Professional Learning for Busy Educators

I’ve spent a lot of years talking with and listening to some very smart people, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the people who are legitimate experts in their fields rarely spout off facts like they are the final word. Their assertions don’t back you into a corner or embarrass you into silence. Their delivery is often quieter. More nuanced. The smartest people in the world are least likely to have singular, one-note answers to difficult questions. They’re more likely to respond with “It depends,” and then, if you’re willing to stick around and listen, share ideas that take a little more time to develop.

And I want to take a moment to elevate that, because I believe that if we spend more time practicing this kind of thinking, if we honor the true elegance of that gray area, we’ll all be a lot better off.

Amidst the discussions about content standards, curriculum and teaching strategies, it's easy to lose sight of the big goals behind education, like giving students tools to deepen their quantitative and qualitative understanding of the world. Teaching for understanding has always been a challenge, which is why Harvard’s Project Zero has been trying to figure out how great teachers do it.

Some teachers discuss metacognition with students, but they often simplify the concept by describing only one of its parts -- thinking about thinking. Teachers are trying to get students to slow down and take note of how and why they are thinking and to see thinking as an action they are taking. But two other core components of metacognition often get left out of these discussions -- monitoring thinking and directing thinking. When a student is reading and stops to realize he’s not really understanding the meaning behind the words, that’s monitoring. And most powerfully, directing thinking happens when students can call upon specific thinking strategies to redirect or challenge their own thinking.

As teachers incorporate Habits of Mind into their thinking and behaviors, they say, “I need more practice with…” or “I am so excited by how much I have learned about…” or “I need to go deeper into this material…” They have developed the desire to continuously improve and learn.

Such dispositions must be developed, nurtured, supported and practiced on a regular basis. The environment and culture of the school must honor and encourage these dispositions. Schools with supportive cultures are more likely to foster significant growth among its teachers.

Like the whole child, whole teachers are a composite of human motivations and developmental drives.

Project Zero at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education has created a collection of Core Thinking Routines as part of their Visible Thinking Project. Teachers can view the entire collection on the Project Zero website, where each routine is described in detail (e.g., purpose, application, launch) in both English and Spanish.

Motivating and engaging students is the goal of most teachers–priming them to receive instruction, or otherwise align themselves to a pre-set process you’ve sketched out that you hope will yield a learning goal you selected beforehand. But I’ve also been thinking recently of how learning actually happens–the causes of learning. Learning events, maybe. Eh.


So I came up with 60 (of millions) of these “learning events” (for lack of a better term)–circumstances in which students seem to learn effortlessly. They can learn when they are coerced–to start, to increase the pace, to finish, to revisit. But what kind of conditions or contexts promote effortless learning? Learning when they don’t even know it’s happening? When they’re (essentially) tricked into deep understanding?

Over more than a decade, the author has developed a 14-point plan for encouraging students to engage deeply with math content.