Overview
“One of our goals is to build the capacity of pioneering teachers who will carry the work forward from the ground-up. They are the best advocates and means of scaling innovation.” (Michael Fauteux)
Challenge: How to inspire pioneering teachers to share their practices both within the network and also to others around the country. How to encourage other teachers to engage in the initial process of shifting their practice.
Context: Leadership Public Schools (LPS) is a network of urban charter high schools in San Francisco, California. LPS leaders were looking to find ways to enhance the professionalism of the teacher’s role, build off their expertise, and increase interest to join the work of growing and shifting instructional practice.
Action Steps: LPS leaders created action research opportunities for teachers that grounded the network’s scale initiatives on the spread of teacher-developed instructional practices. By intentionally providing opportunities for teachers to share their practices both internally and externally, they hoped to not only bolster peer-led learning through the LPS network, but also show teachers that their efforts to improve classroom practice mattered to others across the country.
Some examples of these action-research opportunities include:
- Developing a grant for the Assessment for Learning Project to share teacher’s work on Collective Feedback.
- Teachers that helped develop a math acceleration course called “Navigate Math” now have their work documented on Gooru, on the LPS website and have been connected to the Christensen Institute.
- Teams of teachers working on Cooperative Learning had their work shared on the Teacher's Guild.
- A team of teachers involved in LPS’s Gratitude initiative ended up doing research with CSU professor Dominguez Hills with the results to be published in the fall of 2018. This practice has also been turned into a tool that teachers across the country are currently piloting.
“We hope the approach serves as a catalyst that leads to permanent micro-shifts with the LPS network of schools and beyond,” says Director of Innovation Michael Fauteux.