No more isolation: Project encourages teachers to share ideas

Pam Grossman

The typical teacher beginning his or her first job is given classes to teach, required textbooks for the students and a classroom in which to hold forth. Then, with the exception of a few required observations from the principal, the teacher is left alone to do the job.

It's an old model, and one that many school professionals are satisfied with. It is, in fact, one of the appeals of teaching for some people—the chance to work fairly independently within the confines of school regulations.

It is, on the other hand, isolating. A new teacher is plunged from the world of a university, where discussing and debating issues with colleagues is the norm, to a public school, where one is alone with one's students all day long. The result, Education Professor Pam Grossman believes, is that many potentially fine teachers are lost to the profession because they find schools intellectually isolating.

Sam Wineburg

Grossman and her colleague Sam Wineburg wanted to do something to combat the isolation and the loss of teachers it causes. So, with the help of a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, they spent two years creating a "community of learners" among teachers in Seattle's Roosevelt High School.

Their efforts have borne fruit. Although the money to support the activities has run out, the teachers are still meeting, still finding the time spent worthwhile.

"It really is exciting," Grossman says. "Often, it's hard to sustain these projects once the money goes away, but these teachers have taken ownership of it; they feel it has really benefited them and their students."

What Grossman and Wineburg did was to gather about 15 teachers from the English and Social Studies Departments at Roosevelt and arrange for them to meet twice a month—once for an all-day session and once after school. The grant money provided substitutes to take the teachers' classes during the all-day meetings.

And what did they do, once together? On the surface it sounds very simple: They read books together. Initially, Grossman and Wineburg provided shorter writings for participants to discuss; then the teachers decided to read books in their respective fields. History books studied included Undaunted Courage and No Ordinary Time, while the fiction included Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Jasmine.

The book discussions did a couple of things, Grossman says. First, they thrust the teachers back into the role of student, discussing their opinions with their colleagues about material that was new to them. English teacher Jennette Britton wrote about what that experience meant to her: "The discomfort I felt (at working with unfamiliar material) has given me a new and better understanding of the problems my students face on a regular basis. So much is new to them. We forget that feeling of being totally lost in a subject, and the feeling that we'll never 'get it.' Going into the discomfort zone helps us understand what our students experience."

The second thing the book discussions did was to give the teachers an opportunity to learn about a field different from their own—the English teachers about history and the history teachers about literature. "Doing that made the different ways of knowing more visible," Grossman says. "A recurring topic among the teachers was, what is the nature of evidence? How does one build a case for a particular interpretation?" The overall result was some of that intellectual stimulation usually missing in public schools.

The teachers also discussed books about teaching, and they wrote short papers about their own teaching. Over time, sufficient trust developed that they were willing to talk about difficulties they were facing in the classroom and to ask their colleagues for ideas. Two teachers decided to extend their collaboration outside of the sessions to create a new curricular unit comparing the American and Vietnamese revolutions.

Beyond the content of the discussions, the sheer fact that teachers were meeting regularly with a group of their peers with whom they might never otherwise have significant interaction had a strong impact, especially on teachers new to the school. Nan Van Zwol describes her first year of teaching at Roosevelt, before the project started, as "a painful emotional wasteland . . . I felt completely isolated and overwhelmed." But once involved in the group, things changed: "Participating in this project has meant getting to know my colleagues, actually building a community, a think tank, through which I can grow as an educator," she says.

Grossman and Wineburg served as facilitators for the early meetings of the group, but shared more of the leadership of the group as the community they were seeking to create coalesced. By the time the fieldwork aspect of the project officially ended last spring, the teachers were planning the sessions and the two professors served more as resource persons—bringing in new material about teaching and arranging for guest speakers.

The teachers met three times in the fall, and although the professors are still participating in the community, their efforts have shifted to analyzing what happened during the project. Tapes were made of all the group sessions, and they're paying attention to how the talk changed as time passed.

"Our interest, of course, is in creating a model that can be used by other schools interested in professional development for teachers," Grossman says. "Typically, professional development has been done by sending teachers off to workshops and classes, but the flaw in that plan is that even if the teacher is transformed in the process, he or she returns to an unchanged school and soon becomes frustrated and discouraged. We thought it made sense to create an ongoing program in a single school, one that crossed departmental lines."

When the teachers decided to continue on their own this fall, they opened the program up to any interested teacher in the school. About 15 are participating, half of whom were in the group that Grossman and Wineburg led.

What they do from here on is up to them, but Grossman is convinced they're onto something. "Professional development to me means investing in teachers' capacity to go on learning throughout their careers," she says. "School reforms come and go, but the success of any reform depends on teachers themselves." ¶

Nancy Wick