which encourages participants to find a session that meets their needs: As anyone can host a session, it is critical that participants are encouraged to actively self-select the best content and sessions. Edcampers should leave sessions that do not meet their needs. This provides a uniquely effective way of "weeding out" sessions that are not based on appropriate research or not delivered in an engaging format.

Despite the concrete definition, it can be difficult to truly capture the Edcamp experience. That's because a "typical" day of learning at an Edcamp doesn't really exist. Each Edcamp is unique and based on the needs of the participants. When you arrive at the location (usually a school or university) on the day of the event, there is no pre-set schedule of sessions or presenters. Instead, there's just a blank sheet of big paper with a grid on it.
Photo credit: Kristen Swanson
From that blank slate, everyone builds the session schedule together. As people mingle and chat over free coffee and donuts, they put up potential discussion topics on a board. Since it's my job to build the schedule at the Edcamp events I organize, I can truly attest that the entire process is positive and organic. Occasionally, people who don't even know each other realize that they have similar interests and end up running a session together. Other folks come with an idea, throw it out to the group, revise it, and end up posting it with a refined focus. Since anyone who attends an Edcamp event can be a presenter at the event, it's a very empowering experience for everyone involved.

The skeptics are likely wondering, "What do you do if no ones signs up?" (I get that question a lot.) And while there are certainly specific strategies you can use to ease your anxiety (building an idea board on the event page, having conversations with amazing educators who are planning to attend, etc.), they usually aren't needed. I've never attended or heard of an Edcamp where the schedule board didn't fill. It just doesn't happen.

What Happens in a Session?

Given the spontaneity of the schedule creation, you may be curious about the content of the sessions that are typically shared at an Edcamp. Well, it's certainly hard to generalize, but here is a sampling of sessions from recent Edcamp events:

Edcamp SF Bay

Fostering Student Learning Networks

How to Run Your School from Your iPhone

Edcamp Omaha

The Global Read Aloud and Reading in the 21st Century

Badges, Levels, Games, and Learning

Edcamp Atlanta

Twitter Newbies

Collaborative Classrooms, a New Physical Environment

Educators often have very specific, concrete takeaways from sessions like these all over the country. Consider these positive personal outcomes:

"I learned ways to flip my faculty meeting, spending less time on announcements and more time on PD, relationship building and modeling a maximization of time with my staff." - Joe Mazza

"I absolutely loved hearing about Lauren's experience with a school-wide topic of study, and would love to bring this practice to our school. She described a school whose study topic was 'India,' and every grade level, across all content areas, sought to plan experiences that helped students engage with that topic in some way." - Lyn Hilt

"In one Edcamp I learned about all the cool things you can do with Evernote and how you can save everything there!" - Joy Kirr

These aren't merely fluffy concepts. They are specific, practical strategies and ideas that educators are sharing and investigating at Edcamps all over the nation.

Beyond the Takeaway

Further, the social, interactive, recursive nature of an Edcamp is directly aligned to adult learning theories. In a whitepaper I wrote in 2011, blog posts about Edcamp were qualitatively analyzed to determine common themes. The most popular ideas were:

Collaboration and connections

Group expertise

Tech tools

Instructional design

Surprise (at the number of educators dedicated to their craft)

These themes are directly correlated to the tenets of effective adult learning as stated in the meta-analysis by National Academies Press entitled How People Learn: Brain, Mind Experience, and School. And further peer-reviewed research in 2016 has corroborated these findings and added greater understanding about the efficacy of the model.

The Edcamp model provides educators with a sustainable model for learning, growing, connecting, and sharing. Everyone's expertise is honored, and specific, concrete strategies are exchanged. When professional development is created "for teachers by teachers," everyone wins.

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Edcamps are informal sessions by and for teachers, where anyone can present, and the focus is on collaboration and connections, group expertise, tech tools, and instructional design. Photo credit: K.W. Barrett via flickr (CC BY 2.0) During the past six years, hundreds of Edcamp events have popped up worldwide.

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I like to share little note cards.

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We highlight teachers weekly, who are integrating best practices to support students and parents.

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Another great tool for collecting input during Google Slides

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It's how you include everyone
in your meetings

Slido gives you everything you need to engage your participants, capture their views and make everyone feel connected - whether you're running a team call, training or an all-company meeting.

Intuitive and easy

The attendees can join without any logins or downloads, and the setup for hosts takes only minutes.

5+ polling options

With Slido's 5 types of polls, Q&A, quizzes and surveys, you can engage your participants in a variety of ways.

Get started for free

Start with our forever-free Basic plan, or get more from Slido for only €10 per month.

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Slido is the ultimate Q&A and polling platform for live and virtual meetings and events. It offers interactive Q&A, live polls and insights about your audience.

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Work with a great consultant who delivers services at multiple levels in the district--Performance Education Partnership!

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Work with a great consultant who delivers services at multiple levels in the district--Performance Education Partnership!

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do synchronous breakout rooms and asynchronous time to read articles.

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do synchronous breakout rooms and asynchronous time to read articles.

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using breakout screens

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Google Slides or Flipgrid to share out after conferences

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Google Slides or Flipgrid to share out after conferences

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Emoji check ins

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There are restrictions on how many freebies so be careful about being too picky about the background.

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There are restrictions on how many freebies so be careful about being too picky about the background.

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Choose a few people of week and have a 5 minute chat regarding what is going well and what their needs are.

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April 1995 | Volume 52 | Number 7
Self-Renewing Schools Pages 48-50

Ulrich C. Reitzug and Leonard C. Burrello

What distinguishes principals in self-renewing schools from those in schools where it's business as usual? Outstanding principals go beyond merely involving teachers in decision making-they encourage teachers to continuously engage in identifying best practices. These self-renewal efforts result in the types of learning organizations described by Senge (1990), Watkins and Marsick (1993), and others.

We studied 13 principals from 13 school districts in the Midwest, Southwest, and Southeast. Outstanding principals had been recommended to us by school administrators and university colleagues in each geographic region of the United States. Our sample included urban and suburban as well as male and female principals. We observed the principals; interviewed them, their teachers, and other staff members; and analyzed school documents for evidence of empowering and self-renewing leadership behavior.

We found that these principals do three things to help teachers become more reflective practitioners. Specifically, they:

provide a supportive environment that encourages teachers to examine and reflect upon their teaching and on school practice;

use specific behaviors to facilitate reflective practice; and,

make it possible for teachers to implement ideas and programs that result from reflective practice.

Providing a Supportive Environment

How do principals develop a supportive environment for reflective practice? They use several strategies.

1. Encouraging justification of practice. Many of the teachers we interviewed commented that principals allow them to teach in the manner they feel is most appropriate. Autonomy, however, does not come without responsibility. Teachers have to justify why they are using specific methodologies.
In one school, a group of teachers went to the principal because some of them wanted to use a phonetic approach while others preferred a whole language approach to reading. The principal replied, "Each of you needs to be able to justify what you're doing. You don't all need to be doing the same thing." What was important to him was not which approach they use but that they do their own thinking and that students learn. Other principals had similar philosophies. The implication is that teaching cannot be standardized-it is individual and context-specific. Teachers must study their own practice and learn from it as much as from formal research.

2. Providing alternative instructional frameworks. Principals also help teachers develop other perspectives through creative use of staff development opportunities. For example, one principal scheduled an in-house workshop in the morning with a repeat session in the afternoon. This permitted half the teachers to attend each session, with enough aides and special area teachers available for classroom coverage. Other principals also manipulate school schedules to provide more staff development opportunities for their teachers. In addition, they share professional articles at meetings and by placing them in teachers' mailboxes, generally with a personal note.
Perhaps the most extensive way in which principals provide alternative frameworks is by framing ideas as possibilities: "Maybe you could try this way; give it a thought." One teacher whose principal periodically attends their team meetings commented, "He jumps right in and makes suggestions. Now whether we do it or not is our choice. It's not like, `Because I'm here and said this, you have to do it.'"

3. Encouraging risk-taking. Many of the principals in our study encourage teachers to take risks. For example, one principal fulfills teacher resource requests not "to be nice to them, to get them what they want," but to encourage them "to start making more decisions for themselves." Outstanding principals view unsuccessful tries as learning opportunities. When risks don't work out, this principal remarked, "I'll sit down with the person, and we'll talk about what we're going to do next and why."
Another teacher observed that a favorite saying of his principal was, "We're not working on a project; we're working on improving ourselves."

4. Creating teaming structures for collective responsibility. Many of the principals create organizational structures that reduce isolation and increase teaming. Teaming leads to a sense of collective responsibility for one another and for students and provides an emotional and instructional support network. One teacher observed that when she had tried everything she could think of with a student, simply having team members with whom she could share these frustrations helped. Her colleague summed it up this way:
One person doesn't own a child. You may be able to work well with a child in one area of his or her life, and somebody else needs to give you some ideas to work with in another area.... It's not only team teaching, but it is collaborative consultation.

Thus, teaming provides teachers with a support group that recognizes individual limits. Simultaneously, teaming expands individual limits by providing opportunities for teachers to share ideas, strategies, and students.

Facilitating Reflective Practice

Whereas providing a supportive environment requires changing organizational characteristics, principals facilitate reflective practice in ways that more proactively stimulate teachers to study their teaching. Here are three strategies that we observed.

1. Asking questions. Principals ask challenging questions that prompt teachers to reflect on their practice. One teacher noted that sometimes a simple "Why?" from her principal is enough: "If I haven't done any research, I'm not going to be able to present a valid argument."
Principals also ask questions to help resolve issues of school policy and practice. In one school, for example, several teachers were involved in a scheduling dispute. The principal called them all together and asked each individually, "Did you get exactly what you wanted last year? What other time is good if you can't get this time?" Rather than imposing a solution on teachers, this approach places the responsibility for developing solutions and resolving conflicts upon those involved.

2. Critiquing by wandering around. Peters and Waterman (1982) popularized the concept of "management by wandering around" (p. 67). If principals are to ask questions that facilitate reflective practice, they need to know what is occurring in teachers' classrooms. "Wandering around" helped our principals stay informed. One teacher commented that her principal was "everywhere," using his visibility to interact with teachers. "He really picks our brains," she said.
The principals in our study also use their time in classrooms and hallways to relearn the local context, which increases both their opportunities to ask questions and their knowledge of what questions to ask. While Weick (1982) has argued that the purpose of management by wandering around is to "remind people of central visions and to assist them in applying them to their own activities," our principals' questions, by contrast, helped teachers clarify personal visions, which ultimately strengthens the organizational vision.
While in some contexts the frequent presence of the principal in classrooms might make teachers uncomfortable, this was not the case in the schools we observed. Teachers interpreted the principals' presence as a sign of support rather than as an intrusion. As one teacher commented, "That shows me he's interested in what's going on in my classroom ... in what I'm doing with the kids."

3. Challenging program regularities. Knowledge of local context also makes it possible for principals to go beyond questioning to challenging program regularities. For example, after observing two reading classes-one ability-grouped and the other for learning disabled students-a principal initiated a conversation with teachers about tracking and then issued a challenge: "We're working in the same place. Why don't we bring two teachers down [to join the two LD teachers], keep these kids on task all of the time, and we'll get a lot further than we are." The result for students was the alleviation of an exclusionary tracking relationship, which has been found to undermine social aspirations and feelings of self-worth (Oakes 1985).

In another instance, the principal's actions went beyond challenging a program regularity. When the principal came to the school, she found a culture that embraced corporal punishment. She responded by prohibiting it:

Now that I look back on it, I took the one piece of power they had. The teachers said the best thing about paddling in the hall was that everybody down the hall heard it.... It was significant when I asked them to put the paddles away, because they had no idea what they could do to motivate kids in a positive way. They had no alternative.

While the tendency might be to criticize the principal's autocratic decision, when core values are at stake, principals (or teachers) may not have a choice other than to respond in a manner compatible with their core beliefs. In this case, teachers responded by developing a more humane discipline policy.

Enhancing Possibility

Another type of behavior through which principals promote self-renewal is giving teachers the opportunity to implement ideas and programs. Principals in this study enhance possibility by providing resources in the form of money, materials, time, and opportunity.

Teachers and principals have an explicit understanding of the relationship between resources and self-renewal. As one principal observed, "When I believe that teachers know how to teach, then I believe I need to provide them what they need to teach with." Teachers noted that rather than issuing a flat "no" when money was not available, the principal worked with them to identify potential resources. "It forces you to sit down together to talk about programs that you might want to do if you could dream," explained one teacher.

According to teachers, funding was frequently obtained through grant writing. When they were unsuccessful in obtaining grants, schools would "find the money somewhere." Many schools regularly look for funding from local businesses and state incentives, or they creatively administer the regular school budget.

The "possibility thinking" stimulated by grant-writing appeared to be something that principals consciously promote. One teacher indicated that in her selection interview, the principal had asked her, "If I gave you $500 to spend in the next 10 minutes, what would you buy?" After giving the teacher an opportunity to reply, the principal had asked, "Now I'm telling you I don't have the money; how are you going to get it anyway?"

One principal used a teaching slot to which the school was entitled to restructure two elementary teachers' roles. As a result, they could more extensively share their special interest and expertise in science and language arts by working with students throughout the school, while the new teacher taught half-time in each of their classrooms.

A Focus on Teachers and Their Practice

Traditionally, principals have been placed in hierarchical domination over teachers, the assumption being that hierarchical superiority equals expertise (Sergiovanni 1992). It logically followed that it was the principal's responsibility to tell teachers how to teach.

By contrast, principal behavior in the self-renewing schools we studied motivates teachers to examine their teaching in order to determine which practices are appropriate. Dominant sources of teaching expertise in these schools shifted from principals and formal research to teachers and their practice. The role of principals changed from dispensing information to facilitating processes in which teachers could discover knowledge.

References

Oakes, J. (1985). Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Peters, T. J., and R. H. Waterman. (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.

Sergiovanni, T. J. (1992). "Moral Authority and the Regeneration of Supervision." In Supervision in Transition: The 1992 ASCD Yearbook edited by C. D. Glickman, pp. 203-214. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Watkins, K. E., and V. J. Marsick. (1993). Sculpting the Learning Organization: Lessons in the Art and Science of Systemic Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Weick, K. E. (1982). "Administering Education in Loosely Coupled Schools." Phi Delta Kappan 27, 2: 673- 676.

Ulrich C. Reitzug is Associate Professor, Department of Administrative Leadership, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Enderis Hall 629, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201. Leonard C. Burrello is Professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, W. W. Wright Education Building, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47401.

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How Principals Can Build Self-Renewing Schools

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April 1995 | Volume 52 | Number 7 Self-Renewing Schools Pages 48-50 Ulrich C. Reitzug and Leonard C. Burrello What distinguishes principals in self-renewing schools from those in schools where it's business as usual? Outstanding principals go beyond merely involving teachers in decision making-they encourage teachers to continuously engage in identifying best practices.

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Rotate interested teachers as administrative designees/subs

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Rotate interested teachers as administrative designees/subs

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Per applicable contracts

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Invite teachers to participate in walk-throughs

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Invite teachers to participate in walk-throughs

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If permitted by contract

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Invite staff to facilitate professional learning

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Invite staff to facilitate professional learning

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For teams, departments, staff, district groups, etc. Provide encouragement and support.

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Want them to read an article and respond? Try Edji

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Want them to read an article and respond? Try Edji

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This is a freemium tool.

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Want them to watch a video and respond? Try EdPuzzle

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Want them to watch a video and respond? Try EdPuzzle

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This is a freemium tool.

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In addition to using these tools as a way to check in with staff, there are numerous other ways to use these tools to provide opportunities for staff to process and respond to information or concepts being shared at meetings. Build Pear Deck or Near Pod activities into the slide decks for your content.

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That is the tool you are looking at right now. It is set so that you can post, comment on posts and like posts. Posts can include a recorded video, image, links, drawings, maps, and more. You can also set it to allow users to "vote" instead of "like" posts. This is a freemium tool.

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This tool has many question types, including the word cloud and 2X2 grid we used in our session

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This site allows you to create a board where people can add text, images and links. Then, if it is set to do so, they can go back to the board and comment on what was posted and add "dots" to vote for items. You decide how many dots (votes) each user gets when you create the board. This is a freemium tool.

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Cookies are important to the proper functioning of a site. To improve your experience, we use cookies to remember log-in details and provide secure log-in, collect statistics to optimize site functionality, and deliver content tailored to your interests. Learn more →

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Dotstorming - A space for real-time group brainstorming and decision making

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Cookies are important to the proper functioning of a site. To improve your experience, we use cookies to remember log-in details and provide secure log-in, collect statistics to optimize site functionality, and deliver content tailored to your interests. Learn more →

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This is basically a free digital whiteboard with just a few basic tools. Be sure to share with edit permission if you want staff to contribute.

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When staff comes back in person, you can always have a box where staff can share ideas, concerns, questions, etc.

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These tools take your slide decks and add interactive content. Pear Deck specifically includes SEL slides. All slide templates are fully editable so that you can customize them for your needs. these are "freemium" tools.

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Teachers are a busy bunch, and learning to use new tools can be time-consuming. That's why Pear Deck was designed to integrate with tools you already know and use. Whether your school is Google or Microsoft-based, Pear Deck will work in your classroom.

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Teachers are a busy bunch, and learning to use new tools can be time-consuming. That's why Pear Deck was designed to integrate with tools you already know and use. Whether your school is Google or Microsoft-based, Pear Deck will work in your classroom.

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Essentially a digital whiteboard. You can load a background (or even a pdf document) to it and then let others annotate on it. If you want others to interact with it, but sure to set sharing to "edit" permission. Posts are anonymous.

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Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Survey Monkey, etc.