Creating Space for Conversation, Community and Professional Learning By Marie (Bonardelli) Bunce This article was published in the Spring 2019 edition of Adminfo, a magazine created by the BC Principals’ & Vice-Principals’ Association.
As conscientious educators and school leaders we constantly reflect on our practice in order to best meet the needs of our students. We think deeply about our instructional strategies and assessment practices, as well as how we will create learning environments that are challenging and engaging. Spending years perfecting our pedagogy can have an all-too-great risk of forgetting that we are learners first.
After being out of the classroom in order to pursue professional development and personal enrichment in Sydney, Australia, I chose to return to the Delta School District and did so with a deeper sense of commitment and enthusiasm. By having meaningful opportunities to reflect on education while working overseas in secondary schools, university, and most extensively at a non-profit museum, it became apparent to me that an educator’s most crucial function is to support our students to make meaning out of their own learning. In this way, students take ownership, recognise their own agency, and think critically and deeply while they explore new ideas.
It is my belief that students ought to engage deeply in their learning, as opposed to broadly, so they internalise, form, and articulate their own fundamental truths and big ideas. Fundamentally, I model my resoluteness to teach and learn with integrity, including basing my practice around my own fundamental truths and the big ideas that I grapple with. This not only affects my instructional methodologies and the physical classroom arrangement, but also my approach to assessment and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Having spent more years as a museum educator and curator than as a classroom teacher, assessment felt like the final frontier. Assessment was an area of my pedagogy that had not only been neglected in recent years but also never fully developed. I threw myself into podcasts, blogs, articles and books about formative and summative assessment. I began to think that assessment was the most intriguing and exciting area of professional learning to embark on. I had a hunch that assessment could be an area of education that unites students, teachers and parents. I started formulating important and essential questions: What makes assessment conducive to learning? What do I want students to learn? How will I know if they have learned it? What will I do if they have learned it? What will I do if they have not learned it? What will I do if they already know it?The more questions I wondered about, the less I felt I had answers. All I knew for sure was this: the way I previously assessed student work was no longer in line with my fundamental beliefs about assessment being about equity and (to paraphrase educational changemaker Dylan Wiliam) to improve the student, not just their work. I seemed to be becoming less interested in assessment as an authentic measurement of student learning and achievement, and more as a means of nurturing students to be self-directed and reflective learners.
While much time and thought was taken to consider the why and how to foster a flexible, inclusive and equitable classroom through assessment, I turned my thinking towards the question of with whom could I collaborate. I was encouraged to approach Brooke Moore, the District Principal of Inquiry and Innovation, who self-identifies as an “assessment nerd”. In our first meeting Brooke challenged me when I expressed my lingering hesitation to embark on such a massive change in practice by saying: “assessment is far too important to not pursue this conversation”. I knew she was correct even though I felt isolated and daunted. I was encountering a new community - one that was almost entirely unfamiliar to me. I did not know any staff members or students when I started at Delta Secondary School, nor was I part of the small, established, close-knit Ladner community (in which everyone seems to know everyone else) in which the school was situated. I was confronted with a sense of being new and unknown, yet had a unique freedom to explore all of my questions and ideas without any preconceived knowledge of resistance or school culture. I was keen to continue my learning with others and was emboldened by Brooke’s belief in my leadership. I wanted to create a critical, relevant and meaningful conversation about shifting educational practices to better support learners and ourselves beyond my classroom walls and into the broader context of the school.
With unwavering support and guidance of the formal leadership team at Delta Secondary School (Principal Jeanette Beaulieu, and Vice-Principals John Pavao and Dean Eichorn), I took further steps to have brave conversations and facilitate an interdisciplinary collaboration group focused on assessment. I sheepishly asked, using the school email, if anyone was interested in navigating some of the questions I had about assessment. I was glad to find allies in this conversation because all that was offered was the promise to think critically and have meaningfully about assessment, but we would have to find answers together, as I promised none.
The Vice-Principals already wanted to have a school-wide conversation about assessment (to gauge where teachers were at in their thinking), and I was able to help create a survey about assessment for the staff to complete during a staff meeting. It was important to navigate the current landscape of beliefs and practice about assessment, in order to consider if and how my colleagues would want to extend their learning and expertise.
The responses to the survey were fascinating as they revealed that sixty percent of staff was confident in their assessment practices and not interested in having further conversations about assessment. What also stood out was that when asked about how they felt about the possibility of going gradeless and focusing on formative assessment, skill-building and development for grades 8 and 9, sixty-one percent said that they wouldn’t support this shift because “grades (percentages) are necessary for quantifying a student’s learning (keep them engaged)”. On the one hand, I was surprised by this, especially as I grappled with the ways in which assessment seemed to hinder student learning. I was even more surprised that a substantial portion of other responses revealed that they didn’t want to go gradeless because “I don’t know how I would explain a student’s progress to parents”. These responses combined revealed an area of opportunity for (re)thinking and (re)considering assessment practices, especially because thirty-two percent of responses demonstrated being open to gradeless assessment. No matter how I looked at these responses, it was apparent that there was a conversation to be had!
I didn’t need much encouragement to follow up with the nine colleagues who wanted to collaborate. It was an informal group that met every four to six weeks to discuss a range of questions and issues, or share resources and practical approaches to assessment. While there wasn’t a hard outcome or resource produced, it was amazing to see teachers from multiple departments coming together to share. Over the months, the group increased in size and created a space where people want to have difficult conversations and challenge one another. At times the group felt supportive and invigorating, while at other times it felt counterproductive and reinforced traditional (and sometimes problematic) practices, rather than pursue new learning. Regardless of the tone of the meetings, there was a genuine desire from all to come together and to develop professionally.
At the end of the year, we decided that we would like to explore one aspect of assessment that we all agreed we could improve on: formative assessment. We also proposed that we read the same text, in order to have common content to discuss, but also be able to learn and interpret practical strategies and approaches in our own teaching contexts. I was reading Dylan Wiliam and Siobhán Leahy’s Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms (2015) when I suggested that we read it as a group. I knew it was a worthwhile text when I read: “Teacher’s don’t lack knowledge. What they lack is support in working out how to integrate these ideas into their daily practice” (17). This was my aha! moment. Reflecting on the year, we had focused on each person’s knowledge rather than on how we could build capacity, ask questions and integrate new ideas into practice. I may have been doing that, but I wasn’t sure that the community felt safe to engage in professional learning in such a way. In the second year of the group, it was apparent that I would need to better consider norms and leadership strategies in order to drive meaningful professional learning. I knew how important it was to take others with me on this journey, rather than be the bottom-line of my own learning. Cynthia Coburn (2003) has referred to this necessary step as a “shift in reform ownership”. It makes sense: lasting and purposeful change can only be fostered if authority and ownership is adopted by the group. I was learning that one of the most important facets of my leadership is to meet people where they are and hold the space for them to engage in critical conversation and learning.
Now, as a professional learning community (lovingly referred to as the A-team, or simply, the Assessment group), we discuss openly and vulnerably where we are in our assessment journeys as we navigate questions together rather than try to provide answers. We challenge each other to think deeply and reflectively about the opportunities that we can create for students and ourselves when we take risks and engage in authentic learning. We are all at different stages of growth in our practice but we are heading in the same direction together. Personally, the group has been an incredible support as I transformed my classroom by introducing gradeless assessment. The A-team meetings are now run by different group members who lead a discussion about the chapter they are most interested in learning from. They raise the questions and concerns they have and no longer are we trying to speak to our own ways of doing things or thinking, but are more looking to create a cohesive and complementary approach to assessment for all of our students.
Last year I thought I was embarking on a journey to be a better teacher, but I now realize that this journey was about becoming a better leader and learner.
Works Cited Coburn, Cynthia E. “Rethinking Scale: Moving Beyond Numbers to Deep and Lasting Change.” Educational Researcher, vol. 32, no. 6, 2003, pp. 3–12., doi:10.3102/0013189x032006003. Wiliam, Dylan, and Leahy Siobhán. Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms. Learning Sciences International, 2015.