Literacy, AIW Focuses on Professional Development

Spencer Daily Reporter

Kris Todd

Just as students attend classes to become educated, teachers brush up on their skills to retain and improve upon what they learned in college.

Professional development sessions, such as what Spencer instructors participate in on a monthly basis, help. The district's next teacher inservices are scheduled for Monday, Oct. 17 and Wednesday, Oct. 26.

With Barb Besch, Spencer's director of school improvement, on an approved medical leave, Elli Wiemers has been hired to serve as the district's interim school improvement director. In this new role, Wiemers, a Spencer High School teacher, continues to teach math in the morning and then serves as an instructional coach in the afternoon.

She is assisted by Pat Briese, a fellow SHS teacher. The 2011-12 school year marks the third both women have served as half-time teachers and instructional leaders in Spencer.

"We're all getting our feet under us without Barb here right now," Wiemers said days after being hired to serve in the interim position.

"Fortunately, Elli and I had both worked this summer on laying out our secondary professional development plan," Briese added. "So, we feel good about how that's ready for us to implement."

At Spencer's middle and high school levels, professional development focuses on departments and what is happening in each. The departmental approach, which happened locally last spring, is aligned to bring in Iowa Core standards—which all schools are required to fully implement in grades nine through 12 by July 1, 2012, and in grades kindergarten through eight by the 2014–15 school year—as well as implementation of new textbooks and curriculum revisions.

"We're on a seven-year cycle with that," Wiemers said. "So, depending upon what department falls in what year, the work is a bit different. It's kind of building-block work."

The district's professional development sessions also have universal learnings which thread through content areas.

"For our professional development specifically, those universal learnings include literacy in the content areas, promoting reflective practice by teachers and development of what we're calling anchor tasks, which are summative assessments, preferably performance in nature, that assess the big ideas and concepts of a unit," Wiemers said. "Everybody 7-12 is working on those three things."

An important piece of Spencer's professional development puzzle is secondary-level instructors continuing to teach content-specific literacy skills. The district's system of educational professionals are also incorporating the common language of Authentic Intellectual Work, which helps in accomplishing this task.

"It's the glue that makes Pat and I—as teachers of English, social studies, and mathematics—be able to talk to each other on the same playing field," Wiemers said.

Through AIW, instructors aspire to bring authentic experiences into the classroom, which encourage students to think like actual social scientists, mathematicians, and other professionals. At the same time, AIW allows students to experience "value beyond school."

"We don't want kids to come to school and then play school; we want them to have authentic experiences," Wiemers said. "Because of this, kids are getting the idea that they really have to play a big role in their own learning. We have what we call 'substantive conversations,' where kids have to know it's on their shoulders to interact with their peers, to make connections and to make meaning together."

Consultant Dana Carmichael, of the Center for AIW, will meet with Spencer teachers three times this school year to augment their AIW knowledge.

"We prefer to think that we've not really made a lot of changes from last year to this year in professional development," Wiemers said. "Rather, we've looked for the natural extensions of the work. [We're] working as much as we can to have the teachers do the work that makes sense to them. We try to ask for their opinions and get their input on it. This is not a top-down decision and the nice thing about AIW is that it honors the experts in the room."

So, how are Spencer teachers viewing professional development?

According to one of the district's instructional coaches, its historical downfall has been learning "this year's new thing."

"For five years now, Spencer's 7–12 focus has been on literacy and Authentic Intellectual Work. We've drawn upon some historically good professional development, including the Understanding by Design framework, something Kathy Elliott began with us six to eight years ago. As practitioners, the good thing is we've been victims of that 'this year's new thing,'" Wiemers said. "Teachers tell us what's working and what's not working. We know that as long as we continue to try to hold a steady path, and the school board and administrators have recognized this as well—this isn't a Pat-and-Elli thing, this is a district movement—then it makes teachers less skeptical about professional development. We've also tried to give teachers a choice in their professional development."