Lauren Porosoff - The PD Curator: How to Design Peer-to-Peer Professional Learning That Elevates Teachers and Teaching

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I set out to write a book about professional development and ended up writing a book about seeingseeing the excellence around us and new possibilities for ourselves. Seeing and uplifting one another, our schools, and our profession.
This book is dedicated to my former colleagues.
I see you.

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I want to thank the following people:

The staff at Independent School magazine, for publishing my articles about in-house PD and their questions during the editorial process that pushed my thinking forward.

Alecia Berman-Dry, director of outreach and professional development at the Association of Independent Maryland & DC Schools, for suggesting that I do a workshop on the topic of peer-to-peer professional development.

Participants at all my workshops on this topic, especially those early ones when I was still working the kinks out of the protocols.

My good friend Laurie Hornik, whose brilliance as both a teacher and an artist made me think of the curator metaphor that runs through this book.

Melanie Greenup, for being that mentor who looked at my sparks and saw fire and gently, but persistently, fanned the flames.

Eric Baylin and his colleagues at the Packer Collegiate Facilitative Leadership Institute, for first introducing me to the idea of creating structured processes for colleagues to learn from one another.

The many educators working with the School Reform Initiative. The protocols in this book are original, but the idea of using protocols to create a framework for meaningful faculty learning is not. I am grateful to those whose efforts inspired mine.

Carley Moore, for teaching me that writing can be a way for teachers to discover and deepen their thinking about their practice.

My co-everything, Jonathan Weinstein, for introducing me to contextual behavioral science, nerding out with me about relational frame theory, coauthoring the protocols for students on which some of the protocols for teachers in this book are based, andmost importantlybeing a loving partner.

My good friend Taslim Tharani, who listened to me talk and talk and talk about this work and who believes in it so much that she uses it in her own work. (If you knew Tas, you'd know that's high praise.)

Susan Hills and Jamie Greene, my editors at ASCD, for wallowing around with me in the concept, message, details, and structure of this book until they were right. Both Susan and Jamie patiently gave me a chance to work through a lot of bad ideas and drafts. If this book is any good, it's because of their wise guidance.

Jill Stoddard, Ryan Harrity, and Timothy Riley, for reading the manuscript (during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, no less) and providing thoughtful feedback.

My former teaching partners and collaboratorsLauren Keller, Dori Kamlet Klar, Melissa Teitel, Kalin Taylor, Rachel Gayer, Renee Charity Price, Eliza Alexander, Laurie Hornik, Corey Blay, Janet Goldschmidt, Dina Weinberg, Rochelle Reodica, and Mollie Sandbergwho generously provided their time and thinking so every day was a PD day.

My parents, Harold and Leslie, and my kids, Allison and Jason.

And my students. All of them. Always.

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My former colleague Sharan was one of those absolutely brilliant teachers, yet for a long time, I didn't know this from actually watching her teach. We didn't have a culture of peer observation (even though we wished we did). Sharan and I were discussing this one day, and we agreed that we would try to start a new trend of popping into one another's classrooms. A few mornings later, when she was teaching and I wasn't, I visited her.

I learned a ton. I thought my sense of pacing was good, but she managed to pack more learning into 45 minutes than I would have thought possible. Her students always began with what she called a cognitive warm-up (which I won't describe because I'm hoping she'll write her own book about it). Next, Sharan had her students write diary entries from the perspective of either Romeo or Juliet right after they met. Every student had actively participated in two different meaningful activities, and it was only 10 minutes into the period.

The diary entries also springboarded into the main lesson on foreshadowing. Sharan's students defined foreshadowing in their own words, offered examples of foreshadowing from Romeo and Juliet, and then read the prologue to Act II. Her students quickly pushed their desks against the walls, formed a circle, and read the text several different ways to begin to understand its meaning. Sharan then had her students get into pairs, sit on the floor (where they'd been standing in a circle), and analyze the prologue. She also harkened back to the beginning of the lesson by asking how the prologue foreshadowed later developments in the act. By the time I was headed downstairs to teach my class, I'd taken five pages of notes.

One of the best ways to learn how to be a better teacher is by watching, listening to, and experimenting with the practices of great teachers. I started to think about other colleagues I could learn from. From Abena, I could learn how to raise the issue of justice from within the curriculum, ask appropriate questions, and push students to discuss them within a safe environment. From Vincent, I could learn how to use music to help students better understand the contentand more generally, how to create a stimulating atmosphere for learning. From Elizabeth, I could learn how to keep students focused on respecting their diverse thinking processes over finding a "right" answer. I also thought about what my colleagues could learn from observing me.

Meanwhile, our school was spending thousands of dollars a year sending teachers to conferences and institutes and bringing in high-priced consultants to tell us about the latest education fads. Sometimes these consultants gave us nothing but jargon and slideshows, and we were left wondering why their paychecks were so much larger than ours. But even when the presentations advanced our thinking and gave us clear takeaways, the message was still that this person was the expert which meant we, the teachers, were not.

I don't want to sound ungrateful; lots of schools and districts make teachers fund their own whiteboard markers, so high-quality professional development (PD) is out of reach for far too many. It's important for teachers to stay current and not get so trapped in our own bubbles that we miss opportunities to learn from innovators outside our schools. But what about the innovators inside our schools? Why couldn't we learn from them?

I was lucky enough to have a department chair who encouraged teachers to learn from one another and created opportunities for us to learn together at our meetings. That was how I found out about some of Sharan's practices and why we originally ended up talking about observing each other. But then it was up to us to find time to visit each other's classrooms.

It was also up to us to keep our minds busy when we sat through speaker after speaker who talked about stuff that didn't directly relate to our experience or that we already knewor that someone in the room could have presented better. No wonder so many of us spent those sessions texting, emailing, doodling, or whispering to one another. It's not especially respectful when teachers behave this way, but it's also understandable. Teachers have very little patience for PD sessions that lack relevance to their students and subject, when purportedly new information and strategies are just repackaged versions of the same old same old, when a high-priced consultant tells them what they already know and lacks interest in their own perspectives, or when they have no opportunities to generate and share ideas.