AIER’s Teach-the-Teachers Initiative: Data Driven

Today I am focusing on the fifth criterion for exemplary professional development workshops for teachers that is outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, and clearly defined in the recent report, “Bridging the Gap: Paving the Pathway from Current Practice to Exemplary Professional Learning,” published by the Frontline Research and Learning Institute. This criterion is “data driven.” My previous blogs walked you through my analysis of other features such as sustainability, intensity, collaboration, and being job embedded.

The “Bridging the Gap” report stipulates that to be data driven, the professional development workshop should be “based upon and responsive to real time information about the needs of participants and their students.” How does AIER’s TTI program fulfill the data-driven criterion?

The AIER Teach-the-Teachers Initiative workshops start with online pre-work. We use an EconLowDown portal to give teachers an opportunity to go over material on the topics that will be presented at the workshop. Since our program introduces economic concepts across various disciplines, the online work serves to bring all teachers (especially non-economists) to the same level. Each module on EconLowDown contains pre- and post-assessments. The results of those tests enable us to refine the presentation of a topic during the face-to-face portion of the workshop, i.e., respond to real-time information about the needs of the participants.

During the workshop, we employ the small-group discussion approach to dissect the information presented both on the content and on the pedagogy. In addition, our presenters, who are national experts in economics and economic education, facilitate, answer questions, advise participants, and give them immediate feedback. This collaborative, real-time, approach is praised highly by the teachers.

This is what they say about this part:

• “This workshop, as I hoped, helped me to gain strategies and collaborate with other teachers in efforts to integrate more economics into curriculum.”

• “It gave me time to think about how I want to incorporate more economic lessons into my curriculum and gave me a glimpse as to what other teachers are doing and how I can use some of their lessons in my own classroom.”

• “I think this helped me to consider how to integrate economics into my curriculum and gave me the tools and resources to do so. I also think getting to hear all of the amazing people who participated in sharing the ideas for their lessons, teaching styles, curriculum, was really eye opening. Sometimes we all get caught up in our own school environment and this was something that really helped build a collegial spirit.”

What about real-time response to the needs of students? During the field-test part of the program where teachers implement their lesson ideas in the classroom, the teachers respond to the needs of their students by integrating into their curriculum economic concepts that they learned at AIER. Teachers know where and when to introduce a topic and how to deliver it in an engaging way appropriate to the grade level and other characteristics of their classes. Based on our classroom observations and the reflective essays that teachers have sent us after the field test, we are confident that the needs of students are met.

AIER’s Teach-the-Teachers workshops are data driven, in my view, satisfying the fifth criterion of a successful professional development workshop.

 

Picture: Participants at AIER’s Teach-the-Teachers workshop in Boston in June 2016. Photo by Leah LaRiccia.

 

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