Leap of Faith

Recently, I ran into a former colleague in Denver who asked about my "new life" at Cornerstone. She was eager to hear about the Cornerstone schools and teachers, she was curious about ways the cities in which we work are different than Denver, whether the frustrations we experienced in our work as staff developers in Denver were similar or different. I paused and sighed, hardly knowing where to begin. My learning curve, as they say, has been more than steep and I wasn't sure I could capture the essence of my learning in a few words.

Of course I began by speaking about Cornerstone kids. I described the faces I had looked into recently in a Philadelphia kindergarten, the writing from Talladega displayed on my refrigerator, the quotes from Cleveland children I regularly receive via email. I told her about the changing school and classroom environment in so many Cornerstone schools and the efforts so many have made to elevate literacy to a level of focus and concern for the whole community. I told her how extraordinarily lucky I feel to have colleagues like the Cornerstone staff who challenge my thinking, cause me to re-sculpt ideas and engage me in problem solving that sometimes wakes me in the night.

"What about the teachers," she asked, innocently enough. That stopped me in my tracks. What about the teachers? When I paused to consider her query, it wasn't the coaches who came to mind. I get regular updates from my colleagues about coaches' activities and accomplishments. I am aware of the challenges coaches face with respect to gathering data on Cornerstone children while balancing their own teaching responsibilities and trying to meet their colleagues' learning needs. I understand the issues with which they are grappling.

When she asked about teachers, an image came to my mind I won't soon forget. In my mind's eye, I saw a closed classroom door with a window high enough in the door that I had to stand on tiptoe to look in. When I did, I saw a 20-year veteran, someone who began teaching around the same time I did, who had taught in the school I imagined for most of her 20 years. Let's call her Hope. Some of the materials Hope uses in her classroom have been re-used for nearly 20 years. She has done little to change the classroom environment in which she works; she focuses on maintaining order and ensuring that children take responsibility for completing assignments on time. Hope is most proud of the reputation she has for running a disciplined and structured classroom. Parents sometimes request that their children are placed in her classroom and she considers this a testament to her competence as a teacher.

When Hope's principals - there have been six since she started teaching in the school - observe her once a year, they usually begin the written report with a litany of positive observations. Her students are well-behaved, the environment is orderly, her paperwork is completed on time, she rarely takes a sick day, she has devoted 20 years of service. . .

Hope's closest colleague in the school happens to be the music teacher. They attended the same high school and college and now they go to the same church and have children roughly the same age. She interacts only rarely with her grade-level colleagues and even less with other teachers. She arrives promptly at school and faculty meetings and leaves the building not long after the children every day. She rarely takes work home and is glad she doesn't have to as she is balancing her teaching with meeting the needs of her own two children. Hope has what she calls a "countdown calendar" in her classroom. Her class counts down the days to the next vacation - winter, spring break or summer. Hope estimates that she has 1,241 days of teaching until retirement. Sound like anyone you know?

Into this scenario, enter an eager coach with her own background - she has fewer years of teaching experience than Hope, but already she has found a way to complete a Masters, present her ideas about her Writers' Workshop at three state reading conferences, sit on the district's curriculum committee, launch a literacy club for parents and kids, examine her own practices by asking the principal to video tape her teaching and create opportunities to review it with her grade level colleagues. She has, at any given time, two books on her bedside table - one she is reading for pleasure and another she is reading to deepen her understanding of children's learning. Sound like anyone you know?

The distinction between these two imaginary individuals is, obviously, profound. How could two professionals evolve so differently? More to the point, how can we help colleagues like Hope find the desire in themselves to reflect on their own practice and their students' learning?

Certainly this is not a new question. American educators have designed dozens of schemes to help colleagues improve their practice. Some have been school-based, voluntary and open-ended -- inviting to teachers who are searching for a way to enter the professional conversation. Others have been top-down, mandatory and driven by the leaders in the school and/or district - someone's way of ensuring "compliance" with a district policy or program. Later in this article I will share a list of key staff development strategies I hope will be useful in your schools. Yet, even as I do so, I wonder whether use of these strategies whether voluntary or mandatory will help teachers like Hope.

In the past two years, I've written frequently in this space about having high expectations for children. Just last month, I advocated for a different and more potent way of talking to and about children in order to demonstrate our belief in their innate intelligence. At the summer institute, we talked repeatedly about expecting (and getting) great ideas from our children. In all our rhetoric about high expectations for children, have we paused to consider the effect high expectations might have on our colleagues?

We can employ all the staff development strategies listed below, we can spend hours and hours planning for a study group, for example, ensuring that there are delicious goodies, comfortable places to gather that are conducive to conversation and find only the colleagues we "expect" to find actually show up and participate. Or, we can insist that all teachers attend staff learning opportunities and cross our fingers, hoping they find something intriguing in the content, only to be disappointed by the detachment we observe in body language and demeanor.

What are we missing? What else could we have done? Perhaps we need to acknowledge that there is absolutely nothing more we could have done, but rather something we must believe. I have tossed and turned late into the night more often than I would like to admit, grappling with these questions: Do I, in my heart of hearts, believe in the intellectual capacity of all teachers to teach brilliantly? In every interaction with a teacher, do I reveal my absolute belief that he or she can and will understand highly theoretical material in order to understand children's learning and make informed decisions every day? Do I expect far more than participation in a study group? Do I speak to each colleague as if I am certain they have something to share that will profoundly affect my practice? Do the subtleties in my tone of voice reveal the deepest levels of respect for each of my colleagues? When I praise a colleague, do I go beyond platitudes - your children are so well-behaved, your classroom so orderly . . . . In other words, might we all, by expecting that each colleague is superb, cause it to be so?

Do you remember reading about the Pygmalion Effect in Psych 101? We came to understand that the most unexpected and profound changes occur when we have an almost blind belief in someone to do what they cannot, when we speak to them as if what we hope is fait accompli? Remember Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady? The novel from which that screenplay was adapted was called Pygmalion.

This is not a new concept to educators. We employ it with children all the time! "Brilliant thinking, Shamaya, I never thought about that character in the way you've described." "Jason, you are so lucky, you're about to undertake a writing project of enormous and complex proportion. Not many second graders in the history of the universe have tackled memoir, but you're about to. What do you need from me in order to get started?" Shamaya and Jason may have had absolutely NO idea they were speaking with insight or tackling a project with valor, but when you speak that way to them, they are sure going to try. Do we reveal the same absolute belief (supported by a silent prayer) for each of our colleagues?

I hope the tools I list below (which originally appeared in a suggested list of follow-up ideas for the asset maps) will be useful. But we have to remind ourselves that creating the most dynamic, inviting staff development opportunities mean nothing without an accompanying belief in those we seek to involve.

When my former colleague asked me about the teachers with whom we work in the diverse Cornerstone communities, I had to think about the potential for Hope. Can someone with 20 years of entrenched teaching habits reflect and revise her practice dramatically? We must believe it to be so. Would we ever consider giving up on a child?

Sometimes the belief of which I speak is born of nothing less than an enormous leap of faith. What if someone took that leap of faith with Hope? Someone certainly took the leap of faith on my behalf. Dozens of times.