What happened when Yeshiva of Flatbush sent their teacher teams - PART 2

7 days
12 schools
16 teacher visit teams 
1 great professional development experience

Together with Prizmah and many other day schools throughout the New York area, our faculty at the Yeshivah of Flatbush early childhood and lower school successfully completed our professional development project. As noted in my last article we had a number of goals to accomplish and our survey results demonstrated that indeed we were successful in many of those areas.

Rachel Levitt Klein Dratch and I worked together to design a meaningful professional development day for Friday, February 14th. The main goal of the sessions was for teachers to be active participants as teachers and learners. We wanted teachers to share reflections and learning from each other in addition to taking something they observed on their school visit and make it actionable. Another overarching goal was that the structure and strategies used for learning during the sessions were intended as models for designing learning in the classroom setting. A third goal was to connect the discussions to our ongoing themes this year at YoF which are fostering a growth mindset and implementing more engaging strategies in the classroom.  Finally, data from past surveys also showed a strong preference for the learning to be differentiated based on interest. The morning was designed with these important elements in mind.

The activities implemented met our goals. Teachers shared their learning from the experience through a gallery walk and a speed pairing activity. During the gallery walk, teachers each took a card and posted their takeaways from the visits on eight possible boards, delineated by topics including:

• Ways to find out what students know
• Ways to promote growth mindset
• Ways to teach a specific skill
• Great use of technology

This was followed by teachers taking a gallery walk and reading all the ideas on the boards. Afterwards, each teacher chose an idea which they would like to further explore.

This was followed by chavruta learning with sources about the spies that went to scout the land of Israel. Through guided questions, we applied lessons about being observers and reporters, like the spies, to our own school visits (we came back with positive reports!) Rachel then unpacked data collected from the teachers after the trip. Over 70 people responded. 26 teachers felt the overall experience was very good and 27 thought it was excellent. About 73% in total. Rachel then shared a few of the responses regarding the visit, the learning experience, and her own observations from the data. We grappled with the “balcony question” which was how did this experience impact you as a learner and teacher? All of the teachers experienced being a student again where someone else determined the style of learning, the schedule, and the information. “What did that feel like?“, Rachel asked, “and how will you view your own classroom and your student experience moving forward? What changes will you make to enhance that experience for your students?”

Speed pairing was next. We sat in two large circles facing each other while Rachel posed a few questions. One example was Something that I would like to try, based on what I experienced during this visit is . . . Teachers then answered the questions and had meaningful and engaging conversations.

Rachel summed up the morning with next steps for individual teachers and for grade-level teams. We are planning future grade-level meetings to discuss the visits and strategies teams would like to implement in their classrooms.

We are excited to report that we already received inquiries from some of the schools we visited. We hope to create a network and communities of schools and teachers who will open up their classrooms to share ideas and to learn from each other with the ultimate goal of increasing learning for all of our students.

Visit to Luria Academy (left) and to NSHA (right).