Today's professional development day

We are deeply grateful for the opportunity to gather regularly as a faculty and have professional development days! Today was no exception, as it gave us a chance to continue the important curriculum review process that we've been undertaking this year. The morning started with an unbelievable breakfast home-cooked by Diane, Heather, Laura, Mohammad, and Paula. At the end of breakfast, Diane spoke with the teachers about the Annual fund.

I then laid out the agenda for the day, and moved into our first activity by reviewing the timeline for the curriculum review process we initially designed in August. Back then, today was intended to be a day to gather faculty into small groups to begin proposing specific changes and shifts in our curriculum. However, the small group meetings in November and December to review the curriculum maps the faculty had created ran into two unexpected issues that we needed to address. The first was the simple fact that there is so much data on the maps that it was difficult for faculty to do the task of finding the alignments, patterns, overlaps, and gaps. This in turn lead to the second issue, which was that faculty had many questions about the process of the curriculum review, and how it was designed. Similarly, I struggled to do a meta-analysis of the data the teachers had provided me, and ultimately created a list that categorized information in one of four ways; themes and patterns, questions about the curriculum, questions about the process, and comments about the process. After looking at this meta-data together, I explained that we wanted to stay in the "questioning" mode rather than shift into a "resolving" mode, and so sent faculty off in small groups

to conduct a parallel process to the reviews of the curriculum maps, except this time each group was tasked with looking specifically at the criteria of a specific discipline (math, literacy, science, cultural studies, approach to learning, social/emotional development) of the progress reports. This turned out to be a huge success - being able to look at the content in a specific discipline helped teachers narrow the data to consider to a manageable scope, and using the criteria from the reports also shifted the conversation from broad patterns about content to the underlying skills and understandings we are trying to help students develop.

After a short break, we reconvened for a short explanation of the afternoon activity. Teachers were asked first to look back at the curriculum maps they had written in August and analyze where, when, how and why they diverged from the curriculum they had planned during the first half of the year; and then, to look at what they had planned for the second half of the year, and to make any revisions possible now based on their experiences in the first half of the year. This took faculty anywhere from 1-3 hours, and they turned these maps in before they left for vacation. The rest of the afternoon, faculty were free to do any curriculum planning work that they needed.

I tried out two new activities with the faculty during these meetings that I learned about from a book Diane (our Director of Advancement) brought back from a recent professional development event she attended on Gamestorming. In the first meeting, just before sending the small groups off to work, I conducted a "Pre-mortem" of what could go wrong with the activity. This was very helpful in generating unrelated constraints, such as focusing on philosophy instead of criteria, or bringing in thoughts/emotions about other topics unrelated to the task at hand, or tentativeness about a discipline, that teachers could then put aside. In the second meeting, I began by leading the group through the game of "Campfire." Just as campfires are a way to share stories, the goal of this activity was to help teachers simply share their experiences with curriculum planning, and thus set the mood to delve into the work they were about to do. I had written 15-20 words related to the theme of curriculum development on stickies (spiral; emergent; resources; whoops!; trial and error; lesson plans, etc), which I put up on the board in a random collection. Taking turns, faculty came up to pick one of the words and talk about an experience they had had related to this key word, and they then added the word to a "path" that represented our collective experience of sharing and listening to these stories. It was a very powerful experience complete with tears, laughter, and appreciations!

The rest of my day was a whirlwind.

11:30-12:00 Math night planning meeting with Amy, Danette, Sima, Mike S, Missy, Maureen, and Steve.

12:00-12:30 Service learning planning meeting with Diane, Mitch, Nancy, and Kate.

12:30-1:30 Phone conversation with Scott Duyan, Head of Presidio Hill School and my mentor in my Fellowship for Aspiring Heads through NAIS.

1:30-3:00 Admin team meeting.

3:15-4:00 Progress reports technology/concept meeting with Cindy, Mike S, and Mitch.

What a great, fulfilling way to head into a few days of rest and recuperation!