The Development of Teacher Expertise to Support English Learners in Secondary Contexts: Preliminary Findings
Presenters: Aida Walqui, Lee Hartman, and Mary Schmida
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the second session of our “Where the Evidence Leads” webinar series where we’ll be presenting preliminary findings from IES funded English learner research studies. This series is brought to you by the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners housed at WestEd. Today’s topic, the Development of Teacher Expertise in Secondary Contexts to Support English Learners. Presenting today is Aída Walqui, Lee Hartman, and Mary Schmida. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m Associate Director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd, I’ll be your host. Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd.
WestEd is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that aims to improve the lives of children and adults at all ages of learning and development. We do this by addressing challenges in education and human development, reducing opportunity gaps, and helping build communities where all can thrive. And finally, the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners is hosting a conference this June 17th through the 18th in Portland, Oregon. The theme is “Reconceptualizing the Development of Educator Expertise for a Multilingual, Intercultural Future.” It’s a two day in-person event at Oregon State University’s Portland Center. You can learn more about the conference and register at elrdcenter.wested.org/2024-conference.
Now I’d like to introduce Mary Schmida. Mary is co-investigator on an Educative English Language Arts Curriculum Materials Study for the Center, and she is a Senior Research Associate at WestEd. She’ll be introducing the session today and moderating our time for a Q&A at the end of the session. Mary, take it away.
Mary Schmida:
Thank you, Danny. Good afternoon, my name is Mary Schmida, and I am pleased to moderate today’s webinar, the second in a series of four bi-monthly webinars that the Center will host this year. Again, today’s webinar is titled “Developing Educator Expertise and Secondary Context to Support English Learners,” and these are the preliminary findings. I would like to introduce our speakers. First, the Director of the Center, Aída Walqui. Aída has spent over five decades working to improve the expertise of teachers and educational leaders, to deepen and accelerate the linguistic and academic achievements of English learners. She has published widely and was selected by the International TESOL Association as one of the 50 Most Influential World Researchers in Applied Linguistics.
And Lee Hartman, a curriculum developer and researcher with the Educative English Language Arts Curriculum Materials Study. In addition to his work with the Center, Lee is an English Language Arts and English Language Development Specialist at WestEd. He is a former teacher of secondary students where he specialized in the education of newcomers. Aída and Lee.
Aída Walqui:
Thank you very much, Mary. Good afternoon, everybody. It’s a pleasure to have you this afternoon and to kind of join us in sharing some very, very powerful thoughts we’ve been having for the last few years on the work of developing teacher expertise. And I just need to say also that I saw some of the names, I didn’t see them all, but I saw some of the names of colleagues who are joining us today, and I was delighted to see so many good friends. So, thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. So, the study that we will be discussing today, as any other study, begins with, you know, wonderment. We wonder what the case is. But it is actually, it came about specifically through one of our main components of the Center portfolio of work, which was the design of educative materials to replace the regular curriculum of ELA eighth grade students for 12 weeks. And because what we were working on was an iterative process of design, implementation, refinement, and at the same time interviewing teachers and students and observing them.
One of the things that really impacted us was how varied, this was not the first time, we’ve always seen it, but this time more closely because we were observing teachers quite significantly, but it was impressive to see how much they varied in their interpretation and in the way in which they took the materials that we had prepared them to use, and so we wanted to go deeper and try to work on a model that has a long history with us. And so, that’s what I want to talk briefly about. A model is a visual that helps us explain what constitute the different elements of a phenomenon we are trying to understand. In this case, what we were trying to understand is what exactly is teacher expertise? That is, the knowledge they have in their heads and the ability to faithfully translate that knowledge into practice.
So, how do we change that knowledge, and how do we actually develop teachers so that they can carry out ambitious pedagogy supported by the use of educative materials in their classes? And I am being sent back to the year 1995 when I started working on my dissertation at Stanford, and then Lee Schulman was one of my advisors. And Lee had been working on a program in Oakland, California, which was called the Fostering Communities of Learners Program. And he designed the program to explain what are the elements that go into teacher expertise. So, I worked a lot with Lee, and I decided to take his model and adapt it to what does it mean when one works with English learners, because that’s been the field that has always concerned me. The education of second language learners, and how to make it rigorous, and how to make it generative.
And then the time when I developed the model more significantly was during an implementation in New York City in which we were building the capacity of professional developers in the city so as to be able to expand models of quality learning for English learners. And so, we are now on a third reconsideration of the model, and most of our data comes from the implementation that we have done to refine the material so far through three years of work, and it also comes from work that we have engaged in, in other settings. So, Lee, now is going to talk to us about the components that I worked on and how I developed Lee Schulman’s model. So Lee.
Lee Hartman:
Yes, thank you, Aída. So, we wanted to show you what that model is, the model that we’ve been using to both support teachers and to see and to keep track of how their expertise is changing over time. So, there’s six interrelated domains which I have to show you here in order, but of course they happen simultaneously and interrelated to where they don’t come in any particular order. But if we start at the top, you see with visions or belief both of what teachers believe about the capability of their students, who their students are, and about what good teaching is. Also, you see one of the domains is motivation. The reason for which teachers teach and the ways that they teach, that is many times emotionally tied, what their incentives are, both intrinsic or extrinsic.
And then the blue one on the right hand side, their knowledge is what teachers know about themselves, about their students, but also about what they’re teaching, their depth of knowledge in subject matter, and also how to teach it or their pedagogical knowledge. And you’ll notice that in the middle, central to this entire model, is reflection, having the teacher implement, reflect on what happened and move to more expertise. At the bottom part of your screen, you see their practice, and this is where we see all of this manifesting itself, and what actually happens in the enactment of learning, and the moment to moment construction of knowledge both with the teachers and the students, and the students with each other. And then the arrows around represent the context because all of this is contextual. As you see here, we’re considering individual teachers, which we’ll talk about a few cases here in a minute. So, of course, it varies depending on the context in which the students and the class exist.
Aída Walqui:
So, as Lee referred to, there are six components or six domains in teacher expertise, but we are used to models where one element triggers the next, and so we are used to linear models. However, the model that we work on is definitely an ecological, and that means that it’s a model that is fluid. To a large extent, it’s almost unpredictable, but it is totally interrelated, it’s complex, it’s non-linear, and the different elements can be positively or negatively impacted by movement in other areas. And so, directionality here is very specific to individual teachers, and it’s always situated in the particular of the context in which that teacher teaches. However, I want to let you know that we will move later on into looking at not an individual conceptualization. Because as one student told me once when I was teaching ages ago in Salinas, California, and I said, “My sons, why do you skip other classes? You are so brilliant, you’re so good.” And he said, “Ms. Walqui, one good teacher is not enough.” And that’s what we need to always remember, that in middle schools, and in high schools, students move through many teachers, and that is why we need to rethink that sending one teacher to professional development expecting for a revolution to happen when that teacher comes back.
But let me explore each domain at a time. The vision, as Lee said, is what are the expectations that teachers have of their students? Who will they be at the end of the semester? Who will they be as they graduate from high school? Who will they be in life? And so, that is a good component of it and oftentimes it changes. So, we’ll look at how vision varies. But there’s also the issue of vision of teaching. So, what does accomplished teaching in a context like the one I am working in look like? How does it develop? In the same way in which, for example, a child who is learning to swim and would like to be one day a great swimmer, he has to have a vision of what wonderful professional fast swimming looks like. Without that vision, there is no way of having the name that you are reaching for. However, the development of vision has to be based on a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. In other words, a teacher must not be happy with what he sees or what she sees happening in schools, and they have then an image of what is possible.
And so it’s the role between what is here and what I see as possible that the vision directs. So, we meet teachers who have a declarative vision. They say, “Oh, I believe that my students are really capable.” But unfortunately that vision does not give birth to sophisticated intellectual learning for those students, so the vision does not somehow reflect into the work of teachers. So, we want to move teachers from stages that are dangerous as in declarative knowledge into stages that are more transitional and ideally into deep, robust generative visions. Now motivation, you would say, is a property of the teacher. The teacher is motivated or the teacher is not. But in reality, teachers may start motivated. However, sometimes it is the environment in which they work that erodes that motivation, and that’s why we see one person is motivated, but that motivation can go back and forth.
So, the motivation can be weak, ineffective, and it can move in stages all the way to be a strong motivation and generative. But a strong individual motivation is very difficult to sustain. If you have outlier teachers that are excellent and they’re very motivated, they will be very motivated for a few years. But more likely than not, that motivation will once again begin to diminish, and their energy and their perseverance to sustain the vision will unfortunately not be there anymore. Now one thing that I loved about Lee’s model, which didn’t have all of this, was the fact that knowledge in the whole model is one small component, although in our view, knowledge is all teachers should develop, right. It’s pedagogical knowledge. How do you teach in general? For example, what is the value of wait time? What is the value of jigsaws? What texts are jigsawable, et cetera, right. But then the essential is to have subject matter knowledge.
But once again, the teacher doesn’t have all the knowledge needed. Ideally, the teacher develops, keeps developing that knowledge as the teacher teaches, and that’s why communities are important, and pedagogical subject matter, which is, I know my subject matter, but I know how I need to teach it to the students that I have in front of me. And different students will require different uses of teachers’ subject matter knowledge. Knowledge of students. But once again, knowledge of students is not fixed. I remember a teacher saying, “I know my students, they’re all Mexican. They share Mexican culture.” But is there such a thing as a Mexican culture? There are Mexican cultures, and they’re always in flux. The Mexican culture of a family that moved to the United States three decades ago is different than the Mexican culture of somebody who just came two months ago, and they’re still evolving wherever they are.
And knowledge of self. Because, as teachers, we tend to treat ourselves very seriously, and we need to have a realistic and a little bit of humor in understanding who we are, and knowing that who we are as teachers is one of our multiple identities. We definitely do not behave, or hopefully we don’t, with our spouses as teachers or with our children or friends as teachers. So once again, this knowledge moves from being weak and superficial, and it is very dangerous when it is weak, and deep knowledge is not necessarily more abundant knowledge. Deep knowledge means that a teacher knows what is substantive, what is the backbone that sustains a body of knowledge, and that teacher then can ensure that students begin to build that central knowledge so that it stays there to then over time flourish into multiple ramifications that are coherent.
So we have then, as Lee said, the engine that drives everything else, and that is somebody who can reflect. And I would say that reflection is probably the least used domain by individual teachers. However, once again, in communities, teachers can learn to reflect as they, for example, plan lessons together. That’s anticipatory reflection. As they view videos of each other teaching the lesson they planned, and then they stop the video and say, “What were you thinking at that moment? And what kind of decisions did you have to make at that moment?” Recollective, as when we revisit past events to learn for the future. And if we engage in reflection time and time again, then of course we develop something that McMahon called mindfulness. So reflection can be superficial and ineffective, but it can also… And that’s where we want to move all teachers into the ability to reflect deeply because that will generate new movements in their knowledge and ability to implement it.
So, a teacher may have actually a vision, a teacher may be motivated, a teacher may know a lot, a teacher may reflect a bit, and then when they engage in practice, it’s either a pale reflection of what the teacher professes to know, or, as was called in the literature, it is a fatal mutation. Talk and reality do not match at all. So we want to move teachers through stages from ineffective and destructive practice into deep… Once again, deep and generative are always going to be the constants, because deep, as I said, is central ideas, how they weave on and how we treat those ideas in analytic ways. And context matter tremendously. Because the context of the classroom, the context of the school, the context of the district, multiple contexts, influence, provide the opportunities for teachers to either learn, work together, reflect together and alone, or they can be overwhelming and they can lead teachers to inaction. So we want teachers who are critical, agentive, and teachers who are collaborative. So, Lee, now is going to walk us through the first example from our study.
Lee Hartman:
Yeah, so as the title says, we wanted to show you some of our preliminary findings in the study of looking at the teachers and charting their development over time. We have for you here two cases, two examples, that we think are very representative of what we’re seeing in the data that is coming back. I’ll describe Ms. Chávez, and Aída will describe Ms. Galdames. We’ll use the same model that Aída has been describing here. We’re considering individual teachers, that’s why we wanted to give these examples. I’ll start a little bit with the context for Ms. Chávez, and I’ll end up there again at the end. So, as Aída has been describing, Ms. Chávez worked with us in another study about English language arts curriculum, and so we’ve been working with her over the period of two or three years.
So now we’re looking at how her teaching is changing in all of these domains as they go across. The context is an eighth grade ELA class, and we’re looking at supporting long-term English learners with a new educative curriculum that was designed both to support teacher expertise while supporting students. So that’s the context in which we find here. If we begin with the domain of knowledge, which is the domain that we saw that during the professional development before we even got into classrooms, we saw that Ms. Chávez may have been the strongest in. She had more experience than some of her colleagues going in it, so she seemed kind of as the teacher who knew the answers, the person that you could go to if you had a question about teaching from some of the younger, less experienced teachers. So she felt very secure in this domain, and it’s also the domain that that we saw first emerge, especially in subject matter.
And then in pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical subject matter knowledge, Ms. Chávez had kind of a little bit of everything that a lot of us did as teachers having gone to professional development for many years. Not one single approach. And so, we posited our approach to her and she accepted it, and she was going to integrate it into her classrooms and that’s where we began with her. Next, if we look at motivation, motivation is probably the point where Ms. Chávez and I spoke the most about this domain, and really what was her motivation in the classroom. Because at the beginning, her motivation, as she expressed it through reporting back to us, which is how we got our data through teacher self-reported, but also through classroom observation so that we were able to compare what teachers thought and what actually happened in the classroom.
And talking about motivation, her motivation was that her kids be successful by finishing and getting good grades and moving on to ninth grade. Then when we got to the classroom observation portion, we didn’t see that, we saw more of a focus on classroom management, but as far as just completing the task. So the incentives and the reasons for teaching were that I’m a good teacher if I finish the task and all of my students finish the task. Later through reflection, we talked a little bit more about motivation, and Ms. Chávez would self-report that she’s ready to motivate her students to learn and to make their learning opportunities more meaningful, but we still have to see that in her practice.
Then we move on to vision, which, as Aída mentioned, is very interrelated, all the domains with each other, very interrelated here with motivation. The vision for Ms. Chávez of what teaching was had a lot to do with her motivations of what she had seen that teaching was growing up and being a student herself. So she lacked a vision of what teaching could be and what her students could be. She had lots of beliefs about who her students were, why they were that way, why some of them excelled while others struggled, but lacked the of vision of what those students could be with support and moving across that continuum. And again, the engine for all of this was reflection. So, during the many hours of being in the classroom and observing and then reflecting with Ms. Chávez and then watching her teach again and see how this was changing as we went across the years, Ms. Chávez is a very reflective person, took time to reflect, as we see, when she had time to reflect.
So this comes back again to the context as well. What we’re finding is when she sat down with me or it was more formalized with me being in the classroom, I’m coming to stay, Ms. Chávez took the time to email me, to write me, to call me, face to face when I was in the classroom, to really have nice reflections out loud with me and talked about how she tried to do that by herself. But that it was difficult to find time always, especially with other colleagues, but that she would do it, for example, like all teachers, we’ve all done, on her commute to work in her own head, but not having a structure for being able to do that with mentor teachers or even the same teachers on her team. Which brings us back to context as well. Ms. Chávez had a space carved out for her to be able to reflect like this with other teachers, but the structure wasn’t really there or formalized.
So a lot of times that space in the schedule wasn’t utilized, it was utilized for other things because as you can probably imagine in this context, like most teaching context, Ms. Chávez was pulled in many different directions. So all of those were working together that we’re seeing where Ms. Chávez is, and we think she represents a lot of teachers. Moving across these continua that Aída was talking about at different places, and all of that is seen in her practice and what her kids actually experienced, and how that changed from year to year. So, now I’ll let Aída discuss a case of a teacher in a very different context in very different places also in all of these continuum.
Aída Walqui:
Right, so before we go into the second teacher that we are going to discuss today, I just want to show that there is a continuum in the transformation of pedagogy for teachers and for multilingual learners. So, it goes from changes that are really trivial, piecemeal, to changes that are significant, they’re more sophisticated, deeper practices. Teachers, in the first case, and sometimes by trying to help teachers, scripts are given to teachers and they have to read the script. And that is absolutely damaging to the possibility for teachers to become autonomous and to learn. So there are superficial programs, the idea of mastery is there, but mastery of what? Mastery of isolated little things. Instead, we want teachers as well as their students to apprentice over time. So, the best idea for teacher learning and growth is the idea or the metaphor of apprenticeship in which they are guided, and there’s gradual possession of skills that then are transformed and made individually styled.
So we move from simply declaring, “Oh, I believe my students can do everything,” but then when you go into class, unfortunately, students are never given the chance to do very much, into teachers and students understanding practice and generating new understandings. So, the next example comes actually from our QTEL work in the past, and it begins with a group of educational leaders from one very large high school attending one of our QTEL Building The Base courses. And I happened to be teaching that course, and it was lovely to see the principal and the six people he came with. It was at the Presidio, and he insisted on not taking the bus, which is we run buses for people to move from the Presidio to parts of San Francisco. But you would see him and his teachers walking up the hills, walking down the hills, going, and they were always discussing, reflecting.
So, they wanted to implement change, and they wanted to develop a shared vision of what was possible at their high school. But more importantly, they decided that if they wanted to motivate their teachers into changing practice, then they, as the leaders of the school, should actually model the change. So, principal and all the leaders decided to teach one class. And the first semester they would just be supported to be excellent, and the second semester they had to open their classrooms to teachers in the school to see. But at the same time they were inviting groups of teachers to come and discuss and problematize and plan together and do things, engage in reflection. And so the reflective practices that teachers engaged in made them be totally honest with each other.
I don’t know if you’ve had the experience, but when I was a teacher, sometimes teachers would talk about the wonderful things they did in class, but you kind of started suspecting that those were tall tales. In reality, they were aggrandizing, or perhaps it was a way of convincing themselves and keeping themselves in peace and being able to sleep at night. But the talk and the reality were different. But here what reflection invited the whole staff was to be honest, was to say we are apprenticing, I am beginning… It doesn’t matter we do things wrong. Together, discussing, pooling our ability, and our communal knowledge is going to evolve together. And together having a shared vision, being able to have moments, the time given to reflect and grow, all of that shared school practice is what motivated teachers. I mean if you ask teachers, what makes them happy? It is usually the ability to collaborate with others in improving on their work with students, and that’s what we want. So, practice also became really stronger.
The teacher, Ms. Galdames, became a fabulous teacher. In fact, she took things into her way. There was a remedial writing class that all students needed to pass. And so it was always the students who had to take the remedial class, the ones that were just run away, teachers would run away from them. But Ms. Galdames decided to create an elective for them, and she created a psychology elective, and she took it upon herself to go and invite each student individually. “I am going to teach next semester a wonderful psychology class, you must enroll.” “Oh, no, but I need to take review.” “No, no, you don’t need to worry. You know I’m the vice principal, I promise you, you will pass the test.” And indeed all of her students passed the test. But when she told me is, “I decided to change stigma into prestige.”
So she changed the term remedial writing into the psychology elective, and that’s the power of communities working together and reflecting and reflecting around. So, among the myriad factors to kind of begin to wrap up ideas that impact the development of teacher expertise, these are a few salient ones. It is absolutely debilitating for teachers at a school when they do mathematics that comes from this position, they do English language arts that comes from a very different strand of thinking, they do history here, it all points in different directions. And I am very concerned that, as principals and teachers by curriculum, they don’t think of the overall coherence of the curriculum that would make it possible to have strengthened opportunities for teachers to learn but more importantly for their students to learn. It’s also equally dangerous when individual teachers are sent to different professional development to cover the field.
One principal told me, “Oh, I send my best teachers to very different professional development so that we have it all covered.” And I said, “What do you have covered? I don’t understand.” I tried to get him to explain, but, of course, without a vision of where we’re aiming to… That principle was not being an evil person, he was just trying to do the very best as he understood it. And that is the point, that we are all trying to do the very best, but are we thinking in powerful, coherent ways guided by a unitary vision, and minimally as schools, we should be able to do that. We need to break the isolation that teachers work in. My six years in high school were basically really isolated work. I had a good friend, we talked, we helped each other, we were honest with each other, but it wasn’t like the whole community of teachers pointed in the same direction. And remember that working together is the biggest motivator for teachers.
And then observations. Now we live in the world in which teachers are externally accountable. Somebody comes with a sheet, typically ticking for two minutes or five minutes and they disappear, and what they’re looking at is individual superficial components of a lesson. Instead, we want everybody to observe everybody. Teachers observe their own practice. We just have a little camera filming the teacher. Teachers share their practice, and that fosters internal accountability. They have their own compass of what it means to excel with the students we are teaching, and only when a community shares generalized internal accountability can then, or should then be subject to external accountability methods.
So as you probably, hopefully… We’re a little bit too excited, so we’re not that articulate. Sometimes you get all carried away, but we hope that through these two brief cases, you have seen that teacher development is not a one road where step one leads to step two to step three. It is complex. But we need to attend to all domains at the same time and observe to see which one needs to be reinforced, knowing full well that that reinforcement will have reverberations across the system. So, we need to absolutely look back at schools as communities of learners because all adults and all students are in the process of change, and if we are not, we’re dead. So, the change that is carried out with a shared and generative knowledge base will be the one that will optimally serve all students, English learners and students whose only language is English, and that will create a future in which people know how to talk to each other honestly, and where inter-culturality, not bi-culturality, not multi-culturality, but inter.
The ability to interact, understand the other’s point of view is the norm. So, I think I will pause so that Mary can now tell us what’s been going on in the chat because I haven’t looked at the chat at all. Should I stop the PowerPoint, yes, or keep it there?
Danny Torres:
You can stop it now please.
Aída Walqui:
Okay, there we are.
Mary Schmida:
All right. So, there were a few questions with respect to motivation so I’ll paraphrase. How can teachers persevere or continue to be motivated in the development of their expertise when other systems at work do not support their development?
Aída Walqui:
You know what, one of the schools I visited in the, it was in the late 80s, early 90s, was the International High School at LaGuardia Community College. Eric Nadelstern was the principal, and I still think he was the most brilliant principal I have ever met, and he created the most incredible processes in his school. But when I ask people, and all of his teachers were so motivated, they would go at seven o’clock to the school because they were borrowing classrooms from LaGuardia Community College. And so, they had to move all the stuff into the rooms at seven o’clock in the morning, start classes at eight, and then at three they needed to move everything out because at four, the community classes would start. I mean, when I saw that and they told me, I said, “Forget about it, I’m not staying in this school. Why should I serve here? It makes no sense.” But amazingly, all the teachers were so motivated.
So I said, “What is the role of the principal?” And to a point they told me, Eric is the buffer that helps us work. So the world is going to be a mess. In fact, if we read the news or listen to the news every day, we know it gets increasingly more difficult, increasingly more complex, increasingly more divided. But a principal and the leaders in a school should work as the buffers. They protect their teachers, and they create the conditions within their teachers so that they work with each other, and they can have opportunities to grow and serve their students better. For example, Lee did not mention this piece about Ms. Chávez. In the school where she works, all teachers share the first period, all teachers who teach eighth grade ELA share the first period, which is supposed to be for them to plan. But we actually never saw them meeting, they all stayed in their classrooms.
So the structure exists, but then where is the impetus to go and start working? And that is not just the fact that teachers don’t want to work, they’re lazy. No, they’re not lazy, they work very hard. But they work very hard at sometimes doing the wrong things. How much fun it would be that they all sat in the same classroom reading the reading students are going to do and dreaming up what invitations are we going to provide our students so that they get engaged in the reading, so that they learn, so that they work with each other, so that they become critical, et cetera.
Mary Schmida:
Thank you. There have been a few questions about the model itself, and how it can be applied to other contexts. So, for example, for writing, can the same model be used? For a math classroom, can the same model be used? So is the model generative across different contexts?
Aída Walqui:
Yes, the model tries to explain and describe what are the different elements that teachers or communities of teachers need to have in order to serve their students with excellence. And thus, it is subject agnostic, but it becomes increasingly more important as we look at middle schools and high schools. Because this is one of the few countries in the world where we actually still have the factory model of schedules, the assembly model of schedules. And the poor students have to run through different groups of peers and teachers five or six times a day. So, it is essential that the math, the social studies, the English language arts teachers share the same view of their students, of what learning is about, and so it works across contexts.
Mary Schmida:
And that’s a nice segue into another question. How do you negotiate or adjust when not everyone has the same vision or they see things differently?
Aída Walqui:
Well, that is interesting because… And I will let Lee talk, because I love to talk, as you can tell. It doesn’t begin with a vision. Vision is on top, but actually it can begin with practice looking at, “Oh, wow! I can see” as indeed teachers told us. One time we decided to teach their classes ourselves and they observed us, and then they said, “Oh, my god! The students did talk so much, I never got them to talk, and then you apologize to the students,” because you assume we never apologize to our student. And that’s what I mean by knowledge of self, the fact that we need to know we are fallible, we are learning. And there’s nothing wrong with saying to students, “Sorry, I thought you really understood it. Let me go back and explain it again in a different way.” Lee, what do you say? Do you want to add anything?
Lee Hartman:
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I agree with that. I think one of the most powerful things, and you’ve said it many times today, Aída, is the fact that teachers working together is so pivotal to this and collaboration. And so just starting there, and a lot of times it depends on the group that you’re working with, where that starts, with motivation, if it starts actually with practice. And that’s the thing about this model is that it allows for all of that. So I would say, you know, build it and they will come. The vision sometimes comes once the practice begins or once the reflection begins, once the motivation begins as well. And for the other question, I saw, I thought, some of the questions in the chat about perhaps-
Aída Walqui:
Oh, you cheated.
Lee Hartman:
I’m sorry?
Aída Walqui:
You cheated. You read the questions in advance.
Lee Hartman:
No, but about like how the model can apply to different contexts, and especially about language, so perhaps in an ESL newcomer, ELD situation. And so all of this applies to that as well, right. So the knowledge of your subject matter, which is always going to be your subject matter and the language of that practice, right, the mathematical practices and the language that goes along with them as well as, in our case, it was English language arts. But as we know, the standards and the subject matter for English language arts go way beyond just understanding the language. So, we do have the language in that knowledge that is then supported through reflection and brings about motivation, and once again, the whole interrelatedness, non-linear aspect of the model applies there as well.
Aída Walqui:
And now that you’re saying that, Lee, you remind me of something very important, which is that unfortunately many teachers think their subject matter is language. And so, they think their subject matter consists of teaching students grammatical structures, lexical items, sometimes pronunciation. But in reality, even the ELD teacher has to work with ideas because it is ideas that move students. It is describing, it is challenging, it is defending ideas, and then there’s the language. So we always say that students develop, first, conceptual understandings, the analytic practices as they run those conceptual understandings through, and the language needed, and they develop those simultaneously. But language does not come first because language is the vehicle that enables students to discuss ideas and to discuss them in potent, intellectual ways.
Mary Schmida:
So there’s a question about using the model, the domains of teacher expertise. If one were to begin, is it best to begin at the district level, at the school level, or at the classroom level?
Aída Walqui:
I think that a simultaneous work at the school and at every classroom level is indispensable. I know there have been a lot of movements in the past to restructure schools, but they have never been guided by a model of teacher understanding. I think this model, or any other that does the same work, can actually be extremely powerful in creating coherence. But if you begin with just a few teachers, then the rest of the school will not be happy, and they will in fact combat change. So beginning with all teachers, understanding full well that some may be ready to retire and say, “I’m not ready to change.” But as they begin experiencing the nature of change and the power of engaging students in critical dialogic interaction, then they get re-energized themselves, and they keep growing. So, I think we fail by not being ambitious enough, and we fail by wanting quick change.
Change like this is going to take years, and change like this needs to be monitored, so how are we growing, but still knowing full well that it’s not going to be a night and day situation, pre and post work. Work will always continue. In fact, as you heard, I’ve been in education more than 50 years, but I’m still learning. It’s so exciting to work with Mary and Lee and another colleague, Shirley, because we discuss, we talk, we… You know, and when we go places, it’s the loveliest thing. We have breakfast together, we run together to wherever we’re working, we have dinner together, and about 80% of the talk is about work. And then when I go to bed, I feel so good. I learned this. So, if I can learn at 77, all of you young people listening to this webinar can definitely invite your colleagues at your sites to engage in wonderful learning that never stops.
Mary Schmida:
So, we have a few questions asking for some concrete suggestions with respect to pieces of the domain. So, one question is to use reflection more effectively, what might be some practices that you suggest for teachers, teacher educators, or administrators?
Aída Walqui:
So I’ll let Lee go first and then I’ll complete whatever.
Lee Hartman:
I think a lot of this, and even with the previous question has to do with context, is, first of all, making sure teachers have time to reflect and that they have a structure for that reflection, because I think it happens in our heads a lot of times, as teachers we’re trying to reflect and we get pulled away and there’s not a formal time for reflection, especially with colleagues, so as much as possible for that. And then even just beginning with teachers to give them structures like when they’re planning their lessons, what they think is going to happen in the lesson, what might be some things where it might go wrong, how can we do that, observe one group while it’s happening as they’re teaching, and then decide how they might change going forward the next time they implement that task or that lesson. Something as simple as that, working with another teacher, or even by themselves if that’s how it has to start, can start there and can move to departments.
And so I would say, a lot of times we think we have to have this whole big thing come in and change everything on the first day, but starting with reflection, and then it will automatically connect with motivation, vision, all of those things will begin to move towards a deeper understanding of all those domains and move teacher practice.
Aída Walqui:
I think if you ask me one concrete action to engage teachers in, that would be lesson planning around a test that they may think is very difficult and that students could never relate to. So, for example, let’s imagine this is a ninth grade class in ELA and students are going to read Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” And so, we start with, okay, we’re meeting tomorrow, please remember to read “The Necklace” before you come, but we will read selections here together to plan a lesson. And teachers may come and say, “Oh, it’s so irrelevant, the language is so antiquated.” Wait a minute, we’re not reading for the language. What is this about? What is the essence? Let’s discuss what is the essence. Discuss what is the essence of, and how can that be helpful to young people?
And so those conversations, and then the laying out of the lesson, and then followed up with visits to class or videotaping one, and the person comes back and says, “Well, I did the activity we designed together, you know, that anticipatory guide and it worked, but my statements, you know, four of them were really great, kids were all excited, but I think the fifth one didn’t work as well.” And discussing and how do you refine and how do you do, but concrete actions. And I have never seen a group of teachers that doesn’t live excitedly about the possibility of working like this. I mean when they work together, it feels like they are alive, and they are growing, and their classes will be so much more impactful.
Mary Schmida:
So we have two minutes left. Let’s see if we can add one more question. Are there any instruments that have been developed that can be used with the domains of teacher expertise?
Aída Walqui:
If what we mean by instruments is presence and absence of this or that, no, and I hope never one is developed. But the best instruments are simply observational and broader questions. That’s what we do when we go and observe teachers, we know what we’re looking for. But we do ethnographic notes, and the thicker, as they’re known in the literature, the better. So the more detailed they are, the better. This is a complex organic model, and we don’t want to reduce it to checklists. It has to always be content specific, and it always has to lead to valuable deep reflection and growth.
Mary Schmida:
I think that’s it.
Aída Walqui:
Mary, you wanted to encourage people to join us in our conference.
Mary Schmida:
Yes, we would like to reiterate and extend our invitation to our upcoming conference which is in Portland, Oregon, June 17th and 18th. There will be both national and international panels at this conference, and you can hear more about our research and meet researchers from all of the studies that are currently being sponsored through the IES Grant.
Aída Walqui:
And if I may add, we want to really put ourselves to the test, so we have these fabulous presentations, and for example, in teams of five, each person will attend a different presentation, come together, share what they learn, and start discussing what of this may be applicable to our own individual situations. So, we have built spaces that will actually be able to help participants reflect together and turn it into actionable ideas. But we do have panels, so everybody will hear all of the national presenters, and everybody will hear all of the international presenters as well. So, we hope to see you there. Thank you very much.
Mary Schmida:
And the link for the conference is in the chat, if you would like to learn more about it.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, Mary, and to all our panelists, Aída and Lee, for a great session, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really, really appreciate you being here. For those of you interested in learning more about the Center at WestEd, visit the website at elrdcenter.WestEd.org, and feel free to reach out to Aída or Lee via email if you’d like to learn more about the study that we talked about today, and you can also sign up for their monthly newsletter to receive updates about future events and updates on the research findings. With that, I wanna thank you all, again, very much for joining us and be well. Thank you.
Aída Walqui:
Thank you.
Lee Hartman:
Thank you very much.
Mary Schmida:
Thank you.