 Well, good morning, my name is Steve Wojcikiewicz. I'm a senior researcher and policy advisor at the Learning Policy Institute. And it's my privilege to welcome you to today's event, Empowering Teacher Learning, a forum to showcase innovative models of teacher-led learning and professional development that can transform schools into places where teachers are driving improvement through their own learning and leadership. We're happy to have you all join us here. This event is cosponsored by the Learning Policy Institute Learning Forward, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association. On behalf of the Learning Policy Institute, I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge our cosponsors and express our appreciation for their partnership. So thank you. I also have some housekeeping details for you. Agendas for the event, along with reports and handouts, are available at or near the information desk. PowerPoints and videos will be posted after the event on the Learning Policy Institute's website. First up on our agenda today will be our research presentation, which will address key findings from our work at the Learning Policy Institute on effective, empowering teacher professional development. Presenting this research will be Dr. Maria Heiler. And before she gets started, let me take a moment to introduce her to you. Maria Heiler is the deputy director of the Learning Policy Institute's Washington, DC Office, and a senior researcher. She also serves as co-leader of LPI's Educator Quality Team and is the director of the Educator Preparation Laboratory, or EdPREP Lab, an initiative in collaboration with Bank Street College to strengthen teacher and leader preparation for deeper learning and equity. Prior to joining LPI, she served as an assistant professor of teacher preparation and professional development in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy, and Leadership at the University of Maryland College Park. She began her career teaching 10th and 11th graders in Belmont, California, where she achieved national board certification in adolescent young adult English language arts. Please join me in welcoming Maria Heiler. Good morning, everyone. I was really impressed at the hush that came over the room when Steve said everyone, we're about to start. I was like, there's teachers in here or students or both. So I'm just going to take a few minutes to share some of our research findings of a couple of reports that LPI has recently completed. And I just want to say it's really excited to see all of you interested in empowering teacher learning. So in recent years, there's been an active conversation about the value and design of teacher professional development. The slide features some of the real headlines we found after doing an online search about the importance of this conversation around the country. It's an important conversation because we know that teacher professional development matters. And it matters particularly in two ways. First, it's widely acknowledged that teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting student success. And there's evidence that teachers opportunities for ongoing professional development, including access to mentoring and intensive professional development, makes a difference for students' achievement gains. Secondly, and just as importantly, opportunities for professional learning and support, especially for novice teachers, supports teacher retention. And this happens especially when new teachers have access to ongoing mentoring, as well as access to expert teachers and watching those practices in the classrooms. So the reality is that not all teacher professional development is equally engaging and effective. This cartoon is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it really references a real challenge. Wait for it. That some well-intentioned learning opportunities are not structured in ways conducive to learning. And some poorly designed PV gets teachers and schools right back where they started. So instead of the 180. But there's good news. Quite a few programs that rigorously designed studies have shown can have positive effects on teacher and student learning. This significant and rapidly growing research base can offer lessons about what it takes to help teachers improve their teaching for students' learning. We've learned a lot in recent years about what makes some professional development programs more effective for teacher and student learning. Traditional professional development models often can be lecture-based or what we might call sit-and-get. They're isolated, offer teachers the same content and strategies, regardless of their skills and experience, and are largely disconnected from their context and student population. What we found is that programs that make a difference for teachers and students tend to follow a different model, which we conceptualize as being defined by seven features listed here. Each of these features were prevalent in the research that we studied. Some of them were in all of 35. And then for most of the 35, all seven were present. So I'm just going to take a minute to talk through each one of them now. Strong professional development is focused on the content that teachers teach in their classrooms. Programs demonstrate this characteristic when, for example, they offer opportunities for teachers to construct lessons and units for new curriculum or investigate what students learn best and how. So the National Writing Project, which we'll hear about a little bit in the first panel, is an excellent example of this. Essentially, the content provides the what of professional development and the next six elements we'll talk about the how. Unlike lectured-based and significant professional development, active learning offers teachers a chance to meaningfully engage with new concepts and teaching strategies by actually doing them. Active learning strategies include analysis, discussion, observation, and direct practice. Active learning is a broad term that subsumes some of the other elements I'll share with you, such as collaboration. Teaching is a collaborative endeavor. So unsurprising that you would find high quality professional development supports collaboration among educators. Collaboration take many forms. Teachers working one-on-one with a coach in small groups or in professional learning communities that can even extend beyond a school. It can occur remotely with the use of technology or in person. And it's often job embedded, meaning teachers plan together, offer each other feedback, and problem solve with their specific students in mind. The fourth key feature is models. By providing teachers with models of effective teaching, professional development programs offer educators a clear vision of effective practice. There are many types of models that can be employed to accomplish this purpose, including curriculum resources like lesson or unit plans, student work or teaching cases, and observations of peers or master teachers. Effective professional development programs also provide coaching and other expert support to facilitate teacher learning. These experts, usually educators themselves, lead teachers through the active and engaging learning experiences I've been sharing with you, and tailor specific advice and counsel to the needs of individual teachers. This type of expert scaffolding, whether through one-on-one coaching or small group work, can help teachers create a bridge from their professional learning to their practice. The next element, feedback and reflection, often occurs within the confines of coaching, though it's not limited to that space and powerful teacher learning opportunities, regardless of a format, offer teachers the time and space to reflect on and receive feedback about their practice. And finally, we know that all of this takes time. So effective professional development must be of sustained duration. Research doesn't offer a magic number of hours for effective program. Instead, it indicates that providing opportunities for teachers to study deeply and then apply their learning and cycles of inquiry over time is essential. Often this involves intensive workshops that set teachers up to apply new approaches in the classroom and then opportunities to reconnect to debrief and problem solve over time. Now as you listen to those seven effective elements of PD, it resonates because that's what we want our teachers to do for our students. So don't we want the same kind of teaching opportunities for ourselves as teachers as we want for our students? I'm gonna share an example of a PD model operating at scale that ties together these elements in the instructional leadership core. LPI just released the report and you have copies of the brief in your folders and the full report is available online and on the flash drive. The instructional leadership core is an innovative professional learning project in which teachers in California collaborate to lead sustainable professional development to support implementation of new student standards within their districts. It's a collaboration between Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy and Education, the National Board Resource Center and California Teachers Association. ILC teacher leaders experience intensive professional development in annual statewide and regional conferences and retreats and learn about the instructional shifts embedded in the new standards and how to transform classrooms to meet these shifts. Teacher leaders then return to their own districts and provide professional development workshops and support to their fellow teachers. This professional development model reflects the seven elements of effective teacher professional development I just shared. ILC is specifically focused on teachers leaders supporting teachers to unpack common core standards and next generation science standards within their grade and subject areas, a content focus. As part of the program's PD, teachers engage in a number of active learning strategies such as analysis of standards, participating and writing and revising curriculum, analysis of student work and observations of teacher leaders. And most of the initiatives, including co-planning and co-teaching lessons are also collaborative in nature. Throughout the program, teachers work with teacher leaders who went through the intensive ILC training. This process is iterative with teachers and teacher leaders coming together to review curriculum and teaching strategies and the impact that had on student learning in a continuous recursive cycle. This is ongoing professional learning through the development of learning communities and does not depend on the one-off workshop model of traditional PD. So this study profiles four very different school districts where the ILC has flourished. It documents the professional learning activities and workshops developed by the ILC members for fellow teachers, how these translate into changes in instructional practice and ultimately into learning opportunities for students. Again and again, we heard the power of the teacher-led model of ILC and the impact on teacher practice and student learning. I'm just gonna quickly read this quote that one of the teacher leaders from East Side Not Pleasant School District shared with us. My students are more engaged. They love basically the different strategies I use from the ILC workshops. They're having more of a growth mindset when it comes to math. I know from previous years that they come into the classroom already saying, I can't do math, it's not my thing. We've all heard that. But once I've implemented so many different strategies and number talks and collaboration that we've learned, they've become more receptive. My students help one another, they're collaborating, they're working as a group. Two years ago, none of that was really happening within the classroom. So that's really a powerful shift in that not only the teacher's feeling the effect of the PD, but the students themselves are talking about and engaged more in the learning. So out of this study, several lessons were learned. Teachers expressed their unconditional preference for learning from and with their colleagues. Teacher leaders were attentive to local needs, attuned to the specific challenges in their implementation, in their districts and more accessible for follow-up, questions, advice, and support. Realizing that they were having an impact on shaping other teachers' practice, increased teachers' sense of professional efficacy. And we know that that's a point of teacher retention as well, so that's really important. More time and opportunities for professional collaboration were critical to implementing instructional change. ILC teachers and their colleagues needed time and material resources to plan lessons, observe each other's classrooms, analyze the work of their students, and discuss and reflect together on their experiences. Teachers had more opportunities to do this when their administrators at the school and district levels provided resources and built structures that allowed the support and supported collegial collaboration. ILC teacher leaders gained the greatest traction when they were able to build relationships with district administrators, teacher associations, local universities, county offices of education, and philanthropic organizations. Partnerships with these organizations supported content alignment and leveraged financial and logistical resources at the local level. We're gonna shift a little bit and we're gonna talk a little bit about what is needed at the school and system level to support this type of professional development. You heard a bit about that when I was talking about the ILC and the larger research base supports this information. So what are the challenges? School level challenges such as inadequate resources, a lack of opportunity for implementation and a negative school culture have shown to be obstacles to effective professional development. Resources include materials such as equipment for lab experiments or project-based learning. Teachers also sometimes contend with limited opportunity to use newly acquired knowledge in their classrooms. And the school culture can be a powerful obstacle to effective professional development. So for example, in one school in the study, the culture at the school, teachers didn't trust the administration. And so even though the PD was really high-quality and well-designed, that resistance resulted in a lack of strong implementation and change in practice in teacher learning. Changes to implementing effective PD extend beyond the school and classrooms. So there's the system level challenges. And this includes a lack of alignment between what teachers feel they need to learn to best meet the needs of their students and district initiatives and priorities. So there needs to be an alignment there. Likewise, there is often a disconnect between district and state policies. For example, states generally require seat time for recertification, which in turn encourages districts to organize one-off workshops, which require little financial or human resources to implement. And they often do not reflect the type of PD that we're talking about today. Related, very few states and districts have robust tracking system for quality as well as quantity of PD. So without such systems in place, it's hard to adopt and implement professional learning for teachers that is evidence-based and designed to address potential challenges. So that means that there's some implications for practice and policy. There's some things that we can do and we have seen that makes a difference for high-quality professional learning. So what we would like to see happen is that within local context, the common obstacles of professional development should be anticipated and planned for during both the design and implementation stages of the professional development. Implementing professional development also requires responsiveness to the needs of educators and learners to the context in which the teaching and learning will take place. What are some areas of focus for policymakers to help ensure teachers have access to high-quality professional learning opportunities? First, policymakers should adopt standards for professional development to guide the design evaluation and funding of professional learning provided to educators. And we're excited to hear a little bit about the learning forward standards in a little bit later. States districts and schools can regularly conduct needs assessments using data from staff surveys to identify areas of professional learning most needed and desired by teachers. Policymakers and administrators could evaluate and redesign the use of time and school schedules to increase opportunities for professional learning collaboration, including participation in learning communities, peer coaching and observations across classrooms and collaborative learning. State and district administrators could identify and develop expert teachers as mentors and coaches to support learning in their particular areas of expertise for other educators. As you heard the ILC, one of the common themes is that they really felt that their peers were the best teachers for them. States and districts can integrate professional learning into SS School improvement plans such as efforts to implement new learning standards, use student data to inform instruction, improve student literacy, increase student access to advanced coursework, and create a positive and inclusive learning environment. States and districts can provide technology-facilitated opportunities for professional learning and coaching using funding available under Title II and IV of ESSA to address needs of rural communities and provide opportunities for intra-district and intra-school collaboration. And finally, policymakers can provide flexible funding and continuing education units for learning opportunities that reflect the type of elements I just talked about and not just traditional workshops. In the end, well-designed and implemented professional development should be considered an essential component of a comprehensive system of teaching and learning. To ensure a coherent system that supports teachers across the professional continuum, professional learning should link to their experiences in preparation and induction as well as to teaching standards and evaluation. It should also bridge to leadership opportunities to ensure a comprehensive system focused on the growth and development of teachers. You can find the reports that I referenced on our website and also some of them are in the materials and also on the information table. But I'm going to turn this over to the experts who are doing this work. I'd like to introduce Peggy Brookings. She's our moderator for this first panel. She is the president and CEO for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. And she is the first ever National Board Certified Teacher to be in the role. She took this, yay, thank you. I appreciate that. She took this role in 2015 after serving as executive vice president at the National Board. And she really epitomizes teacher leader. I'm so excited that you're here to moderate. Prior to joining National Board, she co-founded the Engineering and Manufacturing Institute of Technology at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida where she finally served as the director but also taught as a mathematics instructor. She was walking the walk, not just talking the talk. She brings the same energy and drive to the National Board. You're doing so many great things there to elevate the profession and professionalized teaching. We look forward to hearing some of those initiatives and I'll turn it over to you to introduce the rest of the panel. Thank you. Thank you, I think this thing is on because I can hear myself. Good morning and thank you so much for having us here. This is gonna be exciting. The panelists here are going to tell us a little bit first about their organization. So we have Lily Eskelson Garcia who is the president of the National Education Association. We also have Angela Segal who is an instructional leadership core member. Also Cecilia Pate who is from the National Writing Project and Sarah Katabi from International Public Schools Network. So they have a lot to offer and we're gonna get started quickly and at the end we will have a Q&A so you'll get a chance to ask some questions but we're gonna have a conversation for a little bit and let's start Lily with you. I know NEA has been doing some incredible work around the country so I want you to take a few minutes to think about or tell us about a few of those important NEA initiatives and why it's so important for NEA to support this particular work. Okay and it's on? Yes it's all on. Okay and ironically I am working on my recertification as a Utah certified teacher and I'm using this as part of my quality seat time. Literally I am and let me start by because I love that this session is called Voices from the practitioners from the people who are actually sitting in classrooms and need this desperately to improve their own professional practice. I have to go back to the 1980s. Oh Lord I'm old. When, to give you the cautionary tale the opposite of everything that was on here that was supposed to be doing my district, Granite School District in a suburb of Salt Lake City decided in the 1980s that all of teachers would be trained in computers, these things called computers. And so they bought every school 10 Atari 800s and they hired a company to come in during faculty meetings and give us all lessons on coding because we were all going to code because spelling hangman, that's an Oregon Trail and look at all of the confused people who are younger than I am. So bad. I remember. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. But then within that same decade I remember the district saying we're going to do something called a teacher assistance team. And the way that they had it set up the faculty would select three people that they trusted that they said yeah we'd like to have a team at our school and I got picked as one of these three folks. We went to an incredible training and when we came back the whole system was to say to our colleagues let's form a team. It's not the three of us know something that you don't know. It's you have some challenge in your classroom and you can call the team together. You are a member of that team when you say Lonnie's driving me crazy and I'm projecting just a little bit here. Please don't write his name down because he exists. And I need some ideas about how I can help get him to turn his work in or to stop hitting the other kids or whatever it was. I need some ideas on writing. My kids are bored with the reading program we have. Whatever it was the professional called her colleagues together and we sat in the library and we had a process of collaborating to help that colleague find something that would work for him or her. We weren't there to say here's your answer. We weren't there to give a in the box solution. It was to give alternatives and it was up to the colleague that called the teacher assistance team together to decide what they felt would work for them. It was intentional. It was being curious. It was asking questions. It was deep listening and it impacted our students. This was back in the 1880s. I'm just, you know, it is what was on that screen. It was real. It was relevant. And it lasted three years before they put us out of business because they lost their funding. And they said now we don't have any funding to get training for the coaches and they moved on to the next big thing, whatever it was. We learned coding for apples. I don't know what we did. But what I love is that NEA has adopted now professional learning as a professional priority for our union. And so Andy Coons is here. Dr. Coons there who heads our department of our Center for Great Public Schools. And we don't even, we don't just limit it to the teachers. It is the learning community. It's the support staff. It's the bus drivers. It's everyone who has an impact on those students. We have career continuance. We have micro credentials that you can go online and Andy is gonna give me the link to that. Where you can sign up for these micro credentials as individuals but also as a group, as the faculty. We're very, very proud of our early leadership institute where we train mentors and coaches and our early career learning labs where if you're a local association that would like to offer this learning lab for your new folks at the beginning of their careers when they feel the most vulnerable where they're afraid as if you were in the classroom, remember your first year. Not my best year. Where you're afraid people are gonna see that you don't actually know everything because you don't actually know everything. And so to have that support in our learning labs, the jumpstart program for our national board training, the teacher leadership institute, I don't wanna go on too long but we have embedded just everywhere within our organization ways that our affiliates and our individual members can access professional development, professional learning and to truly get back to what I experienced in the 80s where we looked to each other. We weren't technicians. We weren't people who were just sitting there hoping someone would fill our little brains with a brand new fabulous script to read. That was never gonna work for me. It doesn't work for like human type children. You actually need a relationship everywhere. A relationship teacher to student, a relationship colleague to colleague and we found as this study, I'm so excited, we found it works best when it is the union, when it is the administration, when it is the support staff, when it is the community advocates, whether or not you're talking about restorative justice, English language learners, LGBTQ anti-bullying. You do something with the community, the entire learning community and you raise the professionalism of those educators so that they see something better for their students. I've seen it make a difference personally and we're seeing it all over the country. Thank you. That's a perfect segue I think for Cecilia. Cecilia, you're at the National Writing Project and tell us a little bit about the program and why it's so empowering to teachers. Love to. I started with Writing Project about 10 years ago and I didn't really know the background of it so I just thought I'm taking this four-week summer course and it's transformed me, it has made me a better person, parent and individual and so it's a four-week long summer invitational institute and through that four weeks I have a thinking partner and I didn't know what that means and I'll talk about that a little bit more and in a little bit but I was going through that. I remember the four weeks thinking we've all heard of the imposter syndrome, right? Thinking, okay, I'm gonna, today is when I'm gonna be found, then the next day, okay, today and I realized everybody felt that way because you had all of these professional people that were listening to my voice telling me they wanted to hear my story reflecting every day, they were reflecting and sharing and it was so empowering and as an English language learner myself and as an English language teacher I had never really had anybody tell me that that my story and my voice was worth sharing. The work that I was doing was worth sharing with others that it's important and that was just so empowering and the motto for the National Writing Project is the best teachers of teachers or teachers and so after going through that we become teacher consultants and I said, I wanna do that. I want to pay it forward if you will. I want other teachers to feel the way that I had felt and empower them to share their story because we're on the classroom. I'm sure we have challenges but we're also doing such good stuff so let's focus on that good stuff. Let's name it and let's share it. So that's how that started and that's how a lot of our teacher consultants start through the National Writing Project. More specifically, I then five years ago started working on C3WP and that's the work specifically named. So it's a program within the National Writing Project and it's on evidence-based argument writing, that's the work and this work is free. Anybody can research it right now, C3WP, you can gain lessons, units, tech sets, it's all there. However, if you're a teacher you know that there's resources available everywhere, right? That's, we're not lacking at resources, they're out there. The one component that is not as readily available is that thinking partner. So our material is out there for free, like I said but the thinking partnership is not. So that component, when you put that together that's what we've done. So we've provided a year-long professional development to C3WP resources with teachers and we have been there thinking partners and so what that means is that we've come alongside with them to meet them wherever they are at, wherever their challenges are at and we've helped them reflect on their current practices, we've had their challenges as well as their successes. Again, that's important too. And we've collaborated with them and provided feedback in order to try these new resources and to create the sustainable change and we just continue to repeat that over and over through a whole year-long practice with the C3WP material. That's specifically the work that we're doing. That's excellent and while you were talking it made me think about the latest research from AIR that National Board has just received that four novice teachers, if you are mentored by a National Board certified teacher, we are seeing a growth in student impact of six and a half, I thought I read it wrong first, but no, six and a half months of growth. So having that thinking partner is very important. Having those relationships that you build even with your colleagues, especially with students when you think about our five core propositions and thinking about the fact that you're an English language learner as well. So I know, Sarah, you understand that, being an English language learner yourself. So talk to us about your school, which is part of the International Public School Network and share a little bit about the network, who it serves, your own history of being a student there and now a leader who's focusing on empowering professional learning for teachers that it's so important when you have to build relationships in order to have students feel what they belong. Everybody, can you guys hear me? All right, good morning, thank you for having me. I have a unique perspective on, I guess, the impact of the International Network and the impact of professional development. I actually, I attended middle school in New York City and then I attended one of the international high schools. So what is the International Network? Basically, the mission of the International Network is to provide quality work, sorry, quality education for English language learners and it started in 1985 when New York City, the DOE, the Department of Education, realized we have this population and we're not servicing them, we're not meeting their needs. So they started this project with LaGuardia High School, which became the first international high school and based on their research, they came up with this collective strategies of how to meet the needs of the students. So the International Network only services English language learners from 90 different countries, various varying literacy skills, students, they are students that have no formal education whatsoever and they come here and they attend these schools. So in 1985, LaGuardia started, then they started two other schools and now we have national 28 high schools. And when I started my job in 19, in 2013, I started in a school that was in a second year in the Bronx and so I'll just give a little background personal history. So after I graduated high school, I attended college, both for my undergrad and my master's degree in secondary education and in history and so I wasn't able to get a job until Barack Obama passed the DACA and I was able to get a job. So I went back to my high school and I said, hey, I had this degree and I wanna teach and I wanna be part of this model because this model, this school impacted my life, it shaped my life. As an immigrant, as parents who are struggling to just survive meet ends, just to survive, I didn't know about head upside for college or what I need to do or what are my strengths. So being in high school in this model, the teachers looked at me from a perspective of strength. They empowered me, they told me you can do it whereas in middle school, I remember the teacher telling this other student who came from my country that I have to sit in the back with him to just copy his work and he was frustrated, he was like, don't copy, I was like, don't worry, I won't copy because I'm not gonna learn anything. So for two years, I basically was just sitting in the background, in fact, I don't even remember the teacher's names to be honest and I just felt, I wanted to engage in the conversation, I wanted to learn, but the whole structure was not meaning where I needed. But we were told as an ESL student, I can just attend these like two days, three days classes in an ESL class with five students. So I was not engaged. So you know where I learned English? In the playground. I remember the first word was, don't talk to me, look at my hand or something like that. That was the first thing I did. So talk to the hand, yeah, I forgot about that. So I learned to speak, you know, just to socialize with my peers and defend myself at that age. But when I went into internationalist network, I cannot believe that that's the time when I learned how to raise my hand and participate. Where I, you know, the teacher did not lecture us or have us take notes. We were actually engaged in conversation. We were talking about world affairs. We were talking about how to be leaders. So each shape the whole, you know what? In some ways, it made us like, when we went to the real world, I wanted to go to high school because I felt so empowered, so powerful. And so the teachers, and then, you know, after I finished high school and I went to college, and then I really thought my teachers were like ingenious and creative and amazing. I did not know that this whole network had a philosophy behind it. There was approach that they were trained. I had that perspective once I joined them in that job. So the whole international's work, I mean, as Maria was giving the presentation, I was like, yes, we're fulfilling all the requirements because that's what we do. So one, all of the teachers have to bind in the philosophy and in the mission of the international's network. And if they don't, they really end up leaving because you have to bind in within our approach. The international's network has these professional development strategies, these learning opportunities that services our specific population. But I do believe the strategies can be applied to anyone, to be honest. But they're really geared towards the conversation. What are the needs of our students? How can we capitalize on the strengths that they bring onto the table? How can we push them? How can we, you know, prepare them for 21st world century, you know, skills? And that's what happens. And in fact, when the Common Core came out, we're like, we already do this stuff. So it's not in you. So the approach within the international's network is based on this collaborative instruction. It's based on experiential learning. You can't just learn by being told. You have to experience it. You have to go through the emotions. You have to go through the problem solving and that's what happens. It's also that all teachers are not just teachers of content. They are also teachers of language. And also the best way to learn is really to give students autonomy, to give them empowerment. So this whole model, this five approach, which they now call it Hello, is not just applicable to our classrooms, but it's also within the international's network, within the teachers. So as a teacher, we also have to follow the same model we have our students work in. So we collaborate with different teachers. The principal would have us, she would, you know, partner us based on our strengths, like which teachers are, you know, strong in or have expertise in organizing accountable talk or conversations. Students are stronger in content. So there's a parent going on in-house in schools. So teachers can learn from one another from the experts, from the masters that work with the same population so they can move forward. And what happens in this learning is it continues to grow. And I'll just explain like what how professional development happens within the network. You have the INPS provides professional development in the summer, in the fall and then in the spring. And the professional development is led by teachers. What happens is teachers get a survey on the things that they want to learn about or work on. Teachers volunteer or they have proposals of the things that they wanna lead in in terms of professional development. So there's a set of professional development that are there, particularly for new teachers and there's more room for different things that can happen. And what happens during these sessions of professional development is oversaw by the network itself. It has to be aligning with the philosophy or teaching approach. It has to have preparation so no one can just come in and teach anything. It has to come from experts who are in the field who are doing the work. And then what happens after that is that they also get feedback and they make amends. So I know this because I've also led professional development and I saw the impact like the feedback making what went well, what things I can change. And then what happens is that within our network we also have an online catalog to post our materials. So teachers have an opportunity to take on resources. Now, professional development is sustained after these sessions in the schools. So what happens, for example, then the teachers when they attend these workshops they go back to their content team and then also they're into the disciplinary team and you go back to their units and they make changes so that you are also held accountable. You've learned this, now apply it and see and reflect and make amends. And that's how the internationals were, professional development becomes effective. Sarah, thank you. Okay, that is marvelous. I'll let you can tell she's very passionate about the work and being a part of the work and doing the work as well. So, Angela, during the presentation we heard a lot about ILC. So talk to us about your experience with that PD model and how your initial experience with PD in your district was quite different from what we've just heard from Sarah. Well, I really feel like I'm kind of the downer at this point. Yeah. Not too long. Welcome to Monday. Yeah. So I initially started out in the Instructional Leadership Corps as a teacher member and now I'm a peer support provider within the ILC. And my experience before the ILC was in my district it was a struggle. We struggled with professional development all the time. We struggled with trying to get professional development into our district that was meaningful to us. We struggled to have any kind of input in what that was. We even tried to get our voices heard through surveys. We couldn't manage to get that to happen even. And as we continued to struggle as an active member in my local union, because at the time I was vice president, now I'm president, it became really frustrating to not be able to help the teachers in my local. They looked to their union leadership as the exactly that, the leaders. And they're sitting there saying, professional development is this huge aspect of our job and we don't know where to go for help. And so when the call came out from the Instructional Leadership Corps for applications, my initial thought was, I really need one more thing to do like I need a hole in my head. And then my next thought was, you know what though, I have to put my money where my mouth is. And if I'm going to continue to complain about something, I have to be willing to be the change and provide ideas on how to make that change. And so I went ahead and applied and was selected. And the great thing and the imperative thing about the Instructional Leadership Corps was that it actually brought about an actual model or a system of professional development. And it was a model that I could take back to my site and to my district. And it was a model and a system and a process that then my local union and my local teachers, we then could formulate our ask for the district. Instead of just going in and saying, hey, could you make PD better? We could actually go in and say, you know, this is what we want professional development to look like. And the model, the part of the model that was so fascinating to us and one that we felt like this should have just been something that our district really thought of from the beginning was the fact that it was recursive in nature, that it wasn't the one and done. Because when you get down to it, a lot of the surveys we were getting from our teachers were sick and tired of the cafeteria style, take a scoop of this, take a scoop of that, move on down the line and you'll never see it again. And it was a lot of, well, and my district consultant has kind of turned into a dirty word, so I'm really sorry. But it was a lot of consultants coming in that we were like, how do they know our students? How do they even know us? We have people come in and we're like, welcome to Sacramento. And we're like, you're 45 minutes from Sacramento. What do you, you know? We are not Sacramento, thank you for coming. And so it really helped us get beyond that and find a way to get beyond that. And the ILC model is one that is pretty simple and direct. It is learn, do, assess. And so it brings up that whole cycle and that whole recursive nature, that you go and you learn a new approach, you learn a new strategy, you learn new lessons, you learn new units from other teachers. And a lot of the times, teachers that are right in your school, right in your school district, right in your backyard, that their students are your students and their classrooms are your classrooms. And so you learn and then you go back and you do. You go back, you try it out, you work with your students and then you come back and assess. You reflect on how well did this work and what could I do better? How is this helping my students? We bring back student samples, I'm student work and we talk again and then we start the whole cycle over again because then we talk about, okay, so now, now that I've got this, what can I do next? And then you start the whole cycle over again. And so it isn't the one and done. It is very much the sustained over time. And for me, being within my local and being even at my site, the model also really tapped into teachers as leaders and allowed teachers to view and reclaim their title and their rightful role as professionals. That is absolutely marvelous. And I'm gonna say to all of you, you're now ready for national board certification. You've talked about the five core propositions in ways that we should all be talking about in our professional development each and every day. When we think about what is necessary to make this happen for all of us continually, I think about some of the work that NEA does with the national board as far as jump starts are concerned and having jump starts available to look at professional development that is sustained, that's not a drive by and making sure that teachers have the supports in place initially to get started because the journey that you begin each and every day you walk into that classroom, it's never the same. So we have to be equipped. So I've heard already, Angela, some of the things that weren't working. So I wanna ask everybody else as well, what has been a challenge for you in this work? Anybody can answer in any order you wish. I'll start, and I'll just start off by saying... She whispered money. The funding, I think we'll realize that. That's a huge challenge. As we were providing professional development through the writing project, we had a wonderful, ended up having a wonderful partnership with our State Department of Education in Idaho and we had somebody contact us and say, you know, as a State Department, we're offering free PD and yet there are school districts paying for your PD. What are you guys doing? And then I said, wait, nevermind, we'll just hire your team. So they actually hired a team of writing projects, teacher consultants, it wasn't a bad name there because we're thinking partners. So they hired us and then that grew into the Idaho coaching network and it still exists. It's changed, it's been about six years. And so that's what we do. We are hired, teachers apply, they are with us for an entire year and if they wanna try something in their classroom, we are available. So aside from the workshops that we have for them each month or anything like that, then anything they wanna work for, they can contact us and we go to their classroom, we'll spend time planning, whatever it is that we need to do that those teachers wants to do. But we're limited to only those teachers. So for example, our site director, Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm and myself led a week long summer institute this summer. And then that was done, it's a week long we walked them through our resources and just last week I had a teacher say, hey, I wanna try one of these units in January. So can you help me to prepare for that? Now that week long workshop was a week long. That was done in the summer. So technically my job was done, right? But how do I say no to that teacher? How do I not meet with her? Now luckily I have the flexibility in my current job to do that and to meet with her during her prep time. But that my contract is over, it was over the summer. So I'm going to meet with her probably several times from now until January, I might even co-teach with her. That's nobody's funding that, you know? But that just speaks to the power of the thinking partnerships that we create and that we will have teachers from a previous year or years ago, hey, I've changed my teaching assignment. Can you help me think through this? Yes, you know, let's find an evening where we can have dinner or a weekend where we can get together and do that. So the funding, how do we fund that? I don't know what that looks like. The best model is that coaching network that our state has set up. But again, it's limited, it's one year and you're limited to teachers. And also another challenge is the traditional narrative, as Angela talked about, and some of us also mentioned. It's this one-time workshop from an expert from out of state usually, right? That comes in and tells us how to do our job. We've all been there and that's been the traditional narrative. So it's a challenge to then go into a school district and say, here's this workshop and they're just like, we know, you're that expert from out of town. Like, no, no, no, I'm a friendly person. I'm a teacher too, you know? Then I'm local, we have to change that narrative. We have found that working really closely with administrators and having that administrator support and then realizing what our vision is and communicating that well to teachers is just really helpful. But I think this is a great conversation. The study is obviously working towards changing that traditional narrative that PDE is not a bad word, you know? It can be good. So that's another challenge. So I'll just add one of the challenges that we have is that it's been done wrong in so many places that as the union person, I was on the bargaining team in a non-bargaining state, that is not for cowards. But we found that the more veteran members we had, they weren't interested in us negotiating more time for professional development because they went, no, it's not, professional development for me is third lunch, you know, where I'm gonna sit down with my colleagues and talk about something that's working or not working. But it wasn't intentional time. And most of the time, if you're relying on just hanging around with your friends, it's gonna turn into a venting session with no end and no solution. You really need to have something intentionally structured to say, let's describe what's going on and let's talk about interventions. And that means that it has to be real. One of the things that we're finding some success in are those early career learning labs that a local can request training on so that they can bring it back as an asset to the school district. It is a tool, the school district is part of it. But the early career learning lab, before that new teacher gets a little overwhelmed and before they've had some bad experiences, we wanna give them some good experiences about what a coach, what a mentor, what an assistance team might do for them. And we find that when you have those new folks that understand this is the most professional thing I could be doing. This is not me saying I'm the problem. This is me, the professional looking for professional solutions. And I see the professional learning center. I see my colleagues as a doctor saying, look at what I'm dealing with with this patient. I need some ideas, I need some other eyes on this to help me make professional decisions in the best interest of my students. And that's what we're able to offer now and they see for the first time in some places the union is saying, we're gonna be the key because we represent the vast majority of the teachers and the support staff in this school district. Look to us, your union to help you become a better professional. And so what we're trying to do, especially with those early career quotes is build a culture that the union has a responsibility as well to make sure that every student has a quality teacher, a quality educator serving. So with this question, I was kind of like conflicted. I didn't know how to answer this question because for our network, it's the opposite. We're always full over staff. Like too many people show up in our professional development sessions. We have too many teachers volunteer for proposals and ideas where we have to shut them down as being part of a member of the PD committee within the network. So we're like opposite problems that we have. So, but the one concern that we do talk about and most often just shaped by the population of our students is how to better partner with the communities that we are servicing. So we noticed that the more we need, the more we can understand our students, their backgrounds, their stories, their histories, the more we can service them, the more we can create projects that really engage and increase their interest. So as we have these problems and we create solutions, so I was part of this network, being part of the network, I proposed, listen, we need to start having our students participate in the PD sessions. And that's exactly what we did. So we said, let's start off this session. Let's start off getting students from different countries where they can share the stories of their educational history in their own countries. How do they learn in their country? So teachers can see why this group struggles with higher order questions and it has to do with their former education back home. What does it mean to be in school, in a village, in comparison to a city? So our focus is really how can we help teachers understand our students more by engaging them? So our PD committee is trying to kind of change our PD sessions by involving students when we started by involving students in Socratic seminars by involving students as a panel, by involving students to lead the workshops with the teachers. So that's what we're trying to move towards and it's working well actually. And the teachers, part of the survey, they loved those sessions, they were empowered, they understood the students, because as teachers, we also have our own biases. So we need to have more transparent conversation about our own biases and to challenge our thinking by, you know what, we need to engage who? The students, their parents, their communities. So that's the challenge we're trying to tackle and it's moving forward, I mean, we're improving, we just need to engage the communities more and finding those resources, because often parents of English language learners are just working two, three jobs, they have this idea that we just trust the parents, I mean the teachers, everything, they know better than me, that's how my parents thought, the teachers know better than me, just rely on them so in how we can engage the parents, engage the communities. Another challenge that we also face, we do partner up with other organizations, centers, museums, but what we found challenging is that they don't know how to work with our students. So we're trying to figure out, how can we open our network, our professional sessions to organizations that work with our students? So that's another challenge. For me, and for a lot of teachers within the ILC, especially when we first started, the biggest struggle was trying to convince the district that teachers could and should lead professional development. The first question I was asked when I went to my district was, well, what makes you an expert? How could you lead professional development? And I went, well, let's see, the last expert that you had me sit in front of hadn't been in a classroom in 18 years and had never taught in California. I've got that on both counts. I was teaching just two hours ago. And so it was infuriating, though, and it was really depressing also to take that information back to teachers locally to be like, hey, just so you know, your district has zero faith that you could actually lead professional development for teachers. And that kind of became a bit of a rallying cry then. That really became for us, one of the top things that we began trying to actually bargain and negotiate about because I'm also on our bargaining team and not only trying to work within our own local and work within my site, work within my district to really get that foothold on, no, really, we have some expertise here, trust us. There's 400 of us, we might know something. And so once we finally started to kind of realize within ourselves that we do have this expertise, who are they to say we don't? That then led to some surveys coming back that not only were PD surveys, but also bargaining surveys that said, hey, what can we do with them bargaining to make this happen? If the district won't just recognize the fact that we've got 400 and some odd teachers with how many thousands of years of teaching experience, what can we do there to try to force the issue? And so now, although we are still trying the ways of where we go in and meet with our site admin and lead them down the road up, here's what makes us an expert here, here's why we're qualified to do this, but we also, just this year, we're bargaining a professional development committee and trying to get contract language. And that's what I left Friday at the bargaining table and that's what I returned to next Monday at the bargaining table. And right now, the biggest hurdles that we have are that the district doesn't see why a teacher should co-facilitate leading that committee. That's their number one grudge right now to us is they don't know why we need that. And so it's a challenge and it's a struggle and it's one that we're continuing to fight, one that we're continuing to battle, but the uptick to it is the fact that we have had these successes now to where teachers actually wanna fight that fight because 10 years ago, we had teachers that were like, I don't care, I don't wanna fight over a PD. I'm tired of it. I've fought about it long enough, didn't get anywhere, so now I'm out. But now they're back to, no, we wanna fight the good fight. We need this, we deserve it, we're professionals. And so we need to get there. So that's what our current challenge and success is. So things haven't really changed over the years. I spent about 15 years doing professional development in Florida, we're a merged state, we're both AFT and NEA. And I taught thinking mathematics on a national level and also at the district level. And one of the partnerships that we put together with our district through the union was professional development. And around the courses that AFT offered as part of professional development, and one of the things that helped us is that they were level three research. So we showed the district that particular research and then got the district to understand that it is important to treat teachers as professionals by paying them for planning, as well as delivering this particular professional development, also the follow-ups behind that. And this was not a one and done for anyone. This carried out the entire year and the next year because there wasn't this first class. There were a series of courses that you had to take over a number of years. And I think I'm gonna throw this in. I used a lot of that with teachers who were preparing for their boards at the time and what they were doing back in their classrooms. So I'm gonna take a few minutes now to ask if anybody from the audience has questions for the panel. If not, we're gonna keep talking. This is wait time. I know, I was gonna say. It feels like a classroom. I knew what you were doing. Yes. He's bringing you the mic. Do any of you partner with educator preparation programs or any other higher education institutions? All of our national writing project sites are housed at a university level. So we have about 200 something sites across the nation. Sites across the nation. So, you know, I am at one site in Idaho, Boise State Writing Project, but it's specifically in the C3WP material and sources. You've had over 109 sites across the nation. So you can find a writing project site at I think every state. NEA does on several different levels, including representing many of our members in higher education, but also in accreditation in the national board and the folks that sit on the national board. We truly believe that part of what we want to accomplish has to start with an undergraduate program. I look at what I didn't get as an undergraduate. There was no class in collaboration and you look at how many times a district will say, all right, so the new thing is collaboration. So here's a time now go collaborate, you know, from 415 to 445 or whatever. It doesn't work that way. You have to build a culture that collaboration means something. It's not just from this time to that time. And I believe that the best undergraduate programs we've seen are ones that are preparing students to be team members, to be collaborative. I love the idea of putting students in part of that learning community. And it is the community schools model that every single person, including the students, the administration, the teacher, the parents, the community around the school are all part of the learning community. And we're finding some very enlightened undergraduate programs that are starting to give the students who will become, who are the aspiring educators, that kind of experience before they graduate. Talk a little bit about your experiences about student impact on learning in the programs that you all have. I'm sorry, I jumped in and there's a question right now. Effective schools. I'm struck by the common theme about the importance of teachers being the teachers of teachers and I was very interested in what you're saying about currently trying to negotiate with a school district in terms of recognizing teachers as co-facilitators in professional development. So my question is, at the national level, particularly with the presidents of our two major unions here, have you guys initiated any effort to have locals negotiate teachers co-facilitating being heavily involved with professional development as part of your contracts? Yes, absolutely. And what I was trying to say before is it really takes some very enlightened local leaders to take that on because the rank and file member is not demanding it because it's been done so poorly, so many places, why would they demand it? And so it has to be done in two ways and I love the example, Angela, that you have. It has to be, we are going to ensure it's done correctly that it is high quality, that it is embedded, that our voices are leading it, and only then will you have people then saying yes, go fight for that, and it is happening, but that is the obstacle is that we have years and decades of it being done very poorly. And the model I was speaking about, that was AFT and that was locally negotiated. Hi, thanks. The National Writing Project person mentioned the biggest challenge being funding. Would each of you just give a sentence about how your initiatives are paid for, please? With ours, it's member dues, member dues pay for it. The Instructional Leadership Corps actually came about through an NEA grant and through a number of grants through other charitable organizations and foundations along with CTA. From what I'm aware of, it's our INPS, it's non-profit, I mean through grants, similar to what Angela was saying. They've been through grants as well for ours, for the National Writing Project, any of our work. And ours was through union dues as well. Hi there, Carrie Ballant, I'm from PBS. So you all spoke a lot, I'm just struck by how many of you brought, keep bringing up this word local, local, local, and the ability to really connect with local educators. I'm curious if you see any benefit in a national sort of peer network or if it really does feel like that local piece is so critical? And then sort of a follow-up question. Do you see virtual learning opportunities in any of the work that you do or sort of where does that fit into the future of professional learning? Don't mean to start with you, or is it? So Jumpstart is, there are about 50 of those around the country right now. And one of the things that we've done, especially in the state of Mississippi, because you have, it's a state that has a lot of rural areas. NEA has provided Jumpstart there, but also we have now, this year, created an online support system for those who are starting the process of board certification. The other piece of that is the diversity, equity, and inclusion piece of that. And that we know that when you are vulnerable, you want to talk to someone who looks like you, someone who understands you. So what we have also done is created a network, the National Accomplish Minority Educators Network, we call it NAME. These are board certified teachers who are supporting teachers who are going through the process of board certification. And the other, and that's done nationally. All of this is done on a national level. The other piece that Lily didn't talk about when she talked about microcredentials was the fact that online, they have created a microcredential stack for the five core propositions. Thinking about getting teachers, thinking through the process of what teachers should know and be able to do, that is free as well online. So there are lots of things out there. I'll just let others throw in, or Lily, you can throw in even more than I've just done. Just to add a little bit to that. Yes, yes, yes to all of your questions. And one of the things that we find is a very robust blended learning where it is face to face in mentoring and coaching in some aspects, but also a lot of it is online. We also have hundreds and hundreds of ed communities that we have the infrastructure for at NEA where depending on what it is you're looking for, you're looking for a community concerned about immigrant students today. And you can find that nationally and join that. One of, I think the reason that you hear the word local, it doesn't necessarily mean that school district. It means that to me anyway. And I'm the president of the NEA, so it means a lot. Yes, yes. To me it means that it's not some national product in the box, script, here's what we're gonna open up the top of every teacher's head and pour this in and it's just gonna come out your mouth what somebody decided were the words. To me local means this is my student. I have this need. This child has this need. I am looking for ways to improve my professionalism so that this child gets something that he or she needs. And to me that's as local as it gets. The relationship between educator and this student and where you're going to get that if it's in your own school community or in that broader community, a network of folks that are out there looking for you and you're looking for them. But local to me means that it is completely relevant to what you are looking for as a professional for this student that's walking into your class today. Can I answer this? So within my network it's national and I forgot to mention that we have this thing called intervisitation where basically we open up our schools to different, to teachers from different schools to come and see either a strength that we wanna share or we want their input about a struggle that we're facing in school. So we would like their advice, their recommendation. So, and it's done not only locally or in the region of New York City but also we would have intervisitation from different states. And often since we are now in our eighth year in my school we've had newer schools and administrations come in and see what our work looks like. So there's a lot of support, there's a lot of conversations going on locally and nationally as well. And then we also have just teachers because of the PDs giving them time to talk and share about their work, they're given opportunities to network. And I've seen one teacher actually have a project about an English unit and she collaborated with a teacher from California where the students from these two different regions actually had to share and communicate and use the virtual world. So as long as you give that space for the teachers to develop, negotiate and engage and learn from each other, then so much can grow not just locally but nationally. Sorry, go ahead. Our program is also national and so being part of the national network allows for more of that local support. So we will have monthly meetings to try to connect the network and they're all virtual and we will provide a professional involvement for our teacher consultants virtually, monthly, anybody that wants to join and then we also reflect and talk about what's going on locally to share ideas. So it's a national conversation that we're having to take it. It might be a smaller amount of people that take it locally and then share it that way. So it's just a large conversation. So yes and yes to your questions, absolutely. We've had much the same experience within the ILC. A number of us were also trained as Common Core Advocates, which was national. And so it has really helped to have, to steal the term, thought partners, because even though I may be thinking of the local as far as the student in my class, if I'm thinking about a struggle that I'm having and I'm talking to the teachers around me and they have ideas and thoughts as well to even be able to go out further and figure out what others are doing to be able to think about, well, there's another option and there's another way of doing things. The more resources and tools that we have as teachers, the better off we are. Hands down. And as far as the virtual, my own district, we have students who ride a bus over an hour one way. Geographically, we're rather large. Population-wise, not so much. About 20,000 people in my town. And so we have, and my district is not, the only ones like that was in the ILC, we have other groups that their teams or their districts cover wide swaths geographically. And so we really have tapped into the virtual aspect of things, especially in that reflective process and in the assess part of things. We have, a lot of us have gotten really in tune with things like Zoom and Google Hangouts. And so we have really figured out the virtual aspect of trying to get a group back together because it is a challenge. It's a challenge enough sometimes to get everybody in the room once, but then to have them all come back when you're talking about traveling distances and there again, you're talking about funding to make that happen. So we really have found out that those are a lot of really low cost but highly effective ways of doing that. One else has a question. Thank you. So when you were all asked about the funding, the support for what you're doing, there was another common theme, which was that the funding was foundations, charities, grants, all sources that are outside of the core operating funds of your districts. That creates a real challenge for sustainability and scale. So the question is, how close are we to, or maybe you know, that there are districts that have made this part of their core business model? And there's a lot of teacher activism again, a new surge of teacher activism and striking for conditions and sorry, how close are we to teachers demanding that this kind of empowering professional development is part of the contract that is built into the operations of the schools so that what you're doing is not dependent constantly on outside sources. I think one of the things that's available is ESSA. And during the writing of ESSA, it was very explicit that they stated that you could use Title I, Title II IDEA funding for those schools who qualified or districts who qualified for professional development as well as for teacher leadership. So that would be one model that could be used but that has to, we have to be able to sit down and speak to leadership in ways that they understand the necessity and the impact that we can have on students by reallocating dollars that are already sitting there for quality professional development. I won't be as positive. One of the things that you're seeing with this red for ed wave is the result of decades long intentional underfunding of public education. So that class sizes are ballooning so that they're attacking things like healthcare and pensions and pay where more and more educators who were so excited to become teachers get into these situations where they have 40 kids in the classroom. I had 39 fifth graders one year in the great state of Utah where our state motto continues to be stack them deep, teach them cheap. And our most, you think I'm kidding, that is what it is, it's on our money. But we've got educators that say, I can't afford to keep paying for my own supplies. So when we're sitting here as local and state and national union advocates for the funding of public schools, we're trying to keep our members heads above water so they don't drown. And we need a complete turnaround about the professionalism, the supports that our teachers need. And I've just got, okay, incoming history lesson, Horace Mann, Horace Mann, just around the civil war time when he had this amazing concept of what a public school could be. How are we going to all become Americans? Look at all the immigrant communities coming in. They speak different languages. They celebrate different holidays. They have different customs. What's gonna make us this thing called an American? Oh, all the kids could go to the same place. The butcher's kid and the lawyer's kid and the doctor's kid and the blacksmith's kid are all gonna get the same education. And he had this wonderful thing called a public school. And then he said, and the best part is, we'll get women to be the teachers because we won't have to pay them anything. They don't tell you that part. That's the rest of the story. And who will the administrators be? Men. And we still have that mindset that the teacher is like the technician. We're gonna teach them how to change the tire. And every now and then there'll be a new, when there's a flat, we'll teach them how to change the new tire. But they're not professionals. They aren't the engineers building the car. We're just the mechanics. And that's baloney. See how I did that wrong? Good. We are the professionals. And we have to believe in our own professionalism before we've earned the right to ask anyone else to believe in us. And that is what you are seeing in unions today. You are seeing us, NEA, AFT. We are giving our own members the grants, the money, to have this seed money, to say, see how it works. And you're right, it's not sustainable. We can't do this for 50 million students. We can't do this in every single school district forever. So what we're doing is responding to some very enlightened local and state leaders who say, if I show you, you can trust us to be the professionals, then it's up to you, district, to keep it going. But until we get ahold of the shameful, intentional underfunding of public education that we have seen in the past, it's going to be continually pushing that boulder uphill. Okay. We have a charge. With that, I'm gonna ask each of the panelists to give us one word, one word, for the audience to take away before we end. One word? One word. Well, I think, I'm sorry, one word, I'm sorry. Gather your thoughts. Sorry. Thinking hyphen, partner. Persistence. Relationships. Life long change. Persistence. Yes, it's a hyphen. Thank the panel, please. I'd like to introduce, I'm thrilled to welcome this amazing group of panelists to continue the discussion. First, I'd like to introduce Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Next, we have Michaela Miller, deputy superintendent from the state of Washington. And then we have Monica Goulson, chief executive officer of Prince George's County Public Schools right in our back yard. So we're happy to have you here today. And at the far end, we have Mickey Mouton, senior vice president of business development, consulting and content and learning. Quite a mouthful at learning forward, who also comes from district work in the background. So we heard a lot about what's going on in schools and districts and in the national level. And now we're going to really talk about what are the policies needed to make this work sustainable, to make this the type of professional development that all teachers have access to and make it at scale. So let's jump right in. Randy, AFT has accomplished so much under your leadership. You focus so strongly on change, innovation and collaboration. We've seen this in your work around teacher entry into the profession, as well as teacher evaluations and certainly teacher professional learning. So when we think about quality teacher professional learning at any scale, we tend to think about school district policies and programs. You've had experience with other structures and opportunities to support teacher learning. Can you give us some examples and share a little bit about the work that AFT is doing in this space? Sure. Can you hear me? Okay. So I also want to just to, there was a gentleman's question earlier about how you kind of embed these things. And part of what we've actually tried to do, I don't think we have any of these today with us, but we now have this kind of palm card that's being distributed throughout the 1.7 million members of the union and all sorts of other places. Because I felt like, if we can't say on one piece of paper who we are, what our values are and how we move forward and that everybody knows it and sees it, then shame on us. And so it is, but to the point about how you embed, which I think kind of gets to, because policy without people believing in it, I mean, look, Brown versus Board of Education was fantastic policy. All deliberate speeds is fantastic policy. And then you see all the things that happened, all the racist things that happened afterwards. So part of this is in terms of policy thinking about how you actually align values and policy. And to that point on this, one of the four campaigns that we're doing, we're thinking about things as narrative to organizing values to action. And you see this in there and we will get this to people if they wanna see it. But we focus on something we call the freedom to teach, which part of it is three components. One of those components is collaboration, professional and collaboration not only in school committees, but in professional development. How do you create teacher agency? So we have three components of it. So people love the term the freedom to teach, but part and parcel of that is that there has to be collaborative professional development for lifelong learning and there has to be the teaching conditions and the tools and there has to be the agency or the latitude. So we kind of bundle all of that stuff together so that professional development then becomes something, collaborative professional development, then becomes something that's part of the freedom to teach. You can't have the freedom to teach if you don't actually know and are respected in terms of your teaching and professional development as a piece of that. I just wanted to make sure that, so we've actually tried to answer that question. Now, this is gonna surprise all of you. One thing I'm about to say is gonna surprise you, one thing is not. The thing that it's gonna surprise you is that I learned more about this subject this summer in Las Vegas in a day long trip I took at the Carpenters Union Professional Development Facility. And they spent a lot of time, and just like all of us lifelong learners, and I had heard a lot about how amazing this facility was. And then, so I talked to the president of the Carpenters and they spent a lot of time in the presentation and then in the walkthrough talking about pedagogy in the way we do. But these are not educators, these are Carpenters and talking about how they move Carpenters to actually thinking about and seeing these various different certifications that are including, do you know, Carpentry underwater is pretty cool to watch those divers and how they do this. I mean, it was just, I felt like I was a kid again in a candy store, but it was just, but the end, I mean, I could talk about this for hours which I will not. The end of the story is this. What they've done is yes, a piece of this training is paid by union dues all throughout the country as part and parcel of what a members of the Carpenters or juniors pay for. A piece of it is paid for by bosses, by employers because what they have done in this apprenticeship program is that every employer that they work with or for sees that Carpenters who have gone through this program actually know what they're doing. So the quality is baked in in a way that it then becomes the tipping point and really embedded. So is it, so policy wise, that's what Cincinnati is now doing in terms of basically the Cincinnati school district has said, okay, I'm outsourcing it to you teachers, teacher union, because we really don't know what to do as effectively as you do for all the reasons that people said in the earlier panel. So that is kind of like how quality, how we not only define quality, but then it really becomes something that employers are saying, I know that you can do it better, we have to have quality control, we have to have work done together, but why don't we just let the teachers do it? And then the opposite, which is the thing which will not surprise you is right this moment. People, unlike people like the superintendent sitting right next to me, and I don't need to get in trouble. This is on the bargaining table right now and in Chicago. And it is one of the strike issues about having the time to actually do the collaboration in the morning before they start school. It was taken away years ago by Rahm Emanuel and the teachers are saying, we need that collaboration with each other to start school every day, so there's that kind of alignment. So policy really does matter, but we have to embed it and align it so that people are on the same page. Absolutely. That makes you think about what Angela was saying earlier and just the need to come together with the district to trust that work and to be able to have the supports and the structures to support those types of work that's happening in the district. Michele, can you give us the state perspective? It goes back to an earlier question about, we have this work in districts, but there's things that states can do to be able to support the work of high quality, empowering teacher professional learning. Yeah, thanks. I'm Michele Miller. I am the deputy superintendent at OSPI, which is the state education agency in Washington state. So it's good to be here in the other Washington. I'm going back to the real Washington. Sorry. I'm busy now. The more progressive Washington. Okay, yes, perhaps, yes, perhaps. Our state superintendent says that a lot. So I am really happy to be here and I think when I was talking with Maria earlier last week, I think there are a couple of things that state agencies can do and I hope in Washington we're leading the way around this. One is in the past couple of years, it starts with a professional wage for teachers, just underline professional wage for teachers. And in the last couple of years for Washington state, we've seen double digit percent increases in state salaries for teachers. So an average of about 13% statewide. So just an underlining fundamental realization that we are not paying a professional wage for our teachers. So that was something that we're proud of in Washington state. We think that it's part of, not the entire part, but part of thinking about how we address teacher shortage is actually paying a professional wage for teachers. So that's the first thing. That's kind of just an underlining element to it. The second thing I wanna talk about is long-term investments. Washington state is one of the few states that has maintained a national board bonus for national board certified teachers for going on this year 20 years, 20 years of investment. And it is not, I'm gonna a little surprise here, it's not just the stipend for teachers. It is the consistent support that is brought from the Washington Education Association, our office at the state superintendent's office. Before I took this position, I was in charge of the national board program in Washington state. So I'm proud to have served in that role. We now have 10,866 national board certified teachers in the state. That is 15% of our... That is great. We're really proud of that. But I really believe that the fundamental underlining part that made that system grow to 10,000 over 10,000 is because of the support from the very beginning of the process all the way through to teacher leadership. We now have the capability for my third point. We received $25 million from the state this year for inclusionary practices. We now turn to those teacher leaders and wash it for the first time. I'm really excited about this for the first time. That part of that $25 million, the Washington Education Association actually applied for and received the RFP, the proposal, to actually support at the building level, at the school level, at the district level, actually leading the professional learning for other teachers. So the one first recommendation in the report that you see is teachers leading other teachers. That is going to happen as part of this. The principals association also applied for and is receiving the grant so that they can train their own principals around this for teams of not just special ed teachers, but inclusionary practices for Gen Ed and special ed teachers working on this side by side. So those are three examples. I gave Maria just a couple of other little ones that I do personally, which is make sure that there's actually teachers on every bloody work group that we run. I'm sorry. Every work group that we have, my staff gets annoyed, I think, by me, but I ask every time, is there an actual classroom teacher sitting on that work group? And if there's not, I have a list of 10,866 that you can go to. So I think those are pieces. The last thing I'll say is it's about looking towards the future. And as part of our proposal to the governor, this last for this next session, which is a supplemental in our state, we are asking for a work group to look at what a statewide teacher residency look like. So seeing what that looks like in a practical sense. I am all about the practical. How do we embed this in our system? Not just make another grant, but actually embed these pieces in the system. And if it's not done at the state level and the district level, it will not be embedded in the system for the long term for sustainable change. So I really believe those are the four areas. I had a quick follow-up question for you, Makayla. We started talking about professional learning and your first thing you said was teacher pay. Can you tie the importance of teacher pay to professional learning and empowering teacher professional learning before we go out? I think it sets the whole groundwork moving forward, to be honest. Without that, there is no acknowledgement that this is the hardest job besides parenting, I would say. The hardest, I have a 19 and a 14-year-old, so it is the hardest job. I spent 13 years in the classroom and then moved to the state level. It is by far the hardest job out there and it takes dedicated professionals, and I'll say that until the day I leave the education field, these are professionals. And so not paying the market wage that other professions are seeing, I think is doing a disservice to how we move forward. So that's why I think it's just the underlining foundational piece that we can jump off from every other policy. There's an expectation as professionals who are earning a living wage that there's gonna be learning opportunities and growth opportunities for teachers to be able to engage in this profession the way that they need to for the benefit of their students. Great. Monica, thank you again for coming. So excited to hear about the work that you're doing in Prince George's County Public Schools and how you're supporting and enabling teachers in the district to really engage in this type of empowering professional learning. Can you share some of the stuff that's going on? Sure. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to our area. I am blessed to represent 136,000 students, 206 schools, and 22,000 employees. 10,000 of them are teachers. And I actually have an opportunity to lead a district of which I started as a mathematics teacher and worked my way up. So the experience is unique because I know and remember the experiences I had as a classroom teacher in the classroom. And so what we are trying our very best to do, our very best is to make sure there's a balance between job embedded PD and pulling out our teachers to have them in professional development outside of school. The research shows that our teachers wanna learn from their colleagues. They don't want necessarily paid experts from vendors to come in and talk about a program. And so what we have created are instructional lead teachers and every last one of our buildings where we provide them a stipend and then they come out, receive professional development and go back to train the staff in their building because one, it allows us an opportunity to have that teacher address teachers in the building who understand the culture in that building, who understand what they're experiencing and then can provide that professional development through the lens of how that staff would receive it. And the best way for those teachers to learn it. We have something called a peer assistance and review program where our teachers are actually providing support to our non-tenure teachers who are struggling and who need support and can hear how well they're doing from a colleague versus an administrator. And that has so much more value in it than you can imagine. It does, they work with teachers over a two year time period and then our peer assistance and review program allows them to create a panel and they make recommendations to our labor partner and our employee and labor relations system of whether we should continue the contract for that teacher. That says a lot because if our colleague, if their colleagues are willing to make the investment in time and say, look, if this person just gets one more year of support, I guarantee and promise you they're gonna be an amazing teacher. And so it's so important that even in my role that I make sure that our teachers know that their voice is valued and heard. So I've created a teacher advisory panel, have an opportunity to meet with them every quarter. I meet with them this week, Wednesday is actually the highlights of my week other than this panel. And the reason is because they have very candid conversations with me about how we're providing professional development in their support back. So yes, we do a survey and I actually do read the responses in the survey contrary to what other folks do and actually make changes based on their responses. But to be able to have teachers really sit down with me at the end of the work day and talk to me about what works and what doesn't work and then actually change it is of value. And granted, there are only 15 folks on that panel, but every time we meet, their voice is heard because they tweeted out. And then folks respond to them and say, hey, we have an opportunity to meet with Dr. Goldson. And so please share your thoughts and comments. The other thing that we are doing our very best to do is collaborative planning is built into our schedule. And honestly, and I'm sure we'll get to challenges, we've evolved over time as it relates to collaborative planning, but it's built in the school day and really focused on talking about content and the work that students do in that collaborative planning time. And beginning to break down barriers of teachers' own delivery of content. So I have to be 100% honest is that we first started collaborative planning. Teachers were not so excited to share about their own experiences as a teacher because they thought it would be an indictment against each other on their own delivery of pedagogy. And so really providing guiding questions that focused on student work and not the adult has begun to allow us to begin to change how we view that. And requiring that my principal sit in on some of the collaborative planning to make sure that there are true conversations that are being held about student learning, not about the teacher. And then lastly, we do learning walks. And that is to release teachers from the classroom to actually go and see their peers teaching and be able to come back and have a conversation at the end of that learning walk about what's working in the classroom, what's not working, and when they'll have an opportunity to teach together and providing sub-pay so that teachers can do that. That's great. What I hear is also it's about the culture that you're creating in the district and it's a culture that's focused on growth and really a mindset around thinking about how do we support teachers in this work as opposed to a gotcha mentality? And that's part of what teachers are afraid of is that if I share and open my door, people are gonna be critical as opposed to we're all in this together, we're learning and I really appreciate that approach that's being taken in Prince Sturgis County. Nikki, thank you. We are really excited about the work that Learning Forward does nationally and around the standards. I'd love you to talk a little bit about the professional development standards that you all support and have created and developed. And also feel free, your own background as a district leader, you can also share a little bit about what this looks like in that world that aligns with some of the things that Monica just said as well. Thank you. Sure, thank you for having me. It's certainly a pleasure to be here. As Maria mentioned, I am a representative of Learning Forward but I come with numerous years of experience at the district level in large school districts. I've worked in a large suburban school district which is now considered urban and then a truly large urban school district as well. It really doesn't matter the context because the issues are really still the same. It can probably all apply to a rural setting if I were to be honest about it. I'll just start by saying that at Learning Forward though, we see professional learning as an equity move, period. If all teachers, all leaders do not have access to high quality professional learning, then how do we expect them to get better at their craft and subsequently, how do we expect students to improve? So if we're not providing that for every educator, then we are intentionally leaving some students behind. So given that, the work of Learning Forward is around having national standards for what professional learning should be. Let's be honest, what many of our panelists mentioned earlier today is the reality for some of the professional learning experiences that occur, right? We've all been a part of those that maybe they weren't as related to my work. Perhaps it didn't take into account the expertise that I as the teacher bring to the table. What about the attention to adult learning theory or learning sciences or just the focus for my students in my classroom now? So many of those things are real but having those professional learning standards that say here's the context, the conditions and the characteristics that need to exist for high quality professional learning to occur. Let's think about this in terms of the leadership that's necessary, the outcomes that you desire. Have you included professional learning communities as a part of this work? Again, as our panelists shared with us before, what are we doing to learn from those experts in our classrooms? I've heard it said over and over again, the answers in the room. Have you heard that? So why don't we trust that the answer is actually in our classrooms, leading them every day. So we can utilize that expertise to leverage that professional learning. Certainly it was brought up before this whole notion of investment over time. We've got to make sure that the funding for professional learning remains. Who would go to a doctor who says I've not had any additional training in 10 years? I don't have the time, I don't have the funds and nobody gives me the space for it. Funny enough, we share a building, an office building with other companies at Learning Forward and I walked down the hall the other day and I forgot to get a picture of it but it was actually a financial company. They do investment of some sort. I don't know exactly what they do but they had a note on the door that said we'll be out for the next two days because our team is engaged in learning. Like wow, even they get it. So knowing that when we make these budget cuts and we fail to put money out there for professional learning, we're actually undermining our teachers and leaders capabilities for our students. And then lastly I'd say something that's huge on our radar is thinking about this whole notion of leader development. When leaders understand that professional learning is actually a lever for strategic improvement, then perhaps we'll see some changes in the acceptance and utilization. Professional learning is a part of continuous quality improvement, is it not? Yes, I love the audience participation. Professional learning can help with just the tone, tenor and climate of your organization when individuals feel as if they are treated as a professional whose expertise matters and is utilized, then they will perform accordingly and you'll see the gains that everybody desires. I see my time. I'm just a little passionate. No, it's great. And actually we do have quite a bit of time to be able to engage in conversation. So we're excited about that and we'll leave time for audience question and answer as well so start thinking about your questions and getting ready to pose those. It was interesting, the answers in the room. I was talking to Sarah earlier this week in anticipation of the panel and I was sharing a little bit about Angela's experience and saying, oh wow, your experiences are really different and Sarah said, isn't it amazing that they'll trust you to teach students but they won't trust you to teach other teachers? I was like, wow, that's really powerful What does that say about the work of teachers and where the value lies in that? So we've talked a little bit about the work that you're doing and supporting in each of your areas. What are some of the challenge from the policy perspective? We heard some of the policies from the challenges from the practice perspective and there's overlap. Of course we're gonna hear similar themes but from the policy perspective, where are you seeing the real challenges and getting traction around empowering professional learning? So I'm gonna probably say the same thing as everybody else, time, funding, making a priority. You know, you look at the fact that we have an hour less a day for planning Gravo 8 collaboration than the countries that we compare ourselves to or there's another statistic I had here which was just that half the teachers in the United States of America have actually never visited, is it half? Have never visited another teacher's classroom. So I'm gonna say all of that but I also wanna be real here. If every single superintendent or superintendent of public instruction in the country, including Secretary of Education said what the one to my right had said, then we would actually have less of an issue because this is also about, let's be really clear, this is also about ideology. Our, the ideology is sitting here whether you start by a focus of standards and equity or you start by a focus of classrooms up, the ideology here is public education is foundational to our democracy, public education should be the great equalizer and as a result, you heard what Michela said about, of course, we have to pay people more. Of course, we have to do all this stuff. That, but so let's just put that as a big challenge. I don't wanna actually say the elephant in the room because I don't wanna be political. Let's just put that as a big challenge out there because if we don't actually change the notion that public education must be invested in and that teachers like doctors, think about what's already been said, teacher residencies, learning walks, those are all things that started coming from the Fletcher Report from 100 years ago that changed medicine in a way that we have never changed teaching in terms of lifelong learning. So this election, frankly, and these elections statewide are really important, look at the difference in Illinois, look at the difference, I mean, Washington has been amazing for a long time, look at the difference in New Mexico, look at the difference in Michigan and I think we have to even though the federal government is only 10% of funding, yada, yada, yada, I think that this becomes really important in terms of the nation and the commitment to education and before the one minute sign goes up and rural areas and urban areas and suburban areas all want the same thing, we just did a poll of rural areas and public education is really important. So I think that the obstacle, politics is not a dirty word here, it actually matters in terms of whether or not you are on the side of a functioning public school system that is well-funded on three things. One is the adults that teach and that includes pay and professional learning and things like that, the other is children's needs and the other is all the other infrastructure stuff that supports that and if you're not well-funded on that then it feels like we are all gonna keep on we're all gonna keep on having these obstacles. Mm-hmm, there you go, did I? Yeah, I mean, well, there you go, there you have it. Oh, I'm sorry. I would say one more thing, I think it's also having system leaders that are prepared for, and I'll just give the example of the inclusion practices, we did not know we were gonna get $25 million from the legislature this last session, it was a great surprise, but it's system leaders being prepared to turn around and scale up when the opportunity presents it. If we do a good job with this, which I think we will with the partners that we have at Play, with the Washington Education Association, the Principal's Association, we have WASA involved, we have regional, we have our districts, with teachers teaching other teachers, we have examples to extend that $25 million, not just for a two-year, but as somebody mentioned before, a lot of these programs are funded through grants, or this, or that, and they're one-time money that just goes into the system. We need to see results from that so that we can say we're coming back for another $25 million each year after this for the inclusion practices to continue, because we don't want it to be a one-and-a-half. Can I just say, and I don't mean to interrupt that. I just want to, I rarely go through my own personal experiences, since I feel like I've been in this business since the dinosaurs have grown, but I negotiated a contract in 2002, in New York City, that increased teacher pay, 6, 22%. I do love that Bloomberg takes complete credit for this. Over six years, we negotiated 43%, and he makes it sound like he just gave it to us now, but we negotiate the first one with 16% to 23% for new teachers, 16% across the board, and we increase because of the various different contexts that you have to do in New York City, but we actually increased time by 20 minutes a day, half for professional development, and half for tutoring, and people could, people could appool it, and so lots of schools were doing school-based options for pooling it for 50 minutes, one day for PD, the day that teachers chose, and 50 minutes another day for tutoring, or enrichment, or things like that, but this gets to the point of how leadership is so important, really. From Harold Levy, may his memory be a blessing, to Jill Klein, and you heard Lily earlier about how people hated it, it was then used in such a horrible way, you couldn't say professional development in New York City because of that. So we had the power to change it, but then the change got done so badly, leadership is really, really important, and that alignment is really, really important, and you needed the leaders who had been talking about it for years to be ready to actually work with teachers, to actually do it well. So I'm gonna look at time from a different perspective, and that really is around time to allow for change to happen. Because we're in the microwave age, we believe that everything should take one minute, and maybe one minute, 30 seconds. And so we, and unfortunately, we get money from our elected officials, and they expect change to happen by the next legislative session, and they wanna report on it. And I get that there's accountability because I believe in accountability. I'm a numbers person, I may have a teacher, I get it. But there also requires change and time to do it. So when we talk about time, time from the perspective that it doesn't happen overnight, we did not get here overnight. And so we do need time where you could see change in terms of student growth and teacher growth. Point blank. In terms of funding, I have this theory that all elected officials believe that they are experts in education because they've all been in school. Not because they've gotten degrees in education like us, but because they've been in school when they sat in a classroom, and I remember back in the day when I. But what they don't do is actually listen to the people who've majored in it, who have student loans in it, and who spend numerous hours every day trying to get it right for kids. And so we're grateful in the state of Maryland that we just received additional funding from a Kerwin commission. And we are the district that received the second largest amount of money. And so I'm grateful for it. But at the same time, I also wish that we could have been at the table to dictate and define how those funds would have been used over a specific time period. And so it's creating an environment where you can have those honest conversations with your elected officials. They not get offended by you saying, hey, you actually don't know it all. I wish you'd asked. And to say, allow us an opportunity to tweak what you've provided and put it in now a different form of legislation that will allow us to begin to move the work because we know it because we've worked on the ground and had opportunity to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And so as we're going through this election process, everyone knows that education is the number one catch all phrase, but we just really have to be careful and pay attention to what people are saying when they're there in front. And pay teacher pay is important. There is no question about it. We have to elevate our role of teachers in the profession. And it is why I have charged every last one of our principals to get back in the classroom. This school year, go back in the classroom, tweet that out. Like, I don't, I mean, that's cute. Hey, you went on a field trip. I don't care about that. Tweet out you being in that classroom to elevate the importance of being an instructional leader and the magic that takes place in the classroom. And I'm grateful we negotiated a contract so our teachers over the next three years could have a 23% increase. But that's an investment. That means that my leaders have to make sure that we elevate that so our community understands what that investment means. And that timepiece is so important because that's part of what has gotten us to where we are. We give something a year, two years, maybe three years if we're lucky and they're like, there's no results. So then it's done to the next thing. So really having a long-term plan and a commitment to the plan that's evidence-based and that we know will work if it's given time, resources and structures to implement it. So that's a really important key. I just have one anecdote because I appreciate the time element to that. Just a little anecdote and I'm not going to answer that out the legislator that wrote this. But as I mentioned, we had double digits, huge investment, billions of dollars into the state of Washington, elevating teacher pay to a professional wage. We received an email our office did from a legislator saying, why haven't the test scores moved? Not kidding, really serious question. And so that teaching of the policy makers that make these decisions, but also reframing the conversation around what it means to have student learning. Correct. And that has to happen. We are on the kind of, I think, precipice at least at the state level. We are on the precipice of rethinking what does it mean to maybe not have a yearly dipstick of student learning anymore and what does that mean going forward? And I think it's going to challenge our system. It's going to challenge where we're going, but we have to dispel the notion that you are going to invest in education and then you are immediately going to see the results. It is not going to happen that way. And so the more education of legislators, local legislators that we deal with at the state level and at the national level, but I have, I'll just leave that political comment. I'm going back to Washington today. But education of local leaders about what that means to really transform the profession, it just has to be paramount for state leaders right now. And multiple measures. Yes. So not only we're focusing more now on those social, emotional and academic skills and seeing what are the whole of child experiences and thinking about whole child outcomes. So that's important that it's, you can't get all of that in one single academic score. I'm going to just add something to that as well. And it was mentioned before, this whole notion of full leadership that's needed, especially when we talk about this piece of time. And this is just an anecdote of how I've seen a school district actually work very closely with the powers that be to suggest that professional learning not be counted as hours in terms of seat time, just for recertification or whatever the employment demands are. Let's think about professional learning in terms of the results we desire. So in this particular school district, they started to look at the learning that's occurring and then ask themselves, as a result of this experience, will our teachers have greater knowledge about X? Will they be able to apply this knowledge to X and Y situations? And perhaps can we look at their practices for impact? So they started to think about things in terms of knowledge, application and impact, knowing full well that as Monica mentioned, sometimes some of the learning you're engaged in is really just to provide that knowledge. I'm starting there. I'm trying to understand present case. I'm trying to understand how to become a Mac user and to give up my PC life. It takes some time. I'm at a knowledge level and I'm okay with that for now. But really understanding what our results are that we desire as this has finished and knowing that just like a student's learning, it may not happen in nine months at the same rate of change as the next individual. Thank you, there are some 61 year olds who would be a support group with you. I need to ask you, you've done the same. I need it, my name is Nikki. Peer to peer learning, what peer to peer learning looks like right here. That goes right back to the research, Nikki, and this idea about the design and implementation of professional learning. And I felt a little bit bad because there are good professional development programs out there that are not based within the districts or that so it really has to do about the design and the way that they're looking to partner with districts and looking to come in and not say, we have all the answers for you, but how do we engage and how do we build the capacity of leaders in your school, teacher leaders in your school to continue to build and grow and move that forward? So what is most important is thinking about those elements of professional development and seeing that they're embedded in the types of programs because even the three teachers who we had today, their professional development programs look very different, but they all had those elements together across those program models. So really thinking about when we're thinking about high quality professional learning, what are those elements and features? It's not cookie cutter. It doesn't have to be the same exact program for every single school in district. It's really about those design and implementation elements we talked about. So thinking about this, this is a great conversation. I wanna just interject another point in here and keep on feeding off of one another. Don't wait for me to ask a question. I'll refer free if necessary, but what have you found to be the key partnerships that are necessary to keep this work going at each of your levels? You all remember sitting at different positions. What do you think are the key partnerships that we need in policy to get this going and keep going in sustainable ways? I'll go first. The very first one would be our labor partners, point blank. If you don't have a relationship with your labor partners, if you have honest conversations at the table to talk about truly student outcomes, then you can't begin to move forward. And having heart to heart conversations. So I meet with my labor partners monthly as a group and then individually so that they can, we can hash out our issues, but ultimately we always come back to how will this impact and improve student achievement and outcomes. That is the very last question at the end of the meeting to reframe everything that we've said to make sure everyone knows why we are there every day. And the next one will be our university partners. And this has been a labor of love to bring our institutions of higher learning together to really talk about the experiences that our teachers get as they're learning their craft and then supporting our teachers now. And so asking them to come outside of their locations and coming to us to experience the classroom experience and know truly what that teacher leader learning experience should be like at the university level versus what they're getting in the classroom experience. And so our labor part, our university partners, University of Maryland, Bowie State, our community college have all worked together to provide supports to our teachers. We're now in a point where we're having to go back and do content and making sure that our teachers experience content with common core changes and just times of change and experiencing content through the use of technology but doing it in a way that our teachers don't feel threatened by learning it and doing it in the schoolhouse. And so those are two really big ones. We've talked about elected officials a lot. So I decided I wouldn't talk about them in this area. But truly it's continuing to have conversations, courageous conversations with each other and acknowledging we're not all graded everything but we all have to work together to improve. I just wanna build on what Monica said about labor partners or management partners, university partners, and I'll talk about that in a sec but I also wanna just raise what is the, and I'm not, I don't have an answer to this. When we talk about, because learning forward, not for profit, right? LPI, not for profit. A lot of philanthropy is not for profit but they have their finger on the scale in a lot of different ways, very different than what the National Institute of Health does in terms of research. And in the period of austerity, the philanthropy played a very, very, very big role here but they all had an agenda. Whether you liked it or not, there was an agenda. So the question also becomes, what is the role of commerce and profit in this arena? Particularly with vendors who come in and promise and then leave and then it's one time and it's this and that and I do actually think it may be helpful in a new administration or a place where we actually have this kind of alignment to actually start thinking not just about privacy protocols but about some commerce protocols. And that because that's, it is part of our space when you start because people need to actually make a decent living. And but when there's the over-promising and the under-delivering or when the tech companies decided that they could actually substitute for teachers and we've all lived through that process. But the notion in terms of labor partners and university partners and the long term, one of the best partnerships I've seen in the last decade is the ABC partnership on labor management collaboration and how it is now turned into, as Monica just said, a partnership on student achievement. So it became a conditioned precedent to actually have people talking to each other and trusting each other before they would take the risk to actually look at dispassionately what went wrong and had it corrected. But now you can see those achievement measures, whatever those are, and that's a whole nother panel, you know, going up and up and up and now they are teaching other people. They've gotten grants to teach other people and that they've also involved the labor relations schools like the Rutgers Labor Relations School in the process of it. So they've involved it in an intersectionality which has become really interesting. The partnerships with universities to actually be in a school like we're doing in Newark where Montclair State is actually in the school creating residencies so that it's not that they're opining at us, but they are walking shoulder to shoulder with us. And the last one I'll say is, you know, and you had Lily in the first panel and me here, there's a difference between the national unions and the locals, people have not. We have 3,500 locals. So part of what we do is we also try to figure out how to align for this. So we have a teacher leader program. Now we have 1,000 alum and 24 locals are now in it. So all of a sudden peer to peer people liking it, seeing that the national union is not telling them what to do or ceding or supporting. The same is true with our academies and all sorts of other things. This year, you know, we routinely have two to 400 people for a month in the summer in Maryland at the Maritime Institute. But then what they do is they teach thousands of teachers who now teach tens of thousands of kids. And what's interesting, and this is where I'll end, is that two or three of the most important things that we've done as a union, English language learning kind of curriculum, which now lots of locals are saying, okay, I'm gonna break it up in a different way because it's gonna be really good for us. We have to do it this way, thinking math. But now in the last two years, trauma-informed instructions. Yes, yes, yes. Being flexible and able to change what the changing needs are. Exactly, yes. So I was gonna talk about the importance of partnerships. We have a ton of them. We have a very local control state. So therefore we have literally work groups on everything. So partners are critical in Washington state. But I wanna build off something that Randy said, and that is you have to have system leaders that are grounded in the values that they bring to it in order to say yes to some things and no to some things. You don't have system leaders that are grounded in particular values, then you are all over the map. And I think that's where we've been actually in the last 10 years is I've seen policies. People don't say no to money often. It's a hard thing to do to say no to money. But when it's not aligned to your values as a state system, as a leadership team, it is okay to say no, we're not gonna participate in this. And so I think, and that's the hardest thing in education to do. I've done it and it's really challenging because you get a lot of pushback for that. But being able to be grounded in the kind of set of values with a leadership team that shares those similar values and watch into those situations where you can say no, we're not gonna do that because it's not aligned with where we're going. So I think that's important. We have an alphabet soup that is incredible in Washington state, working with our governor's office, our state legislature, I mean, obviously all of the usual partners, but it's more intentional when you get the outside kind of, hey, we're gonna go for this rant and being able to say no and yes, why is really critical for a system leader. I really appreciated when we were talking earlier in the week when you said that with your partners, you start with the values. And that helps you to negotiate the policy disagreements. And I think that's really powerful and we don't talk about that enough. And I'm not saying we, I mean, there are times we don't see eye to eye, but that's part of how policy is developed. You don't necessarily see eye to eye. You find a place to go with those partners and it's because you're grounded in the same values. I ran the teacher and principal evaluation project for Washington state built on growth. We said no to the Department of Ed when they wanted to link student assessments to teacher evaluations. We lost our waiver, yay, back in the day. But that was an important, it was grounded in the values and at the very start of that project when we started leading it, we created a set of values that grounded the work that we were gonna go forward moving. And then when the hard decisions came, saying no to the Department of Ed, we were there standing unified. Principal's Association, the School Administrator's Association, the Washington Education Association, the PTA, everybody around the table was grounded in that from the start. I think that is key is providing it upfront because what it does do is allow organizations to back out graciously. If they don't align with your vision, then there's no need to try and enforce it. That's really great insight. So if I could just add one piece to that partnership discussion. We've actually worked very closely with school districts on helping them to improve their partnerships both internally and externally. A classic example is our work with Fort Wayne, Indiana where they've actually turned their school district into a complete learning organization. The superintendent has specifically said, I'd like my cabinet to be involved in professional learning together. I'd like to focus on what my principals need in order to help teachers at the local school level. And then I want to also pour into those instructional coaches to make sure that everything is in alignment. Now in that organization, they're not necessarily working in silos for this learning. They're actually working more what I would like to call in swim lanes. Everybody has their role to play, but they're all in the same pool of learning. We're learning some of the same concepts and our outcomes are all related, although we have different pieces of the pie. That's just an example of how we partner with a school district to help them with their own structures related to professional learning. Additionally, we've been working with research organizations like LPI. We've done work with West Ed. Right now we're working very closely with Digital Promise because what we've noticed is the access to quality research around professional learning and what works is limited in the field. So what can we do to make sure that we provide that access to more of our educational leaders and policymakers? Additionally, we've worked with the alphabet soup. Certainly I know there's been work done with AFT, with NEA, looking at time for professional learning as a part of collective bargaining agreements. I said TEA, that's Texas coming out of me, NEA, I'm sorry. And certainly this whole notion of working with colleges and universities, that's a place where we are scratching the surface, but we know we absolutely need to be more involved because as those leaders are prepared, if we can get them to understand this role of where professional learning falls, then we're going to be better served as a result of it. And as was mentioned earlier, we're just so graciously appreciative of all of the philanthropic funders. Tons of our work could not be done without those individuals at Wallace helping us with principal pipeline development. Yeah, Beijing County, that's exactly right. We wouldn't be able to make the strides that we're making with coaching and with looking at using systems of improvement through gates related work. So we're just grateful that we have those opportunities. I guess the bottom line is there, we're going to make this work happen in spite of the limited funds we have. And as long as we continue to pool together and to continue to have these conversations, I think we will move that message forward. So important. I appreciate the shout out to the research because it's like the old saying, you have to know better to do better. That's right. And once you know, you're held accountable to doing better. So thank you for that. Well, it's now time to turn to y'all and see if you have questions that you'd like to ask our panelists and some of the details that they've talked about or some of the interests that you have around the policies and structures needed for this type of work. I see a question all the way up front, Steve. Thank you, Peggy Workins, National Award for Professional Teaching Standards. McKayla, I have a question for you as a former colleague at the National Board. And in your current position, how has being a board certified teacher, and you know where I'm going with this, helped you in this position because you're not one of those individuals who is talking about education because you sat in a seat from age six to age 18. Thanks, Peggy. Next year, I'm going through my renewal for National Board certification. I am gonna figure out how to do that as Deputy Superintendent, but that is, so it starts with me. It starts with my own professional learning. I'm lucky that I have two sisters who are still in education. One is a special ed teacher and one is an, they're both NBCTs and one is a principal now. So believe me, I stay fully grounded in the day-to-day of teaching and learning. I think it really starts with the fundamental. I am one, I've hired more National Board certified teachers at the State Department than we've ever had before. So I am always looking for great leaders that wanna come for less pay now than being a teacher in our Washington State classrooms, by the way. But being able to lead from the mindset of using the architecture of accomplished teaching and using that recursive nature, understanding what teachers need in order to do that, that starts with me and my own learning, but then also embedding it into my assistant superintendent. I have seven assistant superintendents that report to me across all areas and making sure that they are leaders that are consistent. So we have consistent policies throughout the State Department, one I already mentioned, which is making sure that there are teachers. I'm not talking about teachers that are out of the classroom, talking about practicing teachers that are in the classroom right now that are helping to inform State policy. We do not have that and we're not consistent with that. Then the whole system, the values that I hold are going to fall apart. So I think both of those things, it starts with that and then it also is just embedding it into every little tiny piece of what a State Department has to do in order to move the system forward. I'm envious of you for having the opportunity to go through your renewal because I allow my national board certification to last, but I always tell folks that the success that I've had is all attributed to being a 10th and 11th grade high school English teacher and the things that I learned is a high school English teacher. So it really does influence all that we do if it doesn't matter where we sit. Hi, I'm a former Brooklyn high school teacher and Randy, I think you were the leader of UFT. The Clare White High School from New York. Prospect Heights in South Shore. And one of the questions I have. My next door is for you. I know, I know. One of the questions I have is, we've talked a lot about professional development in classroom settings for teachers. I'd be interested to know about mentoring infrastructure and as an anecdote, when I taught at Prospect Heights High School, I didn't have a lot of support. And so I somehow managed to find an AP out at another high school who I knew was strong from a professional development course, mind you. And also it was a grant program. There was a special ESL office where you could go whenever you needed to get further support. So that's a question I have for you guys. So what, remind me, what years did you teach at Prospect in South Shore? Well, we've all, we're all admitting. Okay, got it. Thank you. Thank you for being so brave. So, you know, this is, it's a, the only reason I asked you the question is because it is actually a really important vignette about what austerity meant. In the 1990s in the New York City school system, I often said I taught from 91 to 90 to 97. And I also often used to say that I scavenged for chalk. And that our textbooks, when Clinton was president, used to say if we were lucky, Kennedy or Johnson was president. And we were constantly, I was such a student teacher, constantly, you know, trying to, you know, the stop on my way to school was the print shop and the local Kinkos to just make sure that I could, you know, photocopy my lesson for the day. So that's the, so what went was we actually had a pretty big mentor program that was embedded in the contract, not funded. We actually also had teacher centers all across the New York City, not funded. And all of the kind of pieces that were supposed to help new teachers, they all basically went by the wayside. And I think that part of what all of us are saying is how do we try to figure out that embedded nature so that they don't go bye-bye the next, you know, the next recession? And it gets to a question I think Maria was gonna ask before about something like Title II in ESSA. And how do we actually try to, in the next administration, we hope, have enough kind of federal funding that actually creates enough embedded nature so that those with the least are not gonna suffer the most. We actually have mentor teachers in our school system, but I have to be honest, I think the process that we currently use needs to be revamped. So with us having 206 schools, we don't have enough mentor teachers. So if I'm a new teacher or if I'm a veteran teacher and I am having a rough day, by the time I get to you, I'm the mentor teacher, it's over. You know, my issue is over. I've gotten help from someone else in the building. And so it actually is one of the issues that we're tackling in the teacher advisory group this week is what would a new revised program look like? When I served as a teacher, we had mentor teachers in every building and they received a stipend so that that person was right there, he literally could walk down to the hallway and have your meltdown and get the support so that you could go home and figure out how to regroup for the next day and not wait for someone to triage you three days later. I'm sorry, New York City Nomenclature, that's what the teacher centers were intended to do. Yeah, so we've gotta go back and look at ours differently. This is just a little short tidbit there. One of the things that we're trying to do is to change this whole definition of what professional learning is. Oftentimes it sounds like it's a session, a conference, a training, an in-service, a thing. It is not just that. It is mentoring. It is coaching. It is collaborating. It is continuous. So certainly when we hear that mentoring programs are falling off the map, it certainly raises our radar to say, well, what do we believe professional learning is? Teachers helping teachers to improve their craft. Certainly that's foundational to what we would want to have happen. Similarly to what Monica mentioned, the state of Louisiana has decided that they wanted to overhaul what was required of all mentor teachers and actually start to make it more content-focused and coach-heavy as well. And so we've been working closely with them to help make sure they have that cadre of individuals. Now that takes a huge investment. Again, where are the funds there to make sure that you have these folks who are ready to do the job? We have these people who provide funding. I'd like to say around the mentoring piece, that professional learning for teacher leaders to become mentors is key. Because if not, you're in a situation where Angela was saying, we know that the PD was bad, but we didn't know what we wanted to ask for. So you have to have that kind of support in place so that teacher leaders and teachers who want to lead in that way can get the knowledge and tools needed to be an effective mentor because being an effective teacher is different than being an effective mentor. And so really ensuring that teachers get that learning and support to be the types of mentors is really a key to this kind of system that you're talking about. We have a pretty robust beginning educator support team is what we call it in Washington for mentors. We are asking this session to, along with the residency request to the governor, we are also asking for to finally fully fund it. We'll take another $9 million to fully fund the program. And we've expanded that to principal induction as well. Because this is about having system leaders building specially at the school level that really understand how important and critical that beginning educator support team is. And then it's not just a one to one mentor, it isn't for a team. But in a $6 billion budget that we have for our 1.1 million students in Washington, really $9 million to round out that whole system. And so we are hopeful, I have a call with the governor's office tomorrow about making sure that's a priority in his budget when it comes out. But we are like in the final step of making sure that we have that plan, working with folks to make sure that that is updated, that that beginning educator support team program is updated to address teacher retention, particularly teachers of color. So that is something that we've been embedding in our system locally, having leaders, especially superintendents involved in that process to understand how to embed that. It's especially challenging for our rural schools. 60% of our schools in Washington state have 5,000 fewer students. So we have a lot of rural schools. How do you provide the kind of mentoring and support in the URB new teacher within 50 months? And so we have teams regionally placed to help support those teachers. We have an infrastructure built, just done it fully. That will be my mantra this year. I think we have time to squeeze in one final question if we make sure that we're concise in this process. Hi, Loretta Goodwin. I'm with the American Youth Policy Forum and happy to report that we are one of those organizations providing those study tours for policy leaders so that they can get into the schools. But my question specifically was for Monica and if anybody else wants to jump in and this is following up on the previous panel, where we did hear about the importance of student voice and I'm curious you've got a teacher advisory panel that you listen to on a regular basis. I'm just wondering for any of you, do you have students advising you as well? And are you taking that feedback into consideration? Actually one, I wanna say I thought that was a phenomenal idea to have students participate in professional development, wrote it down and taken it back to my team. So we'll be doing that and tweeting that out. But the other one is yes, I do. This is the first year that I started a student advisory group. I meet with two separate groups. I meet with our student government association leaders that are representatives of middle and high school students. And then I also meet with students who were selected through literally random selection if they were interested to be on the student advisory panel. They all just send an email. I put all of the names in a hat and randomly selected. No criteria whatsoever. So we actually meet for the first time at the end of this quarter, but they have already, I publicly sell people, I check my own email. And so I get lots of emails from my students and those that are already selected. So we do have ongoing conversation. So I'm excited about what that will yield mainly about cafeteria food, which we won't be able to show you. But excited about what we can talk about and move forward. So I will bring up the notion of them sitting in on the question of development as well. If you are in education, I mean, for me, what's amazing is that we actually represent a lot of grad workers. We are the largest higher ed union now. And a lot of grad workers want to organize. And it's really interesting to listen to grad workers. It's also really interesting to listen to students right now in the era of math students and what is important to them and the difference between what's important to them and what's important to almost, and to a lot of non-schools people. And it's also been really interesting to watch the suburbs change because of all the math shootings. And so it's just, I just use those because you have to have structures to make sure that student voice is important and respected. We have structures actually within the union to make sure that that's true too. But it's more than the structure. It's the deep respect that students have to feel. And an array of students. Trans student feels really, really, really, if you don't start using, if everybody doesn't start using, this is my pronoun, as trans student feels really alone. And I would actually just say one other thing. I think as adults, we also have to be really mindful about how to make sure that people don't feel like the stranger in our land right now. The refugee doesn't feel like the stranger. That what happens in terms of Islamophobia, what happens in terms of xenophobia, what happens in terms of racism, we have to be really, really clear. And students will say this in an unbridled way. Thank God. But we as adults also have to be really, really clear about all of this. I just want to add really quick. It's student voice that allowed us to embrace mental health support. Because in my community it is not, there's a stigma around mental health support. And so actually our student board member asked to have a mental health forum last December. It is what opened the door for their parents to begin to receive it. And now we're offering mental health supports in 45 schools this year. Yeah, that was from Kids Voice saying we need help. It's not an indictment on our parents' parenting skills. We need other coping strategies that someone to talk to. So it was them. I think that's the perfect place to end on student voice. I really appreciate the wisdom and knowledge that everyone brought on the panel. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And just for those from here in saying that the PowerPoint and the reports are available online, you'll have a videotape of this event online in a couple of days. And just one thing to highlight in all of this, we're here talking about empowering teacher learning and that was the core of what we talked about and learned. But if you could hear, this is one part of a system about teaching and learning, a comprehensive system of teaching and learning. And so while we're focusing today on that piece, really we heard about the preparation that's needed. We've heard about the leaders that we need at all different levels. We've heard about the evaluation and the ways that we can partner and build relationships all with the center of value, driving all of that. So one of the things that we can take with us today is that empowering teacher learning is at the forefront of what we need is a system of teaching and learning. So thank you all for joining us and we appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.