Example Sequence of Teacher PD Workshop Sessions
Diagram adapted from McCray, J. S., & Chen, J. Q. (2012). Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Preschool Mathematics: Construct Validity of a New Teacher Interview. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 26, 291-307.
I recently had a couple of discussions with schools here in Rwanda regarding how I might be able to support teacher professional learning (aka. professional development) in the coming school-year. I feel strongly that effective teacher professional learning needs to consider the context of the teachers, school, students, curriculum, etc. However, for the sake of discussion, I put together a rough example sequence of workshop sessions. These are based on my personal teaching experience, and my experience working and observing in schools. The below sequence reflects some of the topics and concepts that I believe are high impact for teacher professional growth and student learning. Again, though, this is just an example.
A Potential Sequence of Teacher Professional Development Workshops
This outline is based on a schedule of one workshop session per week. Each workshop session could be structured for somewhere between 1-2 hours each. If two hours was an option, it would allow for additional work-time for teachers to implement the workshop material into their own planning. If only one hour was available, I would set teachers up and provide them with material to implement on their own between workshop sessions.
Overview of My Approach to Teacher Professional Learning
With Lee Shulman (references at bottom), I understand Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) to be the crux of what makes a teacher effective. Shulman argued that it’s not enough for a teacher to merely have content knowledge of their subject matter, nor is it enough for the teacher to have a strong tool belt of pedagogical methods and strategies. Rather, an effective teacher is one that is able to guide students to understanding that subject matter, using pedagogical methods appropriate to the students, the context, and the subject matter. In other words, effective teaching brings together the teacher’s knowledge of the subject (and curriculum), knowledge of pedagogy, and knowledge of the students. The teacher’s PCK is his or her ability to combine these to guide students to understanding.
The idea of PCK also assumes a constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Constructivism is often presented as the opposite of a transmission model of teaching and learning. In a transmission model, knowledge is passed from the teacher to the student merely by the teacher verbally explaining and demonstrating. In this model, the student is a passive receiver of knowledge. The student needs to watch and listen in order to absorb the information; the transmission model equates absorption of information with learning. The constructivist model, however, is based on research in cognitive science, and states that each learner must construct their own understanding. Knowledge is not gained by a passive brain absorbing information; rather, it’s gained through the effortful mental work of each learner creating their own schema and mental models. The role of the teacher is to create and employ the models, examples, explanations, practice activities, and projects that will help the student construct their own understanding.
I’m also a proponent of Universal Design for Learning (see The UDL Guidelines from CAST), which is an approach to what is sometimes called differentiated or individualized learning. The constructivist model of teaching and learning assumes that each student has to individually do their own mental work to construct their own understanding. This implies that the process of coming to understand something will not be the same for every student. Each student comes to learning with different prior knowledge, different personal interests, different cultural backgrounds, and different abilities. A teacher needs to know the students in the classroom, plan instruction, formatively assess, and adapt instruction to ensure that each student is able to create their own understanding of the topic. With the UDL approach, teachers are prompted to consider, during their unit and lesson planning, the different learning needs of the students in the classroom. The UDL approach prompts teachers to take steps from the outset to ensure every student is able to learn the subject matter, and that the teacher has tools and strategies ready so that they can adjust when some students need additional support.
Lee Shulman spoke of the act of teaching as a cycle that involved six steps. Other educators have collapsed these six stages down to three.
Planning (aka. The Pre-Active Stage)
Comprehension: The teacher must understand the topic, including at a conceptual and syntactic level.
Transformation: The teacher must be able to prepare the topic for teaching; this requires that the teacher consider: a) the students and what they already know, b) the curriculum and what is required of the students to know, c) the sequence and steps most appropriate for student learning, d) the models, explanations, examples, and metaphors most appropriate to communicate the topic to the students, e) the ways for students to practice and gain their own understanding, and f) the best pedagogical tools and methods by which to teach the topic.
Teaching (aka. The Active Stage)
Instruction: The teacher must have the ability to implement the lesson plan, grab and maintain student attention, communicate the topic, guide the students, provide feedback to students, maintain a climate for learning, etc.
Evaluation: This includes formative assessment that takes place as part of the act of instruction, whereby the teacher is constantly monitoring for student understanding and adapting instruction accordingly. This also includes summative assessment of student understanding to determine their level of mastery at the end of a learning cycle.
Reflecting (aka. The Post-Active Stage)
Reflection: The teacher must conduct a self-evaluation, using the formative and summative assessment data gathered from students. The teacher must deliberately consider what worked and what didn’t work – and why – in terms of helping to guide students to understanding of the topic. During this stage, the teacher is considering how they will approach teaching this topic next time, based on what they learned from just teaching it.
New Comprehensions: The teacher consolidates what he or she learned through the process of teaching the particular topic. These new comprehensions could be about new understandings of the subject matter, or of the students, or of a particular example or model, etc. These new comprehensions, formed after each cycle of teaching, form the teacher’s PCK, which can then be employed with the next cycle of teaching. Some of these new comprehensions will be specific to teaching that topic, but some will transfer beyond that topic to help the teacher more effectively teach the next topic.
In the outline of workshop sessions listed below, you will see that I’ve proposed the majority of the sessions focused on the transformation stage. This is intentional. In many respects the active teaching stages are the implementation of the pre-active planning stages. Successful implementation in the classroom is directly related to deliberate and thoughtful teacher planning in advance. It also makes sense that during a teacher professional development workshop we’d focus on pre-active planning and post-active reflection. During a PD workshop, the teacher is not actively in the classroom teaching; rather, they are involved in preparing and reflecting so as to improve their teaching in the future.
Outline of Workshop Sessions
In each session, teachers will have the opportunity to apply the topic of the session directly to topics they are teaching in their classrooms. They will consider how it applies to a lesson they are preparing in the coming days, including how it applies to the specific students in that classroom. In each session, teachers will be asked to practice and implement specific take-aways in their teaching during the following week so that we can reflect and debrief together at the outset of the next session.
Session 1 - How Students Learn? Schema, Scaffolds and Constructing Conceptual Understanding
Summary: This session will provide an opportunity for teachers to dive a little deeper into the cognitive psychology of human learning. We’ll discuss Piaget’s idea of schema development through assimilation and accommodation. We’ll discuss Vygotsky’s idea of scaffolding.
Rationale: A key component of a teacher’s PCK is a teacher’s knowledge of students. This session helps teachers think about how students learn in a general sense. It also helps teachers consider their specific students, including the background knowledge they may already have, and the misconceptions a student may have. A teacher’s knowledge of how students already conceive of a topic will help the teacher guide the student to a fuller understanding of the topic. In Shulman’s teaching stages, this session relates to the stage of transformation. Teachers cannot transform their own knowledge of a topic in a way that will be comprehensible to students without understanding how comprehension works in the minds of students.
Session 2 - How Students Learn? The Cognitive Model of Memory
Summary: In this session, I’ll present teachers with a visual diagram of the human memory process and we’ll discuss the implications for teaching and learning, including the following concepts: attention, effortful processing, automatic processing, working memory, long-term memory, retrieval, assimilation, accommodation.
Rationale: Memory is not just for rote memorization of facts and information. In cognitive psychology, memory refers to the whole mental apparatus that allows us to recall what we already know, process new information, and store information to build up our knowledge and understanding. This session focuses on teacher knowledge of students and how students learn. There are significant pedagogical implications when teachers understand the processes of human memory, including how students attend to new information, how they process new information, and how they store information in long-term memory. This session again relates to Shulman’s stage of transformation. For a teacher to transform their own knowledge of a topic so that it will be comprehensible to students, it’s important that they understand how the students will receive and process the new information, construct their own meaning from the new information, and store that information for future use.
Session 3 - Exploring Teachers’ Syntactic Knowledge of their Subject Area
Summary: In this session I will draw on my experience teaching the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course in the IB Diploma Program at a previous school. The TOK course does not ask students to think about the facts, concepts, principles, and theories of a particular discipline; instead, it asks students to think about its purpose, scope and methods. In this session, teachers will reflect on a subject area that they teach as we work through a knowledge framework, thinking about that subject area at a syntactic level. We’ll ponder together the questions: What is the scope of the knowledge pursued within the discipline? What exactly defines the discipline? What sort of questions do researchers and practitioners ask within the discipline? From what perspective does the discipline approach questions? What methods and tools are used within the discipline to produce knowledge?
Rationale: This session will target the comprehension stage of Shulman’s stages of teaching. Teachers typically have a strong knowledge background in one or more disciplines, but that knowledge background often focuses on substantive knowledge– the facts, concepts, principles and theories of the discipline. Teachers often don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the discipline itself, its scope and purpose, assumptions and perspectives, methods and tools, etc. It’s important for a teacher to be able to approach their own knowledge of topics within a subject area at a syntactic level as they transform that topic for teaching. Often, important big ideas and compelling essential inquiry questions are derived from this syntactic level of a discipline. This session will help prime teacher thinking going into the subsequent sessions.
Session 4 - Backward Design Unit Planning: KUDs
Summary: In this session, I will guide teachers through the first stage of a backward unit design approach. Teachers will work with a unit of learning that they plan to teach in the near future. They will consider the curriculum for the unit, unpack that curriculum, and determine the end point they wish students to achieve. They will think about that end-point in terms of the big Ideas / understandings of the unit, the specific facts and information that students need to remember, and the skills that students need to be able to perform.
Rationale: This relates again to Shulman’s stage of transformation. For teachers to transform their knowledge of a topic (and the curriculum) into something that will be comprehensible to the students, it helps to start with the end-point in mind. What information does the teacher want students to know, what big conceptual ideas should they understand, and what should they be able to do by the end of the unit? Once the teacher has established the end-goal, the teacher can then work backwards to develop the lessons, the practice activities, the projects, and the assessments that will guide students to that end-goal. It also helps for the teacher to break the end-goal into big ideas versus facts / information versus skills. Each of these types of goals will require different teaching and learning actions to help students gain understanding. Each of these types of goals will also require different types of assessment to determine if students have learned them.
Session 5 - Learning Through Inquiry: Essential Questions
Summary: In this session, teachers will have an opportunity to consider how good questions can set up units, lessons, and projects as inquiry. In this way, students engage with a topic or a unit as an exploration – a learning journey – structured around one or more questions that drive their learning. Inquiry can be a process guided by the teacher, pursued by the whole class at once, or can be more student-driven, and even individual. The key is a good question. Essential questions are those that don’t have easy answers, require in-depth investigation, open-up the heart of a discipline or topic, and compel students to want to learn more. Teachers will consider the characteristics of essential questions, they will practice developing essential questions around topics they are teaching, and will consider how essential questions can help them structure teaching and learning in their classrooms as inquiry.
Rationale: Teaching and learning as inquiry is a powerful pedagogical approach. Essential questions can drive inquiry, but developing and pursuing essential questions requires that teachers have a deep conceptual understanding of the topic they are teaching, including at a syntactic level. A teacher must not only understand the facts, concepts and principles of a topic, but, to pursue teaching and learning through inquiry, the teacher must know the types of questions asked and pursued within a particular discipline, and the methods, tools and approaches of inquiry within that discipline. This ties back to Shulman’s comprehension stage of teaching, and carries through to the transformation stage as teachers consider how to transform their knowledge of the topic and the inquiry process into something comprehensible for students.
Session 6 - Lesson Planing: Content Representations (CoRes)
Summary: In this lesson, teachers will focus on a specific lesson that they plan to teach in the coming week. I will guide them through a matrix table that asks them to determine the one or two big ideas they are addressing in that lesson. I will then guide them through a series of questions about those big ideas that get them to ponder the big ideas themselves, what students already know about the big ideas, misconceptions students may have about the big ideas, how best to represent and communicate the ideas to students, and the specific pedagogical approaches appropriate to the teaching and learning of these big ideas.
Rationale: Teacher PCK involves the amalgamation of their knowledge of the subject matter, their knowledge of pedagogy, and their knowledge of the students. A CoRes table is a lesson planning tool that forces the teacher to consider each of these components. It is a powerful tool for deliberate transformation of the subject matter for teaching.
Session 7 - Universal Design for Learning: Teaching So that Each Student Can Learn
Summary: The concept of universal design comes from the world of product and infrastructure design. The idea is to design something from the outset that will accommodate the greatest range of human differences, thus allow lots of different people, with different ability levels, to make use of the product or infrastructure. More often than not, this approach results in better design for everyone. UDL applies this principle to lesson planning. How can the teacher design the lesson from the outset to ensure that students, regardless of gender, cultural background, language level, etc. can access the content and demonstrate their learning?
Rationale: This stage also connects to Shulman’s stage of transformation. Shulman himself stated teachers must be able to transform the topic “into forms that are pedagogically powerful and yet adaptive to the variations in ability and background presented to the students.” Teachers must be deliberate in planning for multiple examples, models, practice exercises, etc., considering the difference among students within the classroom. The goal is for the teacher to be able to guide each of the students to understanding of the topic.
Session 8 - Dual Coding Theory: Teaching with Explanations, Models, Examples, Diagrams, & Metaphors
Summary: In this session, we’ll explore dual coding theory from cognitive psychology, which emphasizes the power of processing new information through two modes: a) a more linear, language-based mode and b) a more holistic, visual-spacial mode. For teaching and learning, this applies to the power of diagrams and visual-spatial models to complement verbal and written explanations. Teachers will practice writing and stating descriptions and explanations of visual-spatial diagrams for their subject-area, and they will practice creating diagrams for descriptive information.
Rationale: This session is primarily focused on Shulman’s transformation stage, but it can also be about instruction and evaluation. At the transformation stage, this is about teachers developing the models, diagrams and metaphors that will help guide the students to understanding. However, having students directly work with models, diagrams and metaphors is a powerful instructional tool, and they can also be used to assess student learning and understanding. Tasking a student to describe / explain a visual-spatial diagram, for example, helps the student learn; it can also be used to assess student understanding.
Session 9 - Anatomy of a Direct Instruction Lesson: I Do, We Do, You Do
Summary: In this session, we’ll explore some basic components of a more direct instruction style lesson, including building in opportunity for review of previous learning, making connections to student prior knowledge, getting student attention, and gradually releasing students from teacher demonstrating to guided practice together to independent practice.
Rationale: Technically this session is still focused on the pre-active planning stage of teaching, but it’s also moving towards the instruction stage. Note that not every lesson will be (or should be) a direct instruction style lesson, but there are times with it’s appropriate. Also note that direct instruction does not mean “boring lecture” or “passive, transmission approach to teaching / learning.” Also note that this session is not about presenting a formula or template for what every lesson should contain; rather, it’s about considering the components of a direct instruction style lesson and discussing the rationale for those elements for promoting student understanding.
Session 10 - Formative Assessment: The Bridge Between Teaching and Learning
Summary: In this session, we’ll define formative assessment, explore what Dylan Wiliam means when he says that it’s the bridge between teaching and learning, and discuss how to use formative assessment. We’ll also look at some example strategies for formative assessment.
Rationale: Formative assessment would fit into Shulman’s Evaluation stage of teaching because it’s about evaluating student learning in the midst of instruction for the purpose of adjusting instruction as necessary to promote student understanding. But Dylan Wilam points out that formative assessment should really be intimately tied to instruction; it's like the other side of the same coin. Because the teacher cannot observe what’s inside the mind of the student, the teacher must ask questions or assign tasks to determine student understanding. But formative assessment is not about grading a student; rather, it’s about assessing student progress and understanding for the purpose of adjusting instruction. Formative assessment is data for the teacher to guide instruction.
Session 11 - Teacher Reflection
Summary: This session will involve providing teachers with some tools and protocols that can guide their own reflection practices. It’s about helping teachers establish their own reflective practice for the future. Some of these will be individual and some will be collaborative. We’ll consider teacher reflection on their plans for teaching, teacher reflection on their classroom instruction, teacher reflection on student assessment data. We’ll also go back and look at the CoRes tables that we used in Session 6 as a tool for post-lesson reflection.
Rationale: The post-active reflection stages of teaching (reflection and new comprehension) are about the teacher deliberately considering their plans and their implementation and what worked and what didn’t work for student learning. It’s also about considering the principles of UDL. Maybe the lesson was great for the majority of students, but there were a few who didn’t get it. Why did they not get it? How could the teacher support those students better in the future? The overall goal of reflection is for the teacher to consolidate what they’ve learned through the process of teaching that topic (lesson, unit, activity, etc.). This is their new PCK, which can then be employed the next time they teach that topic. Some of the new PCK may also be relevant for the teaching of other topics.
References
Re. Content Representations (CoRes)
Loughran, J., Mulhall, P., & Berry, A. (2008). Exploring pedagogical content knowledge in science teacher education. International Journal of Science Education, 30(10), 1301–1320. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500690802187009
Re. Lee Shulman and PCK:
Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14;
Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations for a new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–22;
Shulman, L. S. (2015). PCK: Its genesis and exodus. In A. Berry, P. Friedrichsen, & J. Loughran (Eds.), Re-examining pedagogical content knowledge in science education (1st ed., pp. 3–13). Routledge.
Re. Formative Assessment
Wiliam, D. (2018). Embedded formative assessment (2nd edition). Solution Tree Press.
